1000 Days

I thought I had two more days, but I just checked my calendar. I've had 1000 straight days of practice (taiji, yoga, chanting, meditation) as of today. I wasn't sure I'd make it 10 when I started, let alone 1000. I really think the practice saved my life. It was a minor but useful thing that I could do even in the depths of depression and feel a sense of accomplishment.

There have been times when I did the bare, bare minimum just to check it off as done, but lately I've been expanding the practice. I'm up to 22 minutes of standing meditation now. Cheng Man Ch'ing is supposed to have said that one shouldn't even learn the taiji form until one could make 30 minutes; it strengthens the quads and teaches proper skeletal alignment. I can probably jump up to 24 minutes in the next week or so.

Anyway, this song seems appropriate, though I doubt I'll be around long enough to make it to 1000 years. I suppose it's conceivable, but incredibly unlikely ... unless there really is something to the Taoist elixir of immortality nonsense and I've chosen the correct practice to find said elixir. ^!^

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Depressive Stigmas

What happens if I don't take my medication? I turn into a zombie. Everything turns flat, it seems almost as if things lose their color, like all the colors fade. I feel like my body weighs so much that I can't even hold my shoulders up. I become lethargic - I can't get myself to do anything. I don't feel sad; I feel nothing. Empty, blank, flat. Great things can happen, but they don't make me happy. Awful things can happen, but they don't make me sad.

What happens when I take my medication? I'm myself again. The medication doesn't make me feel happy; it makes me feel. With the medication, my emotions come back; I can feel happy or sad. I enjoy it when things are going well; I get sad or angry when they go poorly.

~MarkCC @ Good Math, Bad Math

I seem to have made it through my bout with depression, amazingly without the aid of pharmaceuticals. Some would say that makes me "better" than people who need the pharmaceuticals; I would say it makes me damned lucky. I've talked to people who actually think that all you need to do if you're depressed is "snap out of it." It's obvious that such people have never, ever suffered from genuine depression. They've had the "oh, I'm a bit down today" variety.

In my case, I was able to keep functioning through sheer effort of will, but I didn't give much of a damn about anything. The place where this manifested most obviously was in getting bills paid. I would know that the bill was sitting there, that I had the money in my checking account to pay for it, that the checkbook was under the bill...and I could not motivate myself to get up and do anything about it. I managed to push through that often enough to avoid losing anything other than cable...mainly because none of the other companies were as ridiculously uptight about late payments as the cable company. One of the signs that the depression was lifting was when I would sit down almost immediately after receiving a bill and get it paid.

Here's the thing, though. I didn't use pharmaceuticals, but I did use a meditation practice. Meditation has been shown to alter brain states. Instead of taking a drug to alter my brain chemistry, I adopted a practice that would do so. I tended to keep with practices that seemed to improve the condition, but it was largely a matter of trial and error. I can't see how that is "better" than using a pharmaceutical to achieve the same effect. Such a practice is a major time commitment, and has to be done everyday if you want to keep receiving benefits. The pharmaceuticals are a hefty monetary commitment instead, and have to be ingested everyday to receive benefits. Which have you got more of, time or money? And do you have enough patience to give a meditative practice time to work?

I do think there are further benefits to a meditation practice, particularly one that utilizes physical meditations like taiji and yoga, and I do think everyone could benefit from such practices. But I am not about to tell someone who is so depressed that he/she can't get out of bed to go do yoga asanas. Pharmaceuticals would be a much better option at that point. Maybe, maybe, after the pharmaceuticals have helped enough, such a practice might reduce dependence on them, but, then again, it might not. Whether it's worth trying is entirely up to the person who is suffering.

In my case, since the meditation practice works for me, I prefer to rely on that. It doesn't require a doctor's visit or a prescription. It does require a strong commitment to the practice. Most people who are depressed wouldn't be able even to contemplate such a commitment. When I began it, my goal was to keep it up for 36 days straight, and that was all. Just 36 days. I did not expect to make it through those 36 days, but it gave me a goal to concentrate on. Rather to my amazement, I made it through 36 days, then 108, and I've just passed the 900 day mark. That's 25 cycles of 36 days, when I didn't honestly expect to make it through a single cycle of 36 days. I've even expanded the practice since then. But, that's me. That's not going to work for everyone, any more than a single pharmaceutical remedy is going to work for everyone. It helps that I'm a touch obsessive-compulsive and have a fascination with numbers, so that counting the days actually served to motivate me when I began. Now I still keep track of the numbers, but it's more a matter of interest than of motivation.

But what if that hadn't worked for me? What if I hadn't lucked into a practice sufficient to keep me sane? I don't know. Best case scenario, I think, would be that I wound up on some sort of pharmaceutical. Worst case? I don't think I would have suicided, as the only time I felt suicidal it was ginger-induced*, but I might have gotten to the point of not giving a damn about anything, including the job that pays my bills, or the cars coming on a street I needed to cross, or... One way or another, the situation would have gotten worse and worse.

*I've determined that if I'm perfectly awake and healthy, ginger just makes me a touch sleepy. If I'm already tired, ginger makes me feel depressed. If I'm already depressed, it can make me feel suicidal. I no longer cook with ginger.

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Delusional

I've mentioned before that I occasionally get a sensation like there's a threatening presence nearby. While I have an image of that presence (usually a large, monstrous humanoid), I do not see it, or hear it, or have any other physical sense experience of it. It is purely in my mind. The first time I took Zyrtec, the Zyrtec brought it on. "Paranoia" is described as one of its possible side effects, and I guess my form of paranoia involves this particular delusion.

