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 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 inAwareness Neuroscience

There’s a place for intelligent thinking. But we should be aware of its limitations.

I feel bad that my previous post caused some people to get the wrong impression of one of my favorite authors. In "Everything is spiritual" says Joan Tollifson. I heartily agree I shared quotations from one of Tollifson's books that were unbalanced in a certain sense. While I understood that Tollifson is a big fan of reason and science, taken by itself this paragraph could be taken to be a putdown of reason and science. Our brain sees patterns where none actually exist. It turns chaos into order. But the order is imaginary. We are always clueless. Life is an…
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Posted inNeuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Why repeating a mantra during daily activities doesn’t make much sense

Recently I got to thinking about the many years (about thirty-five) that I did my best to mentally repeat a mantra not only during my morning meditation, but also as much as possible during the rest of my daily activities. UPDATE: I meandered quite a bit in coming to the conclusion expressed in this post's title. Here's the short version: The world is always changing. Unexpected challenges, surprises, problems, opportunities, and such continually pop up. Our minds should be similarly flexible to deal with these happenings in the world and our life. Rigidity should be avoided. But some meditation practices…
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Posted inNeuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Rationality has a lot to do with spirituality

For the thirty-five years I was an active member of an Eastern religion, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), one of my favorite Indian words was sat, truth.  For example, there was the satguru, the true guru, and satsang, association with truth. Eventually I came to feel that truth was the most important thing. When I concluded that for me, truth was best pursued outside the bounds of RSSB, there was only one thing I could do: leave RSSB. When I came to the epilogue of Thomas Metzinger's book, The Elephant and the Blind, an examination of pure awareness, his thoughts…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Reality

Nondual awareness could be closest to the scientific worldview

In my previous post, We're all having an "out of brain experience," I said there was more to say about a lengthy chapter in Thomas Metzinger's book about pure awareness, The Elephant and the Blind.  Here's that saying. More accurately, here's what Metzinger says, because his ideas are so subtle and often expressed in philosophical language, I figure that it's best if I use his own words here, rather than trying to restate them in my own language. Don't be surprised if some, or much, of what Metzinger says in these excerpts isn't crystal clear. It isn't always clear to…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

We’re all having an “out of brain experience”

At long last, I'm reaching the home stretch of reading Thomas Metzinger's meaty/tofuy book, all 500 pages of it, The Elephant and the Blind, about the experience of pure consciousness that's based on more than five hundred experiential reports from meditators. There are 35 chapters. I've just got two left to read. I thought about skipping some, but after finishing the "Transparency, Translucency, and Virtuality" chapter this morning, I'm glad that my rather obsessive reading style -- usually I read every page in a book, unless I'm really not enjoying it -- paid off in this instance.  Because Metzinger makes…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Pure consciousness isn’t an experience. It’s the capacity to experience.

I've gotten back to reading Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness. The title isn't entirely accurate, nor is it entirely inaccurate. I say this because one of Metzinger's chapters is called "It is Not an Experience." He writes: Here, what we are trying to approximate is that for some meditators, the phenomenal character of pure awareness also includes the self-evident fact that somehow, in a way that is very hard to express in words, what is occurring is not merely what philosophers call a "phenomenal experience" -- something that subjectively appears to…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

If you’re trying to control your mind, who is the “you” doing the trying?

English has some confusing ways of putting things when it comes to the mind, consciousness, attention, and all that.  For example, we may say, "I couldn't stop myself from eating a second piece of cake." Okay. But what's the difference between "I" and "myself"? Don't each of these words refer to the same entity? So isn't that sentence just a matter of grammar, not of reality?  In other words, maybe what the sentence really means is "I ate two pieces of cake, but now I wish I'd only eaten one." Now we just have "I" without the extraneous "myself."  This…
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Posted inConsciousness Free will Neuroscience

Our mental experience isn’t always in accord with the mental reality

Descartes famously wrote that even though we could be mistaken about everything else, since God could be a cosmic joker who hides the truth from us, the one thing we can't doubt is that we are a creature who doubts -- and thinks, and in general has conscious experiences.  You know, the "I think, therefore I am" thing. It's hard to argue with that. Sort of. Because we can imagine what Descartes could not, given when he lived: that, among other 21st century possibilities, we are creatures who are characters in a computer simulation crafted by an advanced alien civilization.…
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Posted inHappiness Neuroscience Politics

Negative emotions are just fine. I’ll be angry if you don’t agree.

Proving (sort of) that the cosmos agrees with the theme of this blog post, about an hour ago I finished episode 8 of the fourth season of The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu, which I belatedly started watching after seeing Elisabeth Moss in another streaming series and wanting to see more of her acting. The Handmaid's Tale, of course, is an adaptation of the dystopian book by the same name written by Margaret Atwood. Women are treated extremely badly in the nation of Gilead, which used to be the United States until religious zealots managed to take over the country, motivated…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

You can’t know your “true self,” but you can be it

I readily admit that Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind, often isn't easy to read. This detailed examination of pure awareness involves a lot of philosophy, a lot of neuroscience, and a lot of sophisticated arguments. All that is challenging. But every chapter rewards me with insights presented in simple language that make me pleased I bought this lengthy book -- which as I've noted before can be downloaded for free from the publisher, The MIT Press. (I prefer reading books on paper, not a screen.) Metzinger does a great job separating precepts of Buddhist, Advaita, and…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

Narrative self-deception is one way we fool ourselves

Each of us is the hero or villain in a story of our own making. That's admittedly a simplistic summary of a psychological principle, but it isn't far from the truth. I'm certainly aware of this in regard to myself. I have a way of looking upon my 75 years of living that, by and large, puts me in a positive light. Which isn't surprising, since I prefer praise to blame, so why would I choose to view the events of my life in a fashion that draws attention to my weaknesses instead of my strengths? Of course, some people…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Feeling you know isn’t the same as knowing

One of the benefits of reading a book about pure awareness by a philosopher, instead of someone who identifies with a religion or spiritual practice, is that you get a more realistic perspective. A good example is that Thomas Metzinger, the author of The Elephant and the Blind, speaks in an early chapter about the difference between a feeling of knowing and actual knowing. This should be obvious to anyone, which really is everyone, who has confidently believed that something was true until they learned that it wasn't.  Metzinger calls this the E-fallacy. His glossary defines it this way: A…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Nobody is watching the movie of your life, or mine, or anybody’s

Every morning I try to read one of the short chapters in Thomas Metzinger's fascinating book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness -- Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports. I particularly enjoy passages that intuitively appeal to me, yet rationally challenge my ability to comprehend exactly what Metzinger is saying. Below I'll share an example from the "Nonidentification" chapter.  First, though, this introductory mention in the chapter of the traditional movie theatre metaphor. One classic metaphor for this process [of de-identification], found in many places in the popular literature on meditation, is the image of being…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

The Elephant and the Blind — a provocative book about pure consciousness

Proving my dedication to the study of consciousness (or maybe my addiction to books), a few days ago my $80 copy of Thomas Metzinger's 600 page book, The Elephant and the Blind, arrived.  I had to buy the paperback version because I can't read a nonfiction book without a pen and highlighter in hand. But the book can be read for free via a download from the publisher, the MIT press. Just click on the Open Access tab. Metzinger is a philosopher who wrote a book about the mind, The Ego Tunnel, that I enjoyed. Here's some of the blog…
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