Posted inConsciousness Mindfulness Neuroscience

Often I seem to be conscious, but not aware

I go back and forth, trying to decide whether being conscious and being aware are the same thing, or different things. Sometimes I equate the two. But I recall someone (Ron E.?) expressing a different opinion in a comment on one of my posts.  At the time I discounted that idea. But after what happened to me in my Tai Chi class yesterday -- which wasn't all that different from what has happened to me many times before -- I'm more inclined to believe that being conscious and being aware are indeed distinct mental processes. We were doing a form…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth Mindfulness

Death is the best encouragement for mindfulness I’ve come across

Typically it isn't easy for me to stay focused on the present moment without having my mind conjure up all kinds of unrelated thoughts. This happens not only in my morning sitting meditation, but also in my Tai Chi classes (Tai Chi has been termed "meditation in motion"). Today in class I was doing my best to pay close attention to my movements. That worked for a while. Until it didn't. Then I found myself contemplating what I was going to have for dinner, whether I was going to get rained on when I walked back to my car, and…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

We impose meaningfulness on the world through our stories

Yesterday my increasingly buggy blogging service, Typepad, kept generating a "503" error message all day long, so I wasn't able to write a post for one of my other blogs. I just did that, composing "My fall into a creek shows why doing one thing at a time makes sense."  That post includes a mention of my recent post here about human cognition being amazingly slow, so it's worth a read. You also can see photos of an attractive creek that runs through our rural property. Plus our electricity is off at the moment, owing to some downed power lines…
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Posted inAwareness Mindfulness

Everyone is a creator, says Rick Rubin

I've done a lot of creating in my life. But I've never thought of myself as an artist. Artists create paintings, music, sculptures, pottery, all that stuff that most people, including me, think are art'y. Rick Rubin is leading me to expand that limited point of view. Recently I encountered Rubin when I was watching some episodes of 60 Minutes that I'd recorded and hadn't gotten around to viewing. The segment on Rubin was fascinating. Here's a guy who claims to know nothing about music, yet is a highly successful record producer. (These days maybe it's more accurate to say…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

I like the idea that love is akin to spaciousness

Love. What is it? For me, love has been easier to feel than to describe. It seems to have something to do with attraction, since I want to be closer to people and things that I love, while the opposite is true of people and things that I hate or dislike. Every night I say "love you" to my wife before we go to sleep. She says the same to me. It's a ritual that means a lot to me, in part because it makes me feel good to know that if I die in my sleep, those would have…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

We are both the mind and the observer of the mind

Recently I read an essay in either the New York Times or Washington Post by someone who spoke about how Thich Nhat Hanh's classic little book, "The Miracle of Mindfulness," had changed his life.  That spurred me to head to Amazon to see if I'd already bought that book. Yes, Amazon told me, you did, in January 2019. Looking through the Buddhism section of my bookcase, there it was, all 139 pages of it. I've been re-reading parts of The Miracle of Mindfulness the past few days. Published 50 years ago, in 1975, the book is wonderfully clear and concise.…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

The goal is our chosen direction, says Zen master Henry Shukman

I think it'd be cool to be a Zen master. However, to do that I would have had to actually practice Zen under the guidance of a Zen master, rather than admire Zen from the outside and practice it in my own idiosyncratic fashion. Henry Shukman, who wrote the book Original Love that I'm reading now, and fashioned The Way app on my iPhone that I've using every morning in a cyberspace form of Zen meditation, is indeed a Zen master. I just checked out the Sanbo Zen International web site and Shukman is listed there along with other masters…
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Posted inDelusions Mindfulness Reality

“The Surprising Allure of Ignorance,” an essay by Mark Lilla

My wife subscribes to the print edition of the Sunday New York Times. As I was taking the discarded December 8 edition to our recycling bin, I noticed an essay in the Opinion section, which was on top of the pile, that looked interesting: "The Surprising Allure of Ignorance," by Mark Lilla. (That's a gift link from my digital New York Times account, so it should be readable by everybody. But I've also copied in Lilla's essay in its entirety below, as it isn't all that long.) Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and the author of…
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Posted inBooks Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

“The Mindful Geek” is a meditation guide for secular skeptics

Do I really need another book about meditation? No, I've got lots of them at the moment and have read many more over the 55 years I've been engaged in daily meditation. But do I want another book about meditation? Absolutely. That's why Amazon delivered The Mindful Geek by Michael W. Taft to me recently. I was in the mood for a meditation guide that was based on secular non-religious principles that were in accord with modern neuroscience. Taft has a strong background in various sorts of traditions. His first paragraph is: From Zen temples in Japan to yogi caves…
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Posted inAwareness Consciousness Mindfulness