The most interesting thing, though, is that I discovered in meditation that I could deliberately evoke the delusion, and that I could make it go away again.
I was hoping that this would allow me to quiet it if it arose on its own. It didn't, at least not during the one chance I've had to try it. Thankfully the delusion doesn't come on very often, though if it did I might stand a better chance of working out how to make it go away.

The only way to describe how I brought it on deliberately is from a phenomenological standpoint; then I'll speculate as to what might be going on physically. One of the meditations I use is to visualize bringing energy up the spine and out through the top of the head. One day, and I no longer remember why, I was playing with bringing the energy up through different parts of the head. In one particular "location", I felt the paranoia and sense of presence begin to emerge. I withdrew the "energy" and the paranoia went away. I tried various places in the head, most with no noticeable effect, but that one place, at the back left of the head, always brought on the delusion.

My best guess is that my energy-imagery is, in fact, activating different areas of the brain in different ways, and by focusing on that particular location, I activated the area of the brain responsible for the delusion. I don't know if the area is actually in the back left of the brain, or if there's something about imaging that area that activates the problem-zone. I was mildly disturbed when I discovered this, but also curious to know whether I could use it to make the delusion go away once it had already begun. All I can say is, not in the once chance I've had to try it.

That chance was last week, after I watched the Lost season 1 premiere. It was late at night and I was tired, and the combination of adrenaline and worry about the "monster in the woods" was enough to activate the delusion. I tried to visualize withdrawing the energy from that area of the head, and moving it to a different location. No go. Whatever I tried, the delusion remained active. I can only speculate as to why: (1) I was too tired; (2) The activation process was not similar enough; (3) Too much adrenaline in the system to calm down; (4) ?????.

I was disappointed. So I did what I usually do when the delusion comes on: leave more lights on than usual and open doors with extreme caution. The problem is that even though I know full well that the sensation is not real, it still feels real, and the simplest way to maintain control is to give in just enough to the paranoia to keep it from exploding. So I spend a little more on electricity, and peer cautiously through doorways before entering, and otherwise function normally. Still, I'm just as glad that this only comes on maybe once or twice a year. It would be exhausting, otherwise.

I should note that technically this is classified as a hallucination, not a delusion. I use the label delusion because there is no involvement with my physical senses. I do not have a sense of "seeing" someone in the room with me. I "feel" a presence in my mind, and that presence has a visual appearance associated with it, and a spatial location, but there is no genuine physical sensation: only mental impressions. I suppose if telepathy worked, it could be described as a "telepathic hallucination", but that seems a bit of a stretch to me.

One more item that might be of interest: when I have genuinely tried to activate belief in deities (including, for instance, the Christian deities), I have generally given up because that also activates the delusion. I'll leave readers to draw their own conclusions from that.

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Last Concert of the Season

The symphony concert tonight was awesome. I knew that they were going to be doing Carmina Burana, which would have been sufficient in and of itself to make the concert great. But the first half of the concert was The Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi. I'm sure I'd heard the first movement before (Pines of the Villa Borghese), but I don't think I'd heard the other three movements.

The really interesting thing was during the fourth movement. There is a strong, driving beat on the kettledrum throughout this part. I had allowed the music to take me into a middling meditative state, and I noticed that my heart was beating exactly in time with the beat. It was fascinating. As the music changed tempo, my heartbeat would take a beat or so to "catch up", but it would then beat exactly in time with the music again. I'd heard such a thing was possible, but never before experienced it.

Here is the fourth movement of Pines of Rome, and here is the first song of the Carmina Burana (O Fortuna!). We sang this one when I was in senior choir in high school, as well as Fortuna Plango. I think the next year, they did Ecce Gratum. There were actually several versions on YouTube. I picked that one because it seemed to have the best vocalization. I was extremely disappointed with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra version. It needed the quiet spots to contrast with the loud.

The Carmina Burana is a somewhat odd work, in that the lyrics are all from 13th century poems. About half of it is in Latin, and the other half is in archaic German. It's a mixture of songs that glorify love and songs that despair of fate, or at least acknowledge that fate is fickle and there's no getting away from it. The overall effect, if you pay attention to the translations, is rather existential. However, the music itself is enjoyable whether or not you pay attention to the translations.

(Apologies if this is a bit incoherent; I'm short on sleep)

AM ADDENDUM: Forgot to mention this last night, but after Pines of Rome, I heard the people behind us wondering aloud how the symphony could possibly top that in the second half. I just grinned to myself. Apparently these people hadn't encountered the Carmina Burana before! (And I'll let the disconnectedness from last night stand, as I find it mildly amusing now that I'm more awake.)

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Meditation Benefits

They Call Him James' post on a study showing that zen meditation could help with pain control inspired me to look for other recent studies relating to meditation. I found more than I expected to.

Here's the article James linked to: Zen Meditation Alleviates Pain, but there are plenty more.

Compassion Meditation May Improve Physical And Emotional Responses To Psychological Stress

No differences were seen between students randomized to compassion meditation and the control group, but within the meditation group there was a strong relationship between the time spent practicing meditation and reductions in inflammation and emotional distress in response to the stressor.

Mindfulness Meditation Slows Progression Of HIV

Participants in the eight-week group showed no loss of CD4 T cells, indicating that mindfulness meditation training can buffer declines. In contrast, the control group showed significant declines in CD4 T cells from pre-study to post-study. Such declines are a characteristic hallmark of HIV progression.

Meditation Can Lower Blood Pressure

"Adding Transcendental Medication is about equivalent to adding a second antihypertension agent to one's current regimen only safer and less troublesome," Anderson said.

Zen Training Speeds The Mind's Return After Distraction

After interruption, experienced meditators were able to bring activity in most regions of the default network back to baseline faster than non-meditators.

