台大心理系

As interpersonal, racial, social, and international conflicts intensify in the world, it is important to safeguard the mental health of individuals affected by them. According to a Buddhist notion “if you want others to be happy, practice compassion; if you want to be happy, practice compassion,” compassion practice is an intervention to cultivate conflict-proof well-being. Here, compassion as a practice of meditation is based on Buddhist philosophy that mental suffering is rooted in vikalpa and prapañca (in Sanskrit), which refer to conceptual thoughts that give rise to generic mental images of self and others and subsequent biases to preserve one's egoism. To contextualize compassion meditation scientifically, we adopted a Bayesian active inference framework. In this framework, a person is considered a Bayesian Engine that actively constructs phenomena based on the aggregates of forms, sensations, discriminations, actions, and consciousness. When the person embodies rigid beliefs about self and others’ identities (identity-grasping beliefs) and the resulting ego-preserving bias, the person's Bayesian Engine malfunctions, failing to use prediction errors to update prior beliefs. After recognizing the causes of sufferings, a practitioner of the compassion meditation aims to attune to all others equally, friends and enemies alike, suspend identity-based conceptual thoughts, and eventually let go of any identity-grasping belief and ego-preserving bias that obscure reality. We present a brain model for the Bayesian Engine of three components: a) Relation-Modeling, b) Reality-Checking, and c) Conflict-Alarming. Further, using a dyadic framework involving two Bayesian Engines, I will explain the inverse relation between interpersonal stress and intersubjectivity and present how the brain changes as a result of intersubjectivity-oriented intervention. Lastly, I will explain why the ultimate nature of mind (that is clear and knowing) may be the basis of cathexis, which refers to the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, object, or idea, that prevails our everyday life and why ceaseless happiness can ultimately survive the looming massive destructions of the world as we know it.