Mindfulness as an aid to Reason

I thought that this was a good example (and explaination) of how a mystical practice could aid in one's ability at cognitive reasoning.

Quote :

The only "tool" you really own is your consciousness: this includes your skills to perceive, to reason, to emotionally evaluate, to control your body, to access your instincts and higher faculties, etc. While high levels of development of consciousness are needed to cope adaptively with the world, especially in interacting with others, our educational system strongly tends to assume that we already have great skill in managing our consciousness, and spends its time filling us with more and more content to be managed. On many occasions you need to focus your attention in spite of distraction or conflicting emotions. The enormous amount of maladaptive perception, thought, feeling and behavior in everyday life, among people who are stuffed with more intellectual knowledge than most of the "wise" people in history ever had, testifies to the results of not teaching basic skills in understanding and using consciousness.

Contemporary psychology is just beginning to become aware that one of the most significant psychological dimensions affecting people's behavior is, to use Harvard psychologist Langer's term, "mindlessness." We now have enormous numbers of both experimental and clinical demonstrations to show that much of the time we live inside a kind of waking daydream. This means that our perceptions are often distorted and biased, as are our thinking and emotional evaluations. Consequently our behavior, based on biased and distorted understandings of our selves, of other people and of physical reality, is not only maladaptive but pathological in a way that further affects and distorts other's perceptions and reactions to us, in a vicious cycle.

http://itp.edu/academics/spotlight/meditation.php