Compassion Meditation Changes The Brain

The scans revealed significant activity in the insula - a region near the frontal portion of the brain that plays a key role in bodily representations of emotion - when the long-term meditators were generating compassion and were exposed to emotional vocalizations. The strength of insula activation was also associated with the intensity of the meditation as assessed by the participants.

Mix Of Taiji, Cognitive Therapy And Support Groups Benefits Those With Dementia

Participants in the program benefited in a variety of ways. After 20 weeks, those in the treatment group improved in several measures of physical function, including balance and lower leg strength, while those in the comparison group did not. There were also positive cognitive and psychological effects, Burgener said.

Cognitive Training Can Alter Biochemistry Of The Brain (not directly related to meditation, but some meditation could arguably be considered 'cognitive training')

Professor Klingberg and his colleagues have previously shown that the working memory can be improved with a few weeks' intensive training. Through a collaborative project conducted under the Stockholm Brain Institute, the researchers have now taken a step further and monitored the brain using Positron Emission Tomography (PET scans), and have confirmed that intensive brain training leads to a change in the number of dopamine D1 receptors in the cortex.

Selflessness -- Core Of All Major World Religions -- Has Neuropsychological Connection (Note:I don't care for the wording in some places in this article, but it's still an interesting finding)

“This research also addresses questions regarding the impact of neurologic versus cultural factors on spiritual experience,” Johnstone said. “The ability to connect with things beyond the self, such as transcendent experiences, seems to occur for people who minimize right parietal functioning. This can be attained through cultural practices, such as intense meditation or prayer or because of a brain injury that impairs the functioning of the right parietal lobe. Either way, our study suggests that ‘selflessness’ is a neuropsychological foundation of spiritual experiences.”

Admittedly, some of these focused on very specific meditation techniques, but there's still a pretty clear message that meditation, in any form, is likely to be beneficial to a person's health.

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Adding to the Practice

At the taiji camp that I usually go to, Bataan opens each day with a 30 minute meditation session. He refers to his style as "Vipassana meditation", and he or one of his students always gives a brief introduction for those who haven't done it before. The interesting thing is that a quick internet search turns up all sorts of information on Vipassana, and there is little resemblance to what I have been introduced to as Vipassana meditation.

The practice that I have learned is to focus on the breath, and allow the breaths to become deeper. Then just allow the mind to be empty. Thoughts will arise. Notice them, then let them go. In the beginning, it's very easy to become distracted or fixated on a thought. When you notice, acknowledge the thought, and let it go. Trying to force a thought to go away just gives it more power.

The last time I tried adding this into my regular practice, I was ... somewhat impatient with it, to be honest. I would set a timer for whatever time I could allow (usually 5-10 minutes), then focus on my breath, to the point of counting the breaths, and, assuming that each count took one second, trying to figure out how much time was left. I didn't maintain the practice for long at that point but, honestly, I don't think it's possible to get much out of it that way. This time around, the thoughts stay empty on their own much more easily. Some do arise, and I note them, and wait for them to fade so I can return to the emptiness.

I don't know if I'll manage to continue when the semester gets going, but I hope that I can. So far, the time has passed smoothly and continuously, so that I'm surprised when the timer goes off. It's not that the time has gone quickly... it's more that it feels like there is no time. And if there's no time, how can time pass? It's a bit hard to describe the sensation.

At any rate, here is what Wikipedia has to say about Vipassana, and here is a brief summary of some of the recent research into the benefits of meditation.

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Happy Rebirthday to Me

Yesterday marked two full years of keeping up my daily practice. I've stopped caring so much about the number (and found when I went to check that my count must have gotten off somewhere along the way), but it now stands at 731 days of practicing breathing exercises, yoga, chanting and taiji. So what have I learned through 2 years of practice?

It took getting through the first year to get over my obsession with "How many days have I made now?" For a while, part of my motivation was sheer desire to see the number build. If I missed a day, it would start over at zero, and I didn't want that. Now... I still don't want to miss a day, but the numbers don't really enter into it. Thinking about missing a day is a bit like trying to imagine going through the day without breathing. There were times early on when I hadn't managed to practice by 11:00 pm or so, and I groaned when I realized it. When that's happened more recently, there was no groaning. It was more matter of fact. I needed to practice, and this was the time I had.

The other thing that motivated me early on was trying to overcome my depression. After practicing, I always felt better. It seemed logical to think that a regular practice might help me climb out of it. It did. It's actually a bit strange now to feel that weight gone. Every so often, a tiny bit of it reappears, but it's a bit like being hit by a rock after having a mountain sit on you for a year. The rock isn't pleasant, but it's almost laughable.

What I've noticed most is how differently I experience time now. I can remember when it went by quickly, and I wondered where it had all gone. Now... Most days seem to be two or three days long. The semester seemed to last a year or more. I'm actually aware of time as it passes. There's a lot more of it than people realize. I suspect that people don't know how to deal with all the time, and so they subconsciously find mental ways of making it go away. Then they wonder where it all went. I used to do that, too, but at some point over the past year, time just started opening up for me.

I've also found that the time I most want to practice goes in cycles. For a while, it will be steady in the mornings, then it will gradually shift over to evenings. Occasionally, other commitments dictate the time, but usually a morning or evening time just feels right for that day. Part of me would like to get something going both in the morning and in the evening, but I know full well that there would be days when that would be nearly impossible. So for the moment, I'm just keeping the commitment steady.

Sometime this year I'll pass the 1000 day mark. Supposedly, some of the breathing exercises I do have cumulative effects that show up past the 1000 and 10,000 day marks. I'll be curious to see if I notice anything unusual.