Meditators need to avoid mistaking subtle dullness for meditative joy

As noted in a previous post, I've been re-reading the first part of a book by Culadasa (John Yates), The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness.  I'm almost back to where I stopped my reading about six years ago for a reason I can no longer recall. The book is an amazingly detailed and comprehensive approach to Buddhist meditation. I find it refreshing, because there's hardly any mention of Buddhist scriptures, Buddhist terms, or Buddhist stories.  The whole focus is on guiding the reader through ten stages of meditative practice. So…
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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 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 inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Awareness is more important than peace of mind

Every day I repeat a brief loving kindness meditation. It starts with "May I be happy; may I be safe; may I be healthy; may I be at peace." Then I visualize someone I care about, usually my wife, and say the same things but substituting "you" for "I." After that, I zoom out to visualize the entire planet, and say "all" instead of "I." It's interesting that I have little trouble envisioning myself or someone else being happy, safe, and healthy. But while I enjoy the sentiment, "May ______ be at peace," it's more difficult for me to picture…
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Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

How to have less of a distracted mind

As evidenced by the title of the first blog post I wrote six days ago about The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, a book by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen -- "Why repeating a mantra during daily activities doesn't make much sense" -- I'm interested in the spiritual implications of the book, even though the authors pay zero attention to this. They're concerned with how three modern innovations, the Internet, smart phones, and social media, are screwing up our ability to concentrate, though it isn't as if these innovations are forcing us to obey their whims. For…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

Joan Tollifson on the groundlessness of reality

Tai Chi, which I've practiced for nineteen years, speaks about being rooted. Not in the sense of a plant being attached to the earth, but something similar. Being connected to the floor, or ground, in a way that is stable, secure, capable of being the foundation of productive movement (especially important in a martial or self-defense application). But this root isn't a static thing, because we humans aren't oak trees. It's dynamic, ever-changing, adjusting to circumstances.  Which fits with a recent essay by Joan Tollifson that arrived in my email inbox yesterday. I've shared the first part of it below,…
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Posted inMindfulness Personal/Stories

Pain is a great teacher, though I’d prefer a more pleasant instructor

Back in 2020 was when my sciatica pain started. I don't know why. Often health problems appear mysteriously. Which would be fine if they disappeared just as mysteriously.  But in my case, the extreme pain I had early on, where I'd shed tears uncontrollably while walking the dog or mowing the lawn if I was having an especially bad day, eventually abated. Maybe from time. Maybe from the physical therapy exercises I was given. Who knows? For the next three years, 2021-23, my right leg always had some discomfort. It was manageable, though. I didn't need pain relievers. I was…
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Posted inMindfulness

Mind-body dualism ignores the close connection between mental and physical

Most religions are dualistic. They assume that something ethereal exists within us, or as us, that is separate and distinct from the physical body: mind, soul, spirit, divine energy, and such. To which I say, maybe, since anything is possible. However, there's no convincing evidence that this ethereal something exists, with zero evidence that this something that can't be shown to exist has any observable effects. Today I finished reading Ellen Langer's book, Mindfulness. In a final chapter, this Harvard psychologist has quite a bit to say about mind-body dualism, though not in a religious sense. She starts off by…
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Posted inFundamentalism Mindfulness Politics

Beware of ideologies, even though most of us embrace them

I enjoyed this recent comment on a churchless blog post from "sant64." There's valuable wisdom here. The first paragraph comes from what I said in the post. "This makes sense in many situations. However, when it comes to solid facts, such as the reality of human-caused global warming, 'trying out different perspectives' isn't the right thing to do. In these sorts of cases, reality almost certainly is a certain way." The proper perspective that jibes with "reality" is what? Believing that we're in the end-times because there's little hope we can reverse GW, or believing that GW is manageable and…
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Posted inMindfulness

I prefer the Eastern, rather than Western, approach to mindfulness

Since I enjoyed psychologist Ellen Langer's most recent book so much (The Mindful Body), I figured that I'd also enjoy what may have been her first book, or at least an early book, Mindfulness.  Actually, not so much. As Langer says in a section called "Mindfulness East and West," she takes a decidedly Western approach to mindfulness. The definitions of mindfulness in this chapter, especially the process orientation just discussed, will remind many readers of various concepts of mindfulness found in Eastern religion... While there are many similarities, the differences in the historical and cultural background from which they are…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Meditation isn’t about doing it right. It’s about trusting yourself.

TIME magazine rarely has stories about meditation. So it was a pleasure to turn a page of the February 12, 2024 issue and see a title: "The noises in my head at a silent retreat." I could relate to those words. For after starting to meditate every day in 1971, during the past fifty-three years my meditation has involved a lot of noises inside my own head.  Thoughts. Emotions. Cravings. Things to do. Cosmic conceptions. Crude desires. You know, everything that's going through my mind outside of meditation. It's just more obvious when I'm sitting still, usually with eyes closed,…
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