Tagmeditation

You Are the River: An Interview with Ken Wilber

“Ken Wilber may be the most important living philosopher you’ve never heard of. He’s written dozens of books but you’d be hard-pressed to find his name in a mainstream magazine. Still, Wilber has a passionate — almost cultlike — following in certain circles, as well as some famous fans. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have praised Wilber’s books. Deepak Chopra calls him “one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness.” And the Wachowski brothers asked Wilber, along with Cornel West, to record the commentary for the DVDs of their “Matrix” movies.

A remarkable autodidact, Wilber’s books range across entire fields of knowledge, from quantum physics to developmental psychology to the history of religion. He’s steeped in the world’s esoteric traditions, such as Mahayana Buddhism, Vedantic Hinduism, Sufism and Christian mysticism. Wilber also practices what he preaches, sometimes meditating for hours at a stretch. His “integral philosophy,” along with the Integral Institute he’s founded, hold out the promise that we can understand mystical experience without lapsing into New Age mush.”

(via Salon. h/t Julian Walker’s Blog)

‘I Love the World’

Another one for today. Can’t get much better than this! xo
Kudos to agency 72andSunny and creative director Glenn Cole for this inspirational piece of advertising.

Amazing what a power a positive note can have on one’s day. When’s the last time you made a stranger feel this way?

Overview of scientific research of meditation

meditation

Research into the health claims made for meditation has limitations and few conclusions can be reached, partly because meditation is rarely isolated – it is often practised alongside other lifestyle changes such as diet, or exercise, or as part of group therapy.

So should we dismiss it as quackery? Studies from the field of neuroscience suggest not.

It is a new area of research, but indications are intriguing and suggest that meditation may have a measurable impact on the brain.

In Boston, Massachusetts, Dr Sara Lazar has used a technique called MRI scanning to analyse the brains of people who have been meditating for several years.

She compared the brains of these experienced practitioners with people who had never meditated and found that there were differences in the thickness of certain areas of the brain’s cortex, including areas involved in the processing of emotion.

She is continuing research, but she believes that meditation had caused the brain to change physical shape.

Full Story: BBC News.

(via Plutonica)

‘Secret Worlds’

 

Neil Gaiman quote illustrated by the always-wonderful xkcd.

Kirlian photos of Fell’s progress through Reiki

I’ve been studying Reiki under two local Reiki masters here, and it’s been good so far. I’ll write more about it once I’ve progressed farther. I’ve completed my Level I and some friends and I begin Level II in a couple weeks. I’ll be studying straight through the year until the Master class.

The teachers aren’t your traditional New Age fruits. They’re more like existential yogis, but the Reiki they practise is phenomenal. As an added bonus, they begin sessions with a Kirlian camera. Now, don’t read too much into these. But interesting to see the results as I progress through sessions with them and my own studies.

The image (click image for larger size) is mirrored, so the pinky finger is associated with your connection to one’s intuition, the ring finger with one’s emotional state, middle finger with one’s physical state, and index finger with one’s mental state.

The first row of finger tips is captured as they have you in your normal state, then they ask you to embody happiness, then frustration, and then to feel as if you’re the most comfortable state with yourself as possible. They capture these four sets onto one film and voilà!

The broken lines represent a lack of connection or awareness of that aspect of your being. Beyond language and labels, just being. And as the rings grow in brightness, I believe they come to represent one’s comfort with just being a part of existence — letting the whole of the life experience wash over oneself.

I went today, and as you can see from the bottom-right image, my way of living is beginning to more wholly encompass all facets of being. It was a good session and the past year’s been good.

Might be worth looking into for those unaware of Reiki. As Saul Williams says in his song "Raised to Be Lowered":

To find the balance between all you sense and all you see
To find the patience and the strength it takes to let it be
To stand amongst the crowd and have the strength to hold your own
To throw away the pen and pad and simply be the poem
To rise above hatred to love through seeming contradiction
To seldom take a side and learn to compliment the friction.

The Distance Between Spiritual Experience and Interpretation

“It is undeniable that human beings in all times and cultures have been hardwired for spiritual experiences – some of course more than others. But is this proof of any of the multiple metaphysical belief systems that we tend, I would suggest, to superimpose onto the experience? The central difficulty here is that the altered state of a spiritual experience is so convincing (and so important, beautiful and meaningful in its own right) and we are so suggestible during and afterward, that it is almost ubiquitous to be convinced that the experience is undeniable (or at the very least strong) proof of whatever belief system the ensuing interpretation is coming from – when in actuality it is nothing of the sort!