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Silence

"To hear, one must be silent." ~Ursula K. LeGuin

It seems that some form of 'existential dread' is common in most societies; some fear a sense of emptiness, or of meaninglessness. Sometimes dubbed the "god-shaped hole", I think the best name I found for it is 'the ineffable ache'. The thing that I find strange is that most people either try to deny that the ache is there or try to cover it over somehow. Sometimes the covering over is a symptom of the denial, particularly in people who avoid introspection at all costs.

What I have to wonder, though, is why people do not explore this emptiness that they find inside themselves. It's there, a part of the identities of many people, yet they refuse to acknowledge it except in trying to hide it or escape from it. It's also odd that they assume emptiness is a bad thing.

Thirty spokes converge on a hub but it's the emptiness that makes a wheel work
pots are fashioned from clay but it's the hollow that make a pot work
windows and doors are carved for a house but it's the spaces that make a house work
existence makes something useful but nonexistence makes it work

~Dao de Jing, 11, trans. Red Pine

That emptiness inside, that sense of no-self, of a void, maybe that's telling us something, and maybe we need to be quiet enough to hear it. Not paper over it. Not cover it with music and chat and games. Not blind ourselves to it through the false comfort of religion. Just experience it, and listen.

It can be difficult going at first. We're so used to the constant chatter of our thoughts, of the people around us, of the television or radio or computer. Allowing the mind to become still so that the world can be reflected in it goes against most of what society tries to ingrain in us. Many people work so hard to cover up that ineffable ache that they don't even notice who they themselves are. Their very self-image comes from the constant chatter.

What is that you hear, when you allow the mind to be silent? I don't think it has a name. Giving it a name just reinforces our tendency to chatter chatter chatter. Some might call it 'God', but what is gained by that? Invariably, people begin to argue about the proper label, and claim that they've found the one true religion. Calling something the 'one true religion' makes about as much sense as going on about the 'one true science' or 'the one true toaster oven.' Reality never fits into the small box of any 'one true religion' (or any 'one true toaster oven', for that matter).

So stop trying to cover up that 'hole', and you may be surprised at what you hear.

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The Little Things in Life...

At Mind Hacks' weekly roundup I found a link to this article, discussing what it takes for people to become happier over time. The conclusion?

However, improvement may not come from major events such as winning the lottery, despite the seemingly life-changing nature of such examples. Rather it seems like the key for long lasting changes to well-being is to engage in activities that provide small and frequent boosts, which in the long run will lead to improved well-being, one small step at a time.

I find this of particular interest because it handily explains how my decision to engage in a daily practice of taiji and meditation was able to pull me out of the deep depression I found myself in after my grandma died. It gave me a "small boost" each day, and, over time, those boosts resulted in a lasting difference. Time helped, too, of course, but I'm honestly not sure I would have made it through the worst of it without that daily practice. I don't think I would have suicided, but I suspect that I would have gotten to the point of not being able to function. Sure, there are medications out there that might have helped, but I'll take meditation over meds any day.

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Religion, Spirituality and Mysticism

I’ve been musing lately on the relative similarities and differences between religion, spirituality and mysticism. I had a clear grasp of what I meant when I used the word religion, but the other two terms are rather slippery. In fact, I didn’t find any definitions for "spirituality" that really fit the way that I understand the term. I tried "spiritual" and didn’t have much better luck. But here’s my attempt to make sense of the three.

Religion is primarily external. In particular, it involves acceptance of some external set of dogma and, usually, exhibition of certain external behaviors: going to church/temple/synagogue/mosque/etc., reading a particular sacred text, burning incense/heretics/candles, and so on. It is primarily a social phenomenon in that regard. It is about being observed to follow a certain set of principles and behave in a certain manner. The internal state matters not at all as long as the external matches up.

Mysticism is primarily internal. The best dictionary definition I found was:

In religion, the attempt by an individual to achieve a personal union with God or with some other divine being or principle. Mystics generally practice daily meditation.

Union is the key word. It is no longer about spouting memorized dogma or adhering to behavioral standards. It is about experiencing the divine (whatever label you happen to give to it). More specifically, it is about experiencing a sense of oneness with all-that-is. Even the word "divine" is too divisive. It suggests something separate, when the experience is one of unity.

Spirituality seems to be somewhere in between the two, but probably lies closer to mysticism. There’s no particular dogma to it. Maybe the best description is that it involves a sense of being connected to something larger than the self: that sense of awe and wonder that often comes when looking at a sunset, or at the stars at night, or at a flower unfolding from a bud; a sense of amazement that anything exists at all; and a feeling of gratitude at being there at that moment to observe the intricate beauty of all-that-is.

Of the three, I have the least patience for religion. Yes, I’ve adopted some external trappings that I find conducive to my private meditation practice, but I have no use for "dogma for the sake of dogma." When a dogma helps set someone on a path, then it is useful. When the external trappings provide a mood conducive to seeking enlightenment, then they are useful. When the external becomes more important than the internal, then it is time to throw the external away.

When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice. Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.

~Zen Koan

For another depiction of spirituality, visit Science Musings (HT: James McGrath)

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Halloween Musings

It's been a while since I dressed up as anything for Halloween. Quite amusingly, no one noticed that I had dressed up. As this was perfectly in keeping with the character I was dressed as, I took that as a good sign. They might have noticed had I managed to find a decent black duffel bag to stuff with sharp implements. At the very least, they might have wondered at the bag.

I had decided to dress as Dexter. When he's in hunting mode, he tends to wear greys and khakis. In particular, he favors a grey shirt with small buttons running partway down the chest. Sadly, I had to choose between the correct color and the correct style of buttons. I went with the one that was the best color: a greyish brown. It has two large buttons rather than a row of small buttons. The pants I found, though, were a very good match: khaki cargo pants. All I needed to complete the look was the aforementioned black duffel bag. Ah well.

