Posted inPersonal/Stories

Learning new skills is key to improving both mind and body

Like most people, I'm a big believer in improving my skills. This is such an obvious thing to do, it hardly bears mentioning. But I feel like I need to stress the obvious, because some visitors to this blog seem to view spirituality as a "one and done" sort of thing.  Meaning, you find a religion, meditation technique, mystical path, or whatever that suits you, and you stick with that approach with no modifications for the rest of your life. Yeah, I realize this sounds ridiculous, and it is. Yet I've encountered people who actually seem to believe it's the…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Mindfulness

Mindfulness is focused attention plus peripheral awareness

In December 2018, six years ago, I wrote what seems to be my first (and only) post about a book I'd just started reading, The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness. A few days ago something spurred me to pluck the book from a bookshelf where it had been languishing after I'd read about half of the 415 pages, then put it aside. I decided to re-read it, since the book methodically describes ten stages of Buddhist meditation and I wanted to start at the beginning rather than jump right into…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

My fear of death is less now. But is there anything to fear, really?

I used to have a strong fear of death. So much so, as I described in a 2004 HinesSight post ("Give me liberty or give me gerbil"), I made an attorney say gerbil rather than death whenever she needed to refer to my eventual demise.  Kathleen Evans, the attorney, did a masterful job at a whiteboard injecting into our legal-impaired brains the gist (but not the details, blessedly) of why what we did in 1993 still made sense in 2004, even with arcane changes in some estate and tax laws whose sole purpose seemed to be to make things so…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Understanding how our mind works requires going back to prehistory

Before I share more about what I'm learning in James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, here's a revelation that I found germane to Doty's message. In a recent issue of New Scientist, there was an article about what happened to the Neanderthals. You know, our prehistoric relations who aren't around any longer but live on in the fact that most humans of non-African ancestry have a genetic makeup that's about 1-4 % Neanderthal, which shows that us Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred. The article said that recent archaeological discoveries, notably from a…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Tiny Habits is a good way to change our behavior for the better

As I was making my way through James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, I came across an intriguing mention of another book: Tiny Habits, by B.J. Fogg.  After perusing the Amazon listing, and seeing how well liked the book was by thousands of readers, I decided it was worth $11.67 to click on "Buy Now." I've only read the first 40 pages, but I'm liking what Fogg has to say.  Sure, it appears that Tiny Habits has become a sort of cottage industry since it was published in January 2020. The Tiny…
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Posted inOpen Threads

Open Thread 48 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread. Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread.  As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread. Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults. Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember…
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Posted inBuddhism

Buddhist meditation and psychology can learn from each other

My undergraduate major in college was psychology. I also started to practice daily meditation while in college. So for me, psychology and meditation always have been linked, though not always as closely as they are now. I say this, because for thirty-five years my meditation had an otherworldly emphasis. After being initiated by an Indian guru, my goal was to meditate in a fashion that would enable my soul-consciousness to leave this worldly plane of existence behind and travel to higher regions of supernatural reality. Yeah, right... All that had very little to do with modern psychology. But for about…
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Posted inMindfulness Neuroscience

Thinking positively isn’t as important as being emotionally positive

I'm continuing to enjoy James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. As I indicated before, don't be put off by the title, which admittedly sounds a bit New Age'y. With rare exceptions, and I'm approaching the halfway mark in my reading of Mind Magic, so I'm pretty confident that this is true, Doty stays within the bounds of modern psychology and neuroscience in his book. Which isn't surprising, since he's a neuroscientist and neurosurgeon.  What's well known is that what we're consciously aware of is a very small fraction of what the brain…
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Posted inFree will Neuroscience

Hey, I’m trendy! “Manifest” is the 2024 word of the year.

I was thrilled to see that the subject I've been writing about recently, manifesting, has been named the word of the year for 2024 by the Cambridge Dictionary. (The word was "manifest," to be precise.) However, I wasn't aware of the manifest craze when I bought James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. And I don't agree with the magical thinking side of manifesting, as mentioned in The Guardian story about the word of the year. “Manifest”, meaning to dream or will something into existence, has been named the word of 2024 by…
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Posted inNeuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Manifesting comes in two varieties: scientific and New Age

Before I started to write another post (this one) about James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, I Googled "critique of manifestation" to see what critics of this fad were saying about it. And fad it is, something I hadn't realized. I'd figured that after The Secret had been decried by thoughtful people as a New Age book full of cosmic B.S., where you can get whatever you want by aligning yourself with the esoteric Law of Attraction, people had stopped believing in this crap. But no, the crap has made a comeback…
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Posted inNeuroscience Science Spiritual practice/meditation

Mind Magic is a science-based book about manifesting what you want

If I hadn't read a review in New Scientist of James Doty's new book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, the title and subtitle would have turned me off, since "manifestation" sounds New Age'y, and "how it changes everything" sounds over-the-top. But the review stressed the neuroscience part, which I liked. And after the book arrived via Amazon a few days ago, I really liked the first sentence of the introduction, along with the entire first few paragraphs. THE UNIVERSE DOESN'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU. It may not sound like it, but this is…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Is meditation about feeling better or about knowing what’s true?