Humans love to go into altered states. There is not a culture in the history of the planet that has not come up with some way of fermenting, drinking, eating, fasting, dancing, sweating, drumming, smoking, snorting, chanting, breathing, meditating, stretching, sensory depriving or sensory overloading its way into altered states of consciousness. In addition some people have more labile neurophysiology than others – be they epileptic, hypo-glycemic, bipolar, schizophrenic or merely garden-variety creative, empathic types with thin ego-boundaries.

Thankfully we have developed an ever-deepening understanding of some of the more extreme dysfunctions of the brain and have ways of diagnosing and treating these problems that are more effective than ever before. One cannot help but be curious about the similarities between say religious and schizophrenic statements about reality and wonder how much of the difference is one of degree, and to what extent the vocabulary of experience being used is coming from the same part of the brain.

It is undeniable that to both the person in the grips of an ardent religious conversion and the clinically insane the novel and metaphysical revelations being described are not only convincing but are held as extremely important, often not only for the individual in the grip of the experience, but for all of humanity. I want to suggest that this is an extreme form of an activity of our physiology and its related interior – the psyche, that at its best can be positively transformational, healing and creative and at its worse can be fundamentalist, violent and crazy.”

(via Julian Walker’s Blog)

BBC documentary on how the human mind deals with long periods of sensory deprivation

I love this topic…

“What happens if you are left alone in the dark in solitary confinement for days on end? The result is called sensory deprivation and the human mind struggles to cope with it.”

Git in yer room, comedian!

Sensory deprivation is a controversial subject, with allegations the technique has been used at Guantanamo Bay as an interrogation strategy. And thousands of prisoners around the world are kept in solitary confinement, often with a significant degree of sensory deprivation.

The tests are exploring the theory that sensory deprivation makes subjects much more suggestible.

Some of the first research on this subject was carried out after the Korean War in the 1950s. The Canadian military wanted to investigate what had happened to POWs who appeared at international press conferences confessing that they were war criminals. It was thought they had been brainwashed following solitary confinement.

Whole article via BBC News

Hehe and this is funny, too:

Mickey, a postman is seeing mosquitoes and fighter planes buzzing around his head and it’s frightening him.

Claire a psychology student doesn’t mind the little cars, snakes and zebras. But she gets scared when she suddenly feels somebody is in the room.

“In the dark room there is nothing to focus on,” says Prof Robbins as he monitors their behaviour. “In the absence of information the human brain carries on working and processing information even if there is no information to process and after a while it starts to create that information itself.”

No wonder when I teach people to do their visualisations most of them freak out and never pursue it.

Horizon: Total Isolation is on BBC Two at 2100GMT on Tuesday 22 January.

Spiritual Kitsch, Paranoid Process, and Relativist Nihilism

“In it’s healthy form, Postmodern spirituality deconstructs the cultural baggage and prerational superstitions of Magic and Mythic and expands Rational natural-world, sensual spirituality into a deeper valuing ofboth the inner world of the psyche and the universal truths and states of consciousness made available through the still valid perennial
practices at the heart of those traditions.

Instead we have what I call spiritual kitsch – a kind of lowest common denominator combining of angels, aliens, karma, positive thinking, narcissistic fantasies about manifestation and how the universe works, extra-dimensional spirit guides, astrology, psychics and everything happening for some cosmic reason – all supported by an imaginary new
science that is really just a self-referential reflection of the marketing material that keeps this segment of the economy chugging along at ever greater profits.”

(via Zaadz)

IONS Opens Its Doors

“I just learned that the Institute of Noetic Sciences has opened its virtual library of consciousness studies to the public until December 24th.

Included in this promotion are video interviews from Deepak Chopra and other luminaries, as well as access to dozens of articles and audio broadcasts on subjects ranging from spirituality, the paranormal, the power of intention, meditation, sacred geometry, lucid dreaming, holistic education, bioenergetics…. and on and on.”

(via The Dream Studies Portal)

(Free access to IONS-Shift In Action)

Experiments in lucid dreaming

Everyone, even coked-out party monsters and meth freaks, must sleep. Even liver-bruising doses of Provigil will only let most people function thirty hours consecutively, and then it’s time to pay dear Morpheus. For those of us who have better things to do then sleep, this is a problem. The past several months, one of my personal projects has been to cultivate lucidity while sleeping in order to make some use of this time. As one Tibetan monk put it, if a man lives one hundred years but remains waking while asleep, ‘it is as though he lives two hundred years’. And the Tibetan monks would be the ones to listen to on this topic, as they have spent about the past two millenia hanging out in the bleakest environment on earth mastering their minds through magick and meditation. One of the technologies to which they have devoted much attention is Dream Yoga.

Full Story: From the Laboratory.

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