I also tried a mental experiment which turned out to be quite interesting. I tried thinking of myself as evil for most of the day. As far as I can tell, the most noticeable effect was that I consciously noticed more of my reactions to certain things that happened around me, and didn't try to push the more negative ones away. Interestingly, this made those reactions have less of an effect on me. I found myself pondering why, if I was evil, I didn't do things like drive my car straight into traffic. The answer was simple: it wouldn't accomplish anything useful for me, and it would severely inconvenience me. In non-evil mode, there are of course far stronger reasons for not doing so, but it was interesting to note that reasons still existed in evil-mode.

As a thought-experiment, I highly recommend this, so long as you're not a complete chaotic type who might take it too far. Or if you already think of yourself as evil, it might be interesting to try thinking of yourself as good and see what changes. In my case, I think the exercise put me closer to a calm, neutral center. Which is ironic, as that's how I normally think of myself. Apparently I've been missing the mark. More than that, though, I have a tendency to try and push negative emotions aside. Not ignore them, as such, but to try and gloss over them, see them as aberrations. Today I simply accepted and examined them, to my betterment so far as I can tell.

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Quote of the Day

My religion has nothing to do with either “self-power” or “other-power.” It’s beyond them both. My proof is this: While you face me and listen to me say this, if somewhere a sparrow chirps, or a crow caws, or a man or woman says something, or the wind rustles the leaves, though you sit there without any intent to listen, you will hear and distinguish each sound. Because it isn’t your self that’s doing the listening, it isn’t self-power.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t do you any good if you had someone else hear and distinguish the sounds for you. So it isn’t other-power.

~Bankei

If there are sounds, and there are ears to hear them, the sound will be heard by the ears. You don't do anything, except pay attention. And even if you don't pay attention, the ears still hear the sound. Incidentally, this was found whilst wandering around Daily Zen.

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The Void?

I'm basing this title on the notion of "The Void" in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. For those not familiar with it, the idea is to "light" a small flame in the mind and use it to burn away superfluous thought and emotion, leaving only pure awareness behind. It's an idea I've played with off an on since starting to read the series, but yesterday I think I finally experienced it, or something similar enough to it that I feel the name fits.

It wasn't a completely new experience. It was a feeling of being awake and aware, and fully here. I've had this several times before, but I had no idea how to get there on my own. I would be in that state or I wouldn't. If I wasn't there, I didn't know how to get there. If I was there, I wanted to hold onto the state of mind but didn't know how. Yesterday, I found myself in that state, and found I could put myself in and out of it nearly at will. To explain how, I'm going to have to talk about chakras:


They are usually presented as literal energy centers in the body. I will say that I feel a concentration of energy in those centers, but what I can't say is whether I would feel that if I hadn't been exposed to the idea of chakras. I do know that I have always experienced physical sensations in the heart chakra (center of the chest) in connection with strong emotions: cold and blue for sadness; a raw lump of flesh when I was mourning my grandmother, etc. Whether that's something physical or a mere mental artifact ... *shrugs* I find them useful as a way of taking stock of myself each day.

The picture is a classical representation of where these centers are supposed to be. It's been part of my breathing-meditation for the past 648 days to mentally visit each center and "open" it: imagine the color for it flaring around it in a disc of light. I started this practice after reading Your Aura and Your Chakras. It's written in a down to earth style that, while credulous, can easily be read as a useful series of visualizations. I wrote about it once before on my nearly defunct blog. The interesting thing was that the author adds an eighth chakra, which she refers to as the "golden sun". We often use that visualization in taiji exercises: a source of golden yang energy about a foot above the head.

My general practice is to start with the root chakra (at the bottom of the diagram, red) and work my way up to the crown chakra (violet, just above the head). Then I started adding in the "golden sun" chakra, above that. Then I would work my way back down, "closing" each chakra back into a single "gem". Then, one day, just out of curiosity, I mentally explored the region even further above the golden sun, and found myself thinking of it as the moon or the void. It seemed... black and empty, but empty in the sense of pure potentiality. It somehow felt like it was everywhere and everything at once. I immediately associated it with Jordan's Void, but it didn't seem particularly useful at the time I first encountered it. Still, it seemed to be a ninth chakra, so I played around with it on days when I had time for it.

Then yesterday in taiji, I found myself bringing my mind into that empty ninth wheel, and something clicked inside me. I sat up straighter. I looked around me and every detail seemed crystal clear. It was like flipping a switch and finding myself in that state of clarity and wakefulness that before had simply come and gone without any intervention on my part. I brought my mind down out of the void, and the world around me faded. Colors weren't as bright; my focus went fuzzy. I brought it back up into the void and was back in that state of clear wakefulness. I didn't know if this would last, if I would maintain the ability to move in and out of that state, but it's lasted one day at least. I can still put myself into that mental state. It's...fascinating. It's also easier to get things done. It's like... when I sink back down, there are conflicting impulses, multiple wave-functions of myself fighting to coexist. In the Void, those pulses unite into One.

It would be interesting to know if a brainscan would be able to detect the difference between those states, and what that difference might be.

Disclaimers: I'm not making any metaphysical claims for this state of mind. I'm just describing my experience with it. And if anyone feels like trying the meditation I've outlined, don't be disappointed if you don't get results right away, or don't get the same results I did. Meditation is a very subjective thing. Visualizations that one person finds incredibly helpful may do nothing for the next. The flame/void visualization never did much for me, but I still think that this Void is very similar in nature to the one Jordan described.

