Marsh brought the following passage to my attention, from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. I remember it from my days of listening nonstop to Tolle’s audiobooks. I like this passage a lot.
If at any time you are finding it hard to get in touch with the inner body, it is usually easier to focus on your breathing first. Conscious breathing, which is a powerful meditation in its own right, will gradually put you in touch with the body.
Follow the breath with your attention as it moves in and out of your body. Breathe into the body, and feel your abdomen expanding and contracting slightly with each inhalation and exhalation.
If you find it easy to visualize, close your eyes and see yourself surrounded by light or immersed in a luminous substance — a sea of consciousness. Then breathe in that light.
Feel that luminous substance filling up your body and making it luminous also. Then gradually focus more on the feeling. You are now in the body. Don’t get attached to any visual image.
The “luminous substance” part of this exercise is reminiscent of A.H. Almaas’s description of Living Daylight.
If you’re new to Tolle, I highly recommend listening to the audiobook versions of his books The Power of Now and A New Earth. They help you connect the meaning of the words with the sound of his voice. The two go well together and deepen the learning experience.
Curious to hear thoughts from others who walk the fine line between materialism and spirituality, I posted this article about near-death experiences to Mudita Forum. (I also included links to a critical response to that article and a subsequent reply from the author.)
Some forum members responded that it’s all rather anecdotal and unscientific, despite being researched by neuroscientists who appear committed to scientific investigation and the value of empirical studies.
Below is my reply.
As far as I can tell, consciousness exists only inside sufficiently evolved living organisms. So I view these kinds of NDE reports with a kind of default assumption that they’re not quite true-as-told. At least, I don’t yet understand how they could be true.
I do not dismiss them as unscientific. Yes they can’t be confirmed or disconfirmed with randomly assigned, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. Few things can be. But science existed long before clinical trials. It exists today despite evidence that some of the most highly-regarded clinical trials of recent decades were later repeated and found to yield different results.
Ultimately science is a way of coming to understand the world. At a fundamental level, it requires us to set aside assumptions. It is not synonymous with, or even compatible with, the assumption of materialism.
Materialism and science are often confused, since science has excelled at understanding material aspects of reality. But they are not the same. Science is a method for evaluating the truth of ideas about the natural world. Materialism is a position about what the natural world is. This is an important distinction.
One reason it’s so important is because we still don’t know what consciousness is. Scientists have begun to really understand the laws that govern matter. But they have barely even started to begin to understand the laws that govern consciousness.
And it gets worse. As John Searle points out, today we don’t know whether matter gives rise to consciousness, whether consciousness gives rise to matter, or whether some third phenomenon, completely unknown to us now, gives rise to each.
It’s a useful realization to really let sink in: We don’t know … the relationship … between consciousness … and the material world.
Given our ignorance on this subject, even among top scientists, it seems appropriate to leave our fellow humans a certain amount of wiggle room, rather than dismissing them as unscientific because their findings do not point toward the assumption of materialism.
What do you think? Are these studies worth taking seriously, or should they be dismissed? And why?
UPDATE – From later in the same conversation, in answer to a complaint that such unusual stories of near-death experiences were not published in peer-reviewed journals and more or less amount to rumors.
I would just point out that many of these cases have, in fact, been documented and published in peer reviewed journals. One large study, for example, was published in The Lancet, which Wikipedia describes as “a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal … one of the world’s best known, oldest, and most respected general medical journals.”
According to the summary, it was an 8-year prospective study of 344 consecutive cardiac patients. And you can read more about one of the most interesting cases from that study, in the first third of this article.
That’s just one example among many. We don’t have to look them up, we don’t have to read them, we don’t have to scrutinize them first hand. But they were published in real, respected, peer-reviewed journals. And … if we want … we can find them. So they’re well above the status of rumors.
That said, I’m not here to vouch for their credibility. I’m no expert on the topic, and I’m not even all that interested; I’m just looking from a distance. The credibility (or lack thereof) is there for any of us to investigate ourselves, or not, as we wish.
I’m just here to point out that we can get attached to our beliefs much more easily than we suspect, especially around things that stretch our comfort zone. And the whole spiritual/material distinction is a huge candidate for that. It’s so easy to get blind about our blinders, there.
YMMV. For me, I’m finding it meaningful to acknowledge the limits of my knowledge a bit more than I would have done in the past.
On Facebook, my friend Joe Duarte, a grad student in positive psychology at Arizona State University, asked why I’ve been so scornful of science and clinical trials lately. (For those who don’t know, for six years I studied to be a research scientist while pursuing my Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of New Mexico.) I replied:
As you might suppose, I’m not a proponent of rejecting science or clinical trials, per se. Rather, I’m a critic of how people trust them broadly, while remaining ignorant of common systematic faults in how they are used. Science has become a kind of secular religion, and just as dangerous to the promotion of knowledge in society.
John Ioannidis’s work provides one good point of reference for why we all need a horse-pill sized dose of skepticism about studies we come across. Another good one is Judith Curry’s research on false positives.
I’ve seen too clearly how rubbery the statistics and claims can be in clinical trials, all while parading under the banner of science.
