Meditations By Marcus Meditations

Meditation is very difficult to describe and can only truly be explained once experienced. It is the practice of mental concentration leading ultimately through a sequence of stages to the final goal of spiritual freedom, nirvana. The purpose of Buddhist meditation is to free ourselves from the delusion and thereby put an end to both ignorance and craving. The Buddhists describe the culminating trance-like state as transient; final Nirvana requires the insight of wisdom. The exercises that are meant to develop wisdom involve meditation on the true nature of reality or the conditioned and unconditioned elements that make up all phenomena. The goal of meditation is to develop a concept in the mind.

In Meditation Two of René Descartes’ Meditation on First Philosophy, he notes the sight of “men crossing the square.” This observation is important as Descartes states, “But what do I see aside from hats and clothes, which could easily hide automata? Yet I judge them to be men.” This is an important realization as Descartes argues that instead of purely noticing the men through sight, it is actually “solely with the faculty of judgement,” the mind, that perceives and concludes that the thing wearing a hat and clothes are men. I argue that this view of the outside world by Descartes is incomplete as his idea of “I” is faulty, as well as having a misunderstanding on the importance of the senses.

Topic: How does Descartes argue that mind and body are distinct? Is he right? Am I real, or imaginary? In the First Meditation, Rene Descartes presents the main falsehoods in which he believed during his life, and the subsequent faultiness he experienced concerning the body of knowledge. The philosopher considers that it is never too late to rethink the knowledge about his personal being from the very foundations, and builds his thoughts on a certain ground starting from common things. It would be impossible to doubt each thing separately, so he expresses his doubt to the basic principles of knowledge he has already gained, since a conclusion would surely be doubted if its premise was doubted. He starts by doubting basic senses, by comparing feels in reality vs. in dreams. For example, even if I consciously feel warm when I am walking in the sun, I could not claim that I am hundred-­‐percentage sure I am awake, since I would feel it the same way when I was in dreams. Descartes presents this idea to show the doubt of reality and its elements. Also, he concludes that the common things we perceive are fashioned, and knowledge based on that can be doubted, such as physics and astronomy. This category of knowledge are different from geometry and arithmetic, which contain certain and definiteness in the simplest thing. By doubting the sense and knowledge based on it, Descartes argued his approach that the body and mind are two absolutely distinctive things. Descartes mentions God

The book Meditations wasn’t ever really intended for publication; this is due to the fact that this book is personal writings from Marcus Aurelius himself. Its his own memories and events of his life that he went through.

The universe has a plan for all of us, and we need to follow it. When you asked me what book we should assign to all of our employees, I immediately thought about The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. In The Meditations, you read of ways to live your life without fear of consequences. Forgetting past troubles and current issues will help our employees to work hard at what they have to do, working for our tire distribution company. The universe sets out our life before we are born and it is important to not let fear or mistakes get in the way of the future. If we assign everyone in the company, including those in satellite locations, Marcus Aurelius, I believe that our productions will benefit from the results.

Without a doubt, people use spiritual teachings to help others overcome grief, anger, and fear. In the second article by Noah Levine, his credentials is a Buddhist convert and author. His opinion is credible because it reflects on his experience on how he overcome different times, and what new insights came into his life. He points out his goal was to find his spiritual self and for his friends that he has committed his life, sharing what he has found with others through the teachings of simple meditation techniques that have altered the path of his life. His approach was to put one foot in front of the other, using the feeling of guilt, grief, and confusion as a detour to escape the life of addiction and crime from his teachings. Levine

Edward Taylor’s “Meditation Six” uses a coin-based conceit to explore the ambivalence of the persona; using the coin, Taylor describes his spiritual value to God in material terms. The first stanza reflects an uncertainty within Taylor about his worth to God. He equates himself to gold, asking if he is “thy gold” (1) or merely a vessel for God’s wealth—the congregation. The speaker worries he may only appear to be worthful to God, but he is worthless underneath and “brass in heart,” alluding to the Brazen Serpent of the Bible. Working through his ambivalence, the speaker compares the impression of the grace of God to the stamp on a coin, and he asks if God has left such an impression on him, stamping value onto worthless metal. Taylor writes that he is “a golden angel” in God’s hand, meaning he is valuable to God, which ends his ambivalence as he concludes that he is worthful as a man. In the final stanza, the speaker asks God to make his soul the plate, a blank coin, onto which God stamps value with his “superscription in a holy style” (16). The speaker then becomes a coin with value to God, part of God’s hoard, whereby Taylor acknowledges that he is one of many. A surrender ends the conceit and poem, the speaker asks if he may be an angel, period slang for an English coin, in God’s eyes and if God may be his Lord.