I should probably mention that in Hindu thought, as you go up the chakras, you are getting closer to the point of origin. Climbing up out of the body's gravity well, as it were. After meditating on the chakras, I can see where they got this idea. The experience feels somewhat like climbing out of the body. Thinking of it that way, though, seems likely to lead to trouble, imo. I prefer to think of it simply as visualizations that lead the mind into a particular state. It's equally important to know how to get out of that state: for this method, that is simply to climb back down the ladder, closing the chakras on the way.

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Emerging

I cannot understand an attitude that postpones any and all fulfillment to some ill-defined point in the future. I cannot comprehend how someone can find comfort at the idea of this ill-defined fulfillment while suffering in the ‘now’. And I find it pathetic that people grasp so much for this unguaranteed future that they lose track of the here and now. Everything that I have could vanish in an instant. Everything. Why would I grasp after the future, knowing that there is no certainty in it?

There was a brief span of time where I “tried on” Christianity again, years after I’d stopped considering myself a Christian. The why doesn’t matter, though I suspect there’s one reader here who might be able to guess at it. It felt like trying to crawl back into a small, dark box after being exposed to the light of day. Seriously. I stopped almost instantly. I couldn’t find anything of value there. When I read Plato’s allegory of the cave, I empathized with the character who escaped and tried to return.

Since that time, I have encountered variants of Christian thought that I would deem worthwhile. They might best be described as “mystical Christianity.” I find myself agreeing with many of their sentiments, yet I cannot see the point in redefining Christian symbols to mean something that few self-identifying Christians would even recognize. I’d rather start fresh, and look at the world itself, rather than try to cram an entire world into a small dank box. Maybe the hope is that, eventually, the box will rupture and allow the light of day to shine on all within.

But the one thing that really bothers me about mainstream Christianity is that there is no real sense of the here and now as having any worth. It’s all about the future. My taiji instructor likes to say “The past is a beggar; the future is a thief.” People throw away their present lives on the hope of some ill-defined better future. It’s one thing to prepare for the future. It’s quite another to fritter away the present. But that’s what I see people doing, and a notion of some divine paradise in the hereafter only encourages them.

So in this moment, contemplate what you have, what you need, what you are. Think about the things you wish you had done and didn’t, and check which of them you could be doing now. Be aware of what the future is likely to hold, and prepare, but be ready for it to change in an instant. Know that everything you have now could be erased in an eyeblink, and the world would go on. Know that no matter how much pain you feel, the world will still be going on as if nothing had happened. When you know that, and live accordingly, then you have something.

Living life on the assumption of a guaranteed future is the most meaningless life I can imagine. In fact, it’s no life at all. Living on the edge between past and future, and really experiencing it, requires letting go of those future expectations. The world may or may not be exactly the same tomorrow as it was today. My life may or may not be the same. If I can be aware of the change and flow with it, then I am really living. All else is illusion.

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there is no 'I' in 'me'

There was a good post over at Greta Christina's while I was wandering around in Colorado. She discusses her reason for not believing in the soul. I agree with many of them. At some point along the way, I realized I could no longer accept the traditional view of the soul as some unchanging thing that makes people who they are. Below is my analysis of what's left.

Now, the most common arguments against the soul use examples of brain injuries radically altering personality. The problem is that there's an immediate counterargument, that the soul is the software and needs properly functioning hardware to completely express itself. I'll be the first to admit that this approach has its own problems (e.g. if someone is born with a brain defect, his/her soul will never be able to fully express itself; is there then any point to that person living? -- not to mention that it seems to be completely untestable as a hypothesis), but it is an answer. At any rate, brain chemistry and injuries are not the reason that I have to reject the more traditional notions of a soul.

Still, it is the "unchanging" part of the definition that I have the most problem with. See, brain injuries or not, a person's personality continues to develop and change throughout life. Sure, some people get to a certain point and just stay there for the next umpty-nine years, but that seems to be the exception. I'm not the same person I was a year ago, or two years ago. I'm certainly not the same person I was twenty-five years ago, when I was all of six years old. Some basic preferences have remained the same. Others have changed radically. Now, you can argue that this is the "soul" coming to express itself fully as the body/mind matures. But then where did the earlier preferences come from? Were they mistaken? Were they from the body itself, needing to be tempered by the soul? Okay, that might be workable, but...

What about changes that come about due to bodily chemistry? It doesn't even need to involve the brain directly. Take gluten intolerance. In a nutshell, it's an auto-immune disease where the immune system attacks the intestinal walls in the presence of gluten. Shortly before figuring out I was gluten intolerant, I was the "I'll try nearly anything once" type ('nearly' in case something really grossed me out). Now, I'm the "It's poison until I can see a full ingredient list" type. Fresh unseasoned veggies or fruit? Fine. Anything else? Probably poisonous. You could argue that this is simply an attitude change, but it has affected my personality, and it seems to be independent of the soul. Or could my particular soul only be born into a gluten-intolerant body so that the appropriate personality would develop? Then we get into "If the soul needs a particular kind of body, then what's the point of the soul anyway?" Isn't it supposed to exist and be what it is independent of the body?

Then there's the existence of "muscle memory." This is partially connected to the mind, but has a great deal to do with the muscles themselves. The more we repeat a particular movement, the easier it becomes, and the more automatic it becomes. This is the point of repetition of martial arts forms: to get the basic movements into muscle memory. Anyone who's done any sort of martial arts will understand the sentiment: "I know that in my head, I just can't get my body to do it!" Then once it's been practiced enough: "Wow! I just did that without thinking about it!" See, these things are dependent on the body itself. Without the body, they have no meaning. Part of my identity is "taiji player." Without a body, the "player" part is meaningless. Where is that stored in the "soul"?