I just came across a piece of paper where I'd jotted down some thoughts about meditation that could serve as the basis for a churchless blog post.  I have no idea how long ago those thoughts came to mind. Must have been a while, since I have no recollection of doing this. No matter. I'll make use of them regardless. My first thought was, "Is meditation like learning to play music, where you practice and get better and better, or is it openness where beliefs about how things are is let go in favor of how things actually are?" The…
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Posted inReligions Science

Science says religion isn’t so much wrong, as it is unnecessary

Thanks to fading highlighting, I've been re-reading theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's book, Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions.  I bought the book a few years ago and wrote several blog posts about it. (See here, here, here, here, and here.) Then I put the book aside and turned my attention to other books in my morning pre-meditation reading. When I picked it up again recently, I noticed that I hadn't read a couple of the final chapters. I also saw that my yellow highlighting had faded considerably. To most people, that wouldn't be a big deal. But…
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Posted inPsychedelics Spiritual practice/meditation

Lessons for meditation based on psychedelic experience research

As a long-time daily meditator -- I've been doing this for 55 years -- I found an article in the October 2024 issue of Scientific American interesting both for what it says about the use of psychedelics like LSD, ketamine, and psilocybin, and meditation that doesn't involve any psychoactive substance.  The title of the online version of the article by Gary Stix is provocative: "What Makes a Psychedelic Experience? Not Always a Drug, it Turns Out." I'll share a PDF file of the article for non-subscribers.Download What Makes a Psychedelic Experience? Not Always a Drug It Turns Out | Scientific…
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Posted inPolitics Reality

My cosmic conclusions from the 2024 presidential election

For some reason it's usually easier to draw Gigantic Cosmic Conclusions from big events rather than small ones. It doesn't have to be that way, though "gigantic" and "big" do have an affinity with each other.  Why does death or a disaster move us to ponder the meaning of it all more readily than loading the dishwasher does? If there are grand principles underlying our human experience of reality, why can't we recognize them in the smallest of events as well as the biggest of events? Don't know. Maybe because rare big events grab our attention while everyday small events…
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Posted inPolitics Reality

How am I coping with Trump’s victory over Harris? By embracing reality.

Reality is a terrible thing to waste. It's one of our most precious possessions. For when we depart from reality, truth obviously suffers. So does our ability to deal with problems, which to handle appropriately, almost always requires a healthy dose of reality. Problem is, and I struggle with this often, as almost everybody does, evolution didn't confer upon us the advantage of knowing the world as it is. Rather, evolution through natural selection promotes reproduction of our genes by living long enough to mate and have offspring.  Sure, that necessitates an ability to know how the world is, since…
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Posted inPolitics

With the election tomorrow, I’m trying to empathize with Trump supporters

Empathy. It's a fine-sounding word. I aspire to it. But it can be damn hard to do when people act like selfish jerks and I'm supposed to look upon their twisted view of reality with empathy.  That's how I feel about Trump supporters. They cheer on their chosen candidate, a twice-impeached former president, convicted felon, habitual liar, and instigator of a violent attempt to subvert the result of the 2020 presidential election that was conducted freely and fairly, which Trump lost. Of course, that only scratches the surface of Trump's negative qualities and wrongdoing. Yet polls show that almost half…
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Posted inConsciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

If consciousness is immaterial, why does ultrasound boost mindfulness?

I realize that those who believe that consciousness is immaterial are pretty much immune to the evidence that it is a physical phenomenon.  That evidence is ubiquitous, as I've pointed out many times in blog posts. Anesthesia makes us unconscious. So does being hit on the head with a baseball bat. Caffeine makes consciousness more alert. MDMA ("Ecstasy") makes consciousness feel more loving.  The October 2024 issue of Scientific American has a short article that presents more evidence for the physical nature of consciousness. Being a daily meditator for most of my life -- I started meditating in 1969 --…
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Posted inPolitics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Gurus are like Trump: promising protection in return for absolute fealty

My wife found a Slate article by Steven Reisner on Apple News that she thought I'd be interested in, "The Deep Psychological Reason We're Stuck in This Feedback Loop With Donald Trump." Reisner starts off by saying: This is the third time Donald Trump has run for president as a major-party candidate, and yet, this cycle, the American electorate and the American press seem unable to fully comprehend the choice we are facing. It is not, as we’ve been trained to think, a contest between an extreme Republican and a middle-of-the-road Democrat. There is still no language that conveys what…
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Posted inGod Politics

A model isn’t reality, whether we’re talking politics or God

Since my mind is so focused on the presidential race here in the United States -- we're a week away from November 5, election day -- I figured I might as well go with the mental flow and write a post about a subject that is germane to both politics and God: modeling.  Not the sort of modeling where women or men put on designer clothes and strut down a walkway in front of an audience. The sort where a human understanding of some complex aspect of reality is fashioned into a model that attempts to reflect its nature. This…
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