Maybe I’m a lover of what clinical trials will be able to tell us in thirty years. But today I mostly see flabby science, and that’s before the media gets hold of it, and long before the average non-scientist tries to make sense of what they heard in the media.
Conducting strong studies in the healthcare field often requires a ton of manpower and money, which means so much of the current hardcore research is dominated by pharmaceutical companies and government grants, each driving their own dump-truck of smelly biases and agendas.
Top domain experts are in the best position to reliably discern what is known, what is unknown, and what is still in that gray area between the two. Yet these same experts commonly promote ideas later shown to be bunk. That should be more than a little disconcerting to anyone who places a lot of confidence in the science available to us today.
My view is that the clinical trial, as a methodology of applying reason rigorously, is still in its teenage years if not its infancy. So what do I do in the interim? Enjoy the game. Scoff at things that don’t seem to pass the smell test, scientifically or philosophically.
And I’m irreverent toward anything that seems like a religious trust in science, and I am more inclined to trust people who show a healthy skepticism about the ways science is conducted and who recognize just how little we truly know about anything within about 90 yards of the leading edge of science.
Did I mention some people treat science like religion? “But there are STUDIES…” Uh-huh.
To me lately clinical trials often seem more like a sport than a science. I’m no longer in a league, so instead I root for my team, mock the opposition, and enjoy the show.
I’m glad you’re doing the research you do, and are as aware as you are of the pitfalls in the process. I look forward to seeing where you go with it! Now, where’s my popcorn….
From The Harvard Gazette:
Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. In a study that will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s gray matter.
“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”
See the full article for much more.
I just stumbled across a reader comment from early last year by a teacher in Massachusetts, Camille Napier Bernstein, who begins each day with a “stillness” exercise for the first few minutes each day in her classroom. The students are not only receptive, but sometimes enthusiastic about how valuable it has become to them.
She has written about her successes with the practice. An excerpt:
I teach in a public school. You might wonder if the practice has caused controversy. Certainly, my first two years were fraught with worry that a student might misinterpret the practice to his parents, and I doggedly corrected students who called it “karma” or “some weird Buddhist crap.” A number of parents over the years have thanked me for teaching their kids “an important life skill,” and a few offered, preemptively, to defend me should a problem arise.
The school and community have so supported the practice that I was recently awarded a grant through the local Education Foundation to run a meditation group at the high school.
Students have told me repeatedly that they come to depend on Stillness. On days I am particularly rushed, I might launch into some directions, but they always pull me back: “You forgot ‘peace time!” or “What about Stillness, Mrs. B?” or, my favorite, “Can we do 20 minutes today? I really need it.”
In recent years, I’ve broadened our practice, allowing every six weeks or so an extended period of 20 minutes, sometimes silent, sometimes with a guided full-body scan. And as a reward at the end of the year, I’ve invited my sister-in-law, a yoga teacher, to lead each class in some soothing poses.
Students have told me that they use stillness on the bus before football games, in the middle of the lunchroom when someone “said something stupid that made me want to punch him out,” and at night when they can’t sleep. They regularly download the songs I play or make me cds of music they think will work well. They return after graduation to say they’ve taken yoga or mediation classes at college. The biggest compliment I’ve ever received was when a tough guy – you know the type, too cool for school and always ready to challenge authority – re-emerged after a 20-minute session mumbling dreamily, “Mrs. B., you have the best voice.”
His friends razzed him mercifully, but he was stalwart in defending Stillness: “Dude, shut up! I am so chillaxed after that. We should have a whole class of just her talking about that ‘blue healing breath’ or whatever that thing is.”
See her full article for much more.
This moving message just landed in my inbox, from friend Ross Barlow.
Honoring “The Chosin Few” in the Korean War from 27 November 1950 on into December 1950. The battle of Chosin Reservoir. It was intensely brutal combat in temperatures sometimes down to minus-35 degrees in the mountains. A frozen Hell.
Honored warriors there were from the US Marines, the US Army, the Republic of Korea (the “ROKs,” South Korea), and the British Royal Marine Commandos. But don’t forget, the ill-equipped (and tyrannically led) communist Red Chinese troops fought bravely against these UN forces, sometimes fighting down to the very last man. UN forces retreated but Chinese forces were shattered; no one won.
War sucks. We as human animals seem to worship it, romanticize it, love it, and continue it. I confess: combat service has defined my own life; I will never be the same. But war is at its root insane, inhumane and immoral. Will we ever get over it? Can we as a species survive while acting this way?
A friend on Facebook lamented the fact that academics tend to equate libertarian thinking with Ayn Rand — “And it’s never her ideas of anything like self-ownership or individuality that get cited either. It’s always her batshit personality quirks,” like “Her creepy admiration of William Edward Hickman, a serial killer.”
My reply:
I’ve heard that something like 80% of serious libertarians originally came to these ideas via Ayn Rand’s novels — though their intellectual development hardly stopped there, of course — so perhaps it’s not surprising that many people, especially those who aren’t familiar with the genre, associate her ideas with libertarianism.