The first time I encountered the sentiment that there is no mind, or there is no self, I resisted it. It made no sense to me. Now that I've spent some time meditating, I think I know what it means. The more I explore my "mind", the more that I find that there is nothing of substance in that which we call "mind." There is nothing permanent. Likewise, there is nothing permanent in that which we call the "self." The only constancy is what I've heard termed "continuity of consciousness." There is a sense of things coming before, and that we have experienced those things, and an expectation that this will continue. Everything else rises up for a time and then disappears.

So to me, the notion that the soul is some repository of our true personality is nonsense. It's wishful thinking projected on the world by an ego terrified of ceasing to exist. But even the ego's permanence is illusory. The 'I' who began this blog a few years back is not the same 'I' now writing this article. We share the same body, and many years of the same memories, but to claim that we are the same person with the same personality, the same motivations and desires is nonsense. Sure, there's overlap. But not identity.

What's left? Consciousness. Awareness. Pure and simple. Might these one day have material explanations? Sure. I don't see that as any particular threat. I believe it was Carl Sagan who said something like, "Man is the matter of the cosmos, observing itself." [Note: Can't find the quote I'm thinking of; closest is "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."] That is the point of existence. We are here and it is now. We are aware here and now. That is the most profound truth that I can imagine. Why? Because that awareness links us with all-that-is.

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Progress?

I've had a few solo taiji lessons lately, where Melissa's been out of town and Mark's either overslept or not been feeling well, so Don took the time to try and improve my push hands, among other things. It seems to have been time well spent, as about halfway through our usual push-hands time slot Mark stopped, bowed out, and said "You push with Teacher a while." It could have meant many things, but judging by the tone of voice, I think he was frustrated with me... i.e. I wasn't giving him as many openings as he was used to. ^/^ That's not to say that he didn't push me out a few times, but I think it was more (mental) work than he was used to.

One of many interesting things about good sensing-hands is the amount of mental concentration it takes, though concentrations really isn't the right word. It's awareness. Pure awareness. No thought. This state of mind is both difficult to attain and difficult to maintain. It's similar to the state of hyper-awareness that can come with an emergency, except that it's calm; there's no urgency. My current weakness is surfacing from that calm when I have something and putting more effort into a push than is actually necessary, but it's much improved from a few months ago.

Another interesting thing is that there is always progress to be made. Always further to go. Always more to learn. Even the great masters report that they still have more to learn, and that is as it should be. A path that comes to an end serves no purpose; it is a dead branch. A path that continues to grow and shift and change, now, that is something worthwhile.

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Unbreaking the Buddha

There are two windows in my meditation room/ashram/dojo. The kittens like to get up into both of them, and, of course, managed to knock several items off of the side table in front of the north window. Two of them broke. I have since rearranged, so that there are no breakables near windows. They broke... more than a month ago. I was gluing the Buddha back together a piece at a time before I got sick, then gave up for a few weeks, and finally finished this week. The new tableau is in the corner, away from the kitties:




I honestly don't know if I got all the pieces to the Buddha. The glue filled up some of the room for the pieces, so that at the end I had an irregular piece, not quite rectangular, about half an inch by three quarters of an inch, that was too big to fit in the remaining empty spot. I wound up breaking it into smaller pieces to fill up the room as best I could. Then I filled in the remaining gaps with wood-fill. Incidentally, I discovered that the statue wasn't wood, as I had thought. It was plastic. As it was fairly cheap and came from Target, this wasn't a huge surprise...except that they did such a good job on the paint finish that it had never occurred to me that it might be plastic. Below is the patch-job:


And here is the undamaged side, for comparison:


So why fix it rather than replace it, since it was cheap? Sentimental reasons, I suppose. The statue has been there ever since I started my 108-days thing. Replacing it, even with a look-alike, wouldn't feel right. *shrugs* Besides, it was kind of fun trying to get it back together. And the other thing that broke was an onyx bowl. I think it was onyx. Some rock, anyway. It was much easier to fix. I had all but one piece, and that blank spot I filled with clear glue tonight. You can kinda see it, maybe a dime's diameter below the dime. It's up-side-down so that the glue can dry without sticking it to the little fair-trade bead-bowl it's sitting in.

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Monday Project

Whilst cleaning over Christmas, I managed to misplace my Tibetan mala. It's much easier to keep track of chanting with it, so on Saturday I wandered over to the craft store in Idaho Falls (Michael's; we used to have a branch outlet of it here in Pocatello, but it got bought out, and the new place isn't even a quarter as good). I found some decent wooden beads, and even lucked into a sale. Instead of $4 for a fourteen-inch strand, it was $3. Overall, including the beads I have leftover, it cost me about $13. I did wind up wandering over to the local excuse for a craft store after getting 99.9% done, just to get some beads with a larger bore to finish it off:




I had planned on using the disc-shaped beads every 36 or so, but it didn't look like I had quite enough round beads to make that pan out. They're currently every 12, though I think I could have gotten away with every 18. It's kind of nice to have a marker to go past on the mala. When I had to restring the other one (which will probably show up this week now that I've made a replacement), I put a knot every 36 beads for the same purpose.

I wound up using green garden twine to string it...primarily because I couldn't find my plain white cotton string. Naturally, it turned up a few hours after I was done. ^/^ Anyway, here's a closeup of the twine:



It adds an interesting color, even if it is a bit rattier than string would have been. To close it off, I tied a knot, then unwound the twine, rewound halves from the opposite ends together, then wound both of those together, put the larger bore beads over it, tied another knot, and frayed the end. Finally I put a drop of glue in each of the knots. The unwinding/re-winding wouldn't have occurred to me if I hadn't run across a show on rope making at some point in the last few months. I have no idea how well this twine will hold up, but I'm pretty sure that my finishing will hold together for a good long time.