Descartes talked about the true and the false, and how we make mistakes in Meditation Four. Descartes believed that error as such is not something real that depends upon God, but rather is merely a defect. And thus there is no need to account for my errors by positing a faculty given to me by God for this purpose(546). He thought that the reason why we make mistakes is that the faculty of judging the truth, which we got from God, is not infinite(546). When Descartes focused more closely on more closely on himself and inquired into the nature of his errors, he noted that errors depend on the simultaneous concurrence of two causes:

"The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt."

In the Third Meditation, Descartes forms a proof for the existence of God. He begins by laying down a foundation for what he claims to know and then offers an explanation for why he previously accepted various ideas but is no longer certain of them. Before he arrives at the concept of God, Descartes categorizes ideas and the possible sources that they originate from. He then distinguishes between the varying degrees of reality that an idea can possess, as well as the cause of an idea. Descartes proceeds to investigate the idea of an infinite being, or God, and how he came to acquire such an idea with more objective reality than he himself has. By ruling out the possibility of this idea being invented or adventitious, Descartes concludes

The Fifth Meditation opens with Descartes claiming that he can distinctly imagine extension, size, shape, position, and local motion, in relationship with duration. Thus, Descartes postulates that there are non-corporeal intangible geometrical objects that still exist, such as triangles. Since, triangles have a determinate essence dependent on Descartes mind, his knowledge of the nature of triangles is not dependent on the senses. Descartes can imagine shapes he has never seen but can still perceive their properties clearly and distinctly, thus properties must be true. Concludes that a triangle must carry all ascribed properties as the triangle exists as an idea in which he can clearly and distinctly perceive its properties. Even if the property

According to historian, C. Fenno Hoffman Jr., Prayers or Meditations is a sixty page abridgement of the Richard Whitford's translation of Book III of the very Catholic text, Imitation of Christ, and became another form of expression for Parr. With this text, Parr became the first English female writer to have her work published under her own name rather than remain anonymous or use a male pseudonym . While Parr was filled with confidence when composing this text, she did realize that it still needed the King's approval for circulation to happen, and she once again sought out his favor by reprinting "The King's Prayer" in Prayers or Meditations as well as giving it a more male-identified feel by using a male voice. Mueller argues that Parr

Stoicism: “a systematic philosophy, dating from around 300 b.c., that held the principles of logical thought to reflect a cosmic reason instantiated in nature.” (dictionary.com). Marcus Aurelius (the author of “Meditations”) was a stoic as well as an emperor. The book he wrote was a collection of thoughts, things he advised himself to do, a piece reflecting his stoicism, and a personal diary of sorts. The kinds of things put into this book were sometimes crazy, sometimes contradictory, yet sometimes very true and insightful. Marcus wasn’t a professional philosopher, and this comes out in his work, but he had an interesting way of living his life. His writings

When discussing the relationship of brain and behavior, the materialist view of human experience runs into conflict with the historically dominant religious accounts. Recent studies, however, suggests that there may be a "middle view" between the two world-views. Religions, especially Buddhism, stress the role of meditation in one's spiritual growth. Meditation has tangible psychological and physiological benefits, though, which can be explained strictly in neurobiological terms. Understanding of how meditation affects the brain, and, by extension, human behavior, also gives insight into consciousness, the role of feedback loops, and the nature of the I-function.

The main two aims for the meditator Descartes are to show that the source of scientific knowledge, as we know it today, does not lay in our senses but the mind, and the compatibility between religion and science (Descartes 35). He aims to split the world into body and mind, where science will deal with the body and religion with the mind.