The Hickman criticism is unfortunately a case of critics dropping any semblance of intellectual context. Her journal entries about Hickman were written during an early period in her development as a philosopher, when she was going through a Nietzschean phase. So she admired the radical strengths of an Übermensch, while acknowledging his faults? How scandalous! Presumably Nietzsche would come in for even more criticism on this front, but somehow he remains perfectly respectable.
Interestingly, as Ronald Merrill observes in The Ideas of Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead is at root a dramatization of the female protagonist Dominique’s (and thus Rand’s own) progression from nihilism (loving Keating) to Nietzscheanism (loving Wynand) to Objectivism (loving Howard Roark) — culminating in the portrayal of an ideal man who “neither sacrifices himself to others nor others to himself.”
And so the criticism of Rand as a Hickman “admirer” amounts to saying her philosophy is too Neitzschean when, in fact, she explicitly grew to reject Neitzscheanism in favor of her own philosophy which eschews sacrifices in any form. Her two primary novels are quite explicit about this — which the Hickman criticism ignores entirely. Could one be any less fair in one’s criticism of a philosopher?
I do believe Rand had some bat-shit moments, to use your phrase. I also think it’s a mistake to give in too easily in our defense of her. Sometimes simply restoring a little intellectual context, and reading her actual words, is enough to reveal her as far more thoughtful than her critics would suggest. Given her truly massive role in promoting libertarian ideas, we do ourselves a disservice if we are too quick to push her to the back of — or throw her under — the intellectual bus.
I truly believe we undermine our cause if we’re too quick to allow some of the more ridiculous criticisms to take root.
November 17, 2011 · Filed under:
HealthEarlier this month I relocated to Malta, chiefly for its English-speaking culture, beautiful sights, and sunny weather — ranked #1 in the world for its desirable climate per International Living. I’m liking it a lot so far, though I’ve scarcely begun to explore the island properly.
Among other things, living in a new country always entails discovering new brands of my favorite ingredients — which can be good or bad, depending on what I find. Presently I have three different brands of butter in my fridge. Lately I eat a lot of butter because it’s better for your brain as well as your heart. And I only buy real butter, no blends, “light” butters, or margarine.
Today while making my eggs I noticed that, even while cold, an Italian butter labeled burro prateria (“grassland butter”) by Brazzale S.p.A. smells incredibly sweet and fragrant. That inspired me to smell another brand I bought in a pinch last week, an Irish butter by Kerrygold, which entirely lacks that sweetness and frankly has overtones of manure, once I stop and smell it closely.
I am fascinated by the difference. I had never even paid much attention to the smell of butter. I would assume the sweet brand smells sweet for a reason — and not because they added sugar (which they didn’t, and it wouldn’t change the smell even if they did). I wonder if it was made from cows raised on a healthier free-range diet, for example. In any case, I take the smell as a very good sign of its quality.
This inspired me to actually taste the butter directly, by putting a small slice in my mouth rather than just using it as a way to cook other stuff. And the Italian Burro tastes incredibly clear and creamy, while the Irish Kerrygold tastes strong and faintly unpleasant. In fact, the Burro tastes so good I can eat it straight from the package. The actual flavor isn’t that sweet, just very clear, smooth, pleasant. It’s a minor kind of delicacy, and reminds me of the first time I tried cocoa nibs or unsweetened licorice tronchetti.
So what does the butter in your refrigerator smell like? For fellow butter connoisseurs, what is your favorite brand of butter and why?
This Thursday, September 24th, The John Stossel Show on Fox Business Network will air a show with the theme “What if Libertarians Were in Charge?”
The last seven minutes of the show will include a segment featuring Michael Strong and Magatte Wade, discussing how Free Cities will reduce poverty and create jobs, hope, and prosperity in the developing world.
The work to develop such cities is being spearheaded by the Free Cities Institute, but on the program Stossel actually refers to it as the “Free Cities Project.” So I’m creating this blog post to help point interested parties — as well as Google — to the correct website to find more information.
To learn more about these important initiatives, please visit the site for the Free Cities project (or, more formally, the Free Cities Institute).
UPDATE – The video of their interview is now available online.
I like inspirational novels with a significant moral message, such as Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. They hit us on multiple levels: supplying entertainment, giving intelligent food for thought, and providing inspiration and emotional fuel for facing the challenges of leading The Good Life.
With that in mind, Robert Bidinotto‘s novel Hunter: A Thriller hit the spot. I found the writing crisp, the characters interesting, and the interplay of plot and theme to be tight and compelling. I was far more moved than I expected to be, particularly by the love relationship between Dylan Hunter and Annie Woods. They wrestled with real challenges, and seeing how they resolved them reminded me why I like romantic realism so much: it inspires you to want to live your own life as fully and heroically as possible.
Bidinotto’s mastery of his craft is evident. As a sometimes-writer myself, I got the feeling a few times that he must have really enjoyed the writing process, because in certain passages I got the distinct sense of a sharp mind at work and at play. I think he must’ve loved writing this book.
Ayn Rand wrote, “Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers — show me yours — show me that it is possible — show me your achievement — and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.” I read the novel intermittently over the course of about three days, and on the last morning, as I finished the final chapter, my feeling toward the author was: Thank you for showing us your achievement.
It has given me courage for mine.
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