Does reasoning ever work?

music

It does in objective matters. But in personal matters? For instance, a guy addicted to cigarettes may know he is ruining his health, he may even be experiencing health problems while smoking. Still, he doesn't drop the ciggie, he continues. It is as if no amount of logic can prevail against pure, strong emotion.

So if reasoning doesn't work, what will?

MaryAnne

Smoking cigs is more about physical addiction/reward... than about emotions. When the body actually craves- reasoning is hitting its head against a brick wall.

person

There's something called analytical meditation, where with a reasonably calm and stable mind you reflect and use reasoning about various topics. At some point a feeling associated with that line of thought arises, something like an aha moment. These sorts of experiences happen all the time in our everyday life, like reasoning about quitting smoking and getting the feeling that you're going to do it. Normally though we get that feeling and then our mind moves onto the next thing, similar to watering a plant and then tipping it over right away before the water can soak in. Anyway, in analytical meditation we single pointedly stay with the feeling for as long as we can and then when we notice the feeling has decreased or we've moved onto to mowing the lawn in our head we return to the reasoning or change it up slightly until the feeling arises again, rinse and repeat.

fivebells

music said:

So if reasoning doesn't work, what will?

Are you struggling with an issue like this yourself?

lobster

Most problems make wonderful gifts for the right Buddha. For the right one you can burn or offer cigs or beer and then give to some hell dwelling hobo. You have to have reason and strong, better emotional direction (for example from a lama) and directive.

Most people are quite attached to their bad habits. Ain't it always the way.

how

Reasoning with attachment, preaching to the converted or having a firm grasp of the obvious.

The effectiveness of Reasoning alone seems dependant on the weakness of the attachment that is being challenged and
reasoning with attachment only starts to be effective when ones suffering noteably exceeds the stimulation that the attachment provides.

Reasonings work or failure seems very much dependant on factors outside of reasoning itself..

zenff

music said:

So if reasoning doesn't work, what will?

Dopamine works.
But once we messed up the reward system in our brain it is very difficult to restore its normal functioning. (At least that's my limited understanding of a complex subject...)

Since the mesolimbic pathway is shown to be associated with feelings of reward and desire, this pathway is heavily implicated in neurobiological theories of addiction, schizophrenia, and depression.[6][7][8] Drug addiction, the loss of control over drug use or the compulsive seeking and taking of drugs despite adverse consequences, with the four major classes of abused drugs (psychostimulants, opiates, ethanol, and nicotine) are due to increased dopamine transmission in the limbic system-each by different mechanisms.[2][9] Like drug addiction, schizophrenia and depression have similar structural changes with dopamine transmission
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesolimbic_pathway

andyrobyn

From my studies in the area in mental health, I have found that neurobiological theories are vastly complex and the pathways of transmission involve multiple different chemicals and are not of linear nature, with many negative feedback mechanisms. The exact workings are not exclusively a cause any more ( or for that matter any less ) than they are a symptom of the human condition.

DairyLama

music said:

So if reasoning doesn't work, what will?

Just calming the mind and seeing things as they really are?

driedleaf

music said:

So if reasoning doesn't work, what will?

Keep the mind busy. Find other stuff to do. Change perspective. Stay motivated to do other things and keep busy. Have fun often. Have an agenda. Sooner or later old habits become less and less important.

cheers

SeaOfTranquility

Mindfulness.

Perhaps this teacher's words will help -

"It is sometimes said that practicing mindfulness is easy; what is hard is remembering to do it. To help us remember, it’s useful to have a clear understanding of the forces in our minds that contribute to our forgetting. The one that the Buddhist tradition focuses on most is desire.

Desire is ubiquitous in human life. Living without wants, wishes, motivations, and aspirations is inconceivable. Some desires are quite healthy, useful, and appropriate; some are not. One function of mindfulness practice is to help us distinguish between these. And differentiating helps support the beautiful aspiration for liberation and compassion.

Any desire, healthy or unhealthy, can easily manifest as a compulsion. Wherever there is compulsion, we are not free. In the West, we sometimes call particularly strong desires “addictions.” Buddhism often refers to compulsive desires as cravings, clingings, or “thirsts.” Careful attention to our inner life, through meditation, for example, will quickly reveal that compulsions are deeply rooted in the mind.

One common hindrance to mindfulness that becomes evident in meditation is our propensity to think. Thinking can be quite compulsive, sometimes because of the power of a desire that we are thinking about, and at other times because we are simply addicted to thinking itself. The wish to remain mindfully present has to contend with the tendency to get lost in the mind’s desire to think.

As we touch into the deep satisfaction of being present, settled and concentrated in meditation, sensual desires become less and less powerful. Such satisfaction can even help to heal the compulsion behind some desires.

The more strongly the desire for sense pleasure hinders mindfulness, the greater is the value of learning to be free from it. And the more we value that freedom, the more likely we are to use that freedom to decide wisely which desires or aspirations we will allow to guide our life."

http://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/articles/

Best Wishes

Citta

j

music said:

It does in objective matters. But in personal matters? For instance, a guy addicted to cigarettes may know he is ruining his health, he may even be experiencing health problems while smoking. Still, he doesn't drop the ciggie, he continues. It is as if no amount of logic can prevail against pure, strong emotion.

So if reasoning doesn't work, what will?

It depends on the person...for some people in some situations reason WILL work.
In some ways those people respond most easily to ( for example ) Cognitive Behavioural approaches... CBT is effective also in those people and/or conditions who do respond to reason..its just more indirect.

hermitwin

i have seen it work before.
when my colleague was told he had lung cancer, he quit smoking immediately.

music said:

It does in objective matters. But in personal matters? For instance, a guy addicted to cigarettes may know he is ruining his health, he may even be experiencing health problems while smoking. Still, he doesn't drop the ciggie, he continues. It is as if no amount of logic can prevail against pure, strong emotion.

So if reasoning doesn't work, what will?

Zero

music said:

It is as if no amount of logic can prevail against pure, strong emotion.

So if reasoning doesn't work, what will?

Reasoning does work on a local level - to consider otherwise is to discount your brain functions.

What you describe is not reason as much as a reasoned argument.

Who are you arguing with? Who are you trying to convince?

If reason is just another personality that visits you, such as emotion, then you have multiple personalities to contend with - who knows which one is steering at any one time - if reason however is simply a tool for your one and only personality then perhaps it will work differently.

Florian

As you say, music, reasoning can lead us to water but it cannot make us drink. Getting wet is what works. Iow, empiricism and practice. When we reason our way to a conclusion that we do not like our clever brain can easily just say, oh well, we might have made a mistake.