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One Year

Yeah, I know, I posted about '360 days', well, 5 days ago, so obviously it's now at 365 days = 1 year of practice, but I feel an extreme sense of accomplishment at the moment. I am now one year old. And now for some reason I'm imagining being sworn into a court of law and being asked my age... `/^ I think that has the makings of a Monty Python sketch in it.

"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"
"Yup."
"State your age."
"One."
"What?"
"One year old."
"No, no... the length of time since you were born."
"Which birth?"
"What?"
etc.

If I get bored sometime, I might flesh that out. Anyway, we one-year-olds need our sleep, so good night.

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Relinquish

Random Thoughts on a Comment and a Carnival

New carnival today: Godless. Below the fold is a rather inchoate collection of ramblings inspired by some of the posts therein, and another related post.



From a comment on a deconversion thread:

"if unverifiable spiritual experiences are true, all religions must be considered equally true."

Yes! Exactly! There are really two options here. One is that the human brain is primed for such experiences, and that people just find them in the context of their respective religions. Pure neurobiology and upbringing. The other is that the human brain is capable of perceiving something powerful that really exists, and that everyone finds it in the context of his/her own religion. This is the position adopted by most (all?) mystics. We see the similarities in religious experiences across traditions and embrace them. I would quibble with the word "true" above. A better way of putting it might be that they all have validity.

Of course, there's always the traditional conservative Christian response: that all the experiences not in the (correct) Christian context are from Satan. In which case, Satan would seem to be more powerful than God, since there are more non-Christians on the planet than Christians. For this one to be even remotely interesting, let alone convincing, there would need to be a consistent means of verifying which experiences were from God and which from Satan. That is, someone analyzing the report of the experience itself, knowing nothing of the person's religious background, would have to be able to consistently say that experience A was from God and B was from Satan, and then compare the religious backgrounds at the end and see if all A's were from Version X of Christianity (or ANY version of Christianity). Lacking that, it is meaningless to attribute such experiences to Satan. More than meaningless to me, as Satan Him/It/Herself is just one of many deities.


On prayer: "I eventually concluded that I'd been talking to myself, calming myself down, all those years."

Again, exactly right! Intercessory prayer has never made much sense to me. The descriptions of prayer that made sense to me come much closer to meditation. What is meditation? Exploring your own mind, and seeing where it leads. It can be empty-mind, allowing the thoughts to drift down to the bottom and settle. It can be on a specific emotion or idea, just bringing that into the mind and seeing where it leads you. Some would argue that the latter isn't really meditation, but I disagree. It's a focused meditation. It requires only that you open yourself to what is really in your mind, and this is difficult for many people. It requires acknowledging not only your pain, but your own faults, and accepting that they are yours. It's much easier to split off a part of the mind to hide them away.

Also, from the latest Carnival of the Godless:
A Deeply Religious Nonbeliever

Some of this I could have written not long after deciding I was not a Christian. "The more I go on, the more God feels like Santa, to me. The definition keeps broadening, until it’s indistinguishable from nature. And I don’t mean nature like some trees and a pond. I mean everything in this awesome, unbelievable, almost unknowable universe and beyond it."

I wouldn't have made the comparison to Santa; I'm not sure that I ever believed in Santa, actually. I went through the motions of believing (to the point of sleeping in the living room to try and catch him, knowing full well it would be my parents caught; I was 7) because it seemed to make the people around me happy. I always knew that the Santas in the malls were fake; among other things, one of my cousins worked as a mall Santa one year. I never took seriously the idea that there was a fat man in a red suit living at the North Pole making toys. It was a fun holiday story, but I can't remember ever taking it seriously.

Here's something that bears repeating over and over and over again: "You see, religious people make things up and come to conclusions THEN attempt to prove what they have already concluded – like God, for example. A logical, rational person observes things and then tries to come to conclusions. There is a huge difference. And right off the bat a religious follower and his religion are on the wrong side of logic and reason. The end. There is no discussion necessary beyond this point, because they have already broken the rules of logic."

A few points. The type of religion described here starts by assuming that the Bible (or whatever holy book) is completely infallible. Evidence to the contrary is ignored, derided, or twisted so far out of reality that it's unrecognizable. Science starts by assuming that observable reality is, in fact, reality, and that there are rules that govern reality. Evidence matters to the scientist. It does not matter to this type of religionist, not in the same way. Among other things, there's always the fallback position that Satan planted the evidence. So once again, it appears that Satan is more powerful than God, since nearly all the observable evidence contradicts the Bible (when it's mistaken for a science textbook, anwyay). And if we switch to "fallen humans" making it all go bad, we have humans as a group being more powerful than God, to make such sweeping changes to his/her/its Creation.

Last link is to a curiously Anarchic Response to religious tolerance. I do not agree that organized religion will always lead to intolerance. I don't see much point in organized religion, since spirituality is a profoundly internal and personal matter for me. I don't expect anyone to agree with me on every single issue, nor think that they are wrong/idiots/damned for not doing so. The only purpose for a group meeting would be to discuss exactly those points of disagreement in a logical and consistent manner.

To me, part of "tolerating" or "respecting" another religion is in attacking its vulnerabilities. I suppose that sounds odd to non-martial artists, but that's how you learn in a martial art. The times you win are more immediately satisfying, but it's the times you lose where you learn something. To ignore the weaknesses would be the ultimate sign of disdain and lack of respect. To ignore those vulnerabilities or pretend that they do not exist in your own religion is the ultimate sign of weakness, idiocy and irrationality. To appeal to a higher authority and refuse to think about the issue yourself makes you an automaton in my eyes and worthy of no respect whatsoever.

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