Walking back from work today I ran into one of the city's street angels, a homeless man with a big smile named Kevin who for weeks I have seen sitting on the steps of the Cathedral of Hope or on one of the benches that line Penn Avenue in East Liberty. Whenever I walk past we smile and wave and occaisonaly exchange a few words with each other, and I would be lying if I didn't say his presence wasn't one of the reasons I continue making the 45 minute walk each day instead of rushing to get my bike fixed.
Kevin has never asked me for money, though today I did give him a cigarette. He motioned for me to sit on the bench next to him and he asked how my life is going. I said "wonderfully" and gestured to the lovely day around us; and then he started asking about what I do, and why I dropped out of school, nodding his grin as I told him I have learned so much more about myself and life from being out in it and not stuck in a classroom. "Of course" he said, "you look happy because of it, quite comfortable in your skin. And there's nothing more important than being happy." He laughed, and then asked about my religious beliefs. "That's a tricky question to answer these days" I said.
My friend Z and I have an ongoing debate about spirituality, in which she claims she doesn't understand why people need to look for something larger than themselves to believe in. Personally, I was raised Christian, but never believed in their conception of God. But I did learn that being able to believe in more than youreself is a good thing, and since I was young the world has done nothing but show me that this is true. Even trusting in this community we have is believing in something larger than myself, much less trusting that our whole civilization has to operate together to survive, or that the sun will rise tomorrow. It's kind of kin to the myth of self-sustainability, I can't deny that I am just a little part of something much larger. Escpeically with how mind-bogglingly complex and mysterious it all seems to be.
As for "spirituality," that word is one of the more loaded terms I'm stumbling around these days. It comes from the Latin spirare, which means "to breathe." And as far as I am concerned, that is all spirituality is, being aware of my every breath, and with it being fully present in every moment of being alive in this crazy world. Of course, the common usage of that term has so much more packed into it; churches, and communions, and elaborate rituals that have very little to do with the simple act of breathing, and so it is difficult to have people understand what I mean when I say I am a spiritual person. Not that I don't practice rituals, or even once in a blue moon attend mass at the Cathedral of Hope, but for me it is not about "praying to God" or "summoning spirits" but about being directly focused on my actions and their affects. All the symbolic hoopla just gets in the way sometimes, as amusing as it can be. I can reach the same state of awareness from washing dishes that I can meditating in front of a candle flame, and on the more brilliant days everything I do is done with that same presence of care and intention.
"Well, Kevin," I smiled, after explaining a little of this to him, "right now my religion is being here and talking to you, and enjoying the sunlight in the clouds, and the smell of spring flowers that is still noticable through the rushing traffic."
He smiled, and said that if there is a place we go when we die he hopes we run into each other there.
I laughed, and said that I am sure we will run into each other many more times on this street while we are both still here.
Perhaps tomorrow...
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Sunday, May 08, 2005
the discontents of the soul
"Our modern word unconscious has become a catch-all, collecting into one clouded resovoir all fantasies of the deep, the lower, the baser, the heavier (depressed), and the darker. We have buried in the same monolithic tomb called Unconscious the red and earthy body of the primeval Adam, the collective common man and woman, the shades, phantoms, and ancestors. We cannot distinguish a compulsion from a call, an instinct from an image, a desirous demand from a movement of imagination. Looking into the night from the white light of the dayworld (where the term unconscious was fashioned), we cannot tell the red from the black. So we read dreams for all sorts of messages at once -somatic, personal, psychic, mantic, ancestral, practical, confusing instinctual and emotional life with the realm of death.
The pronounced distinction between emotion and soul, between emotional man and psychological man, comes out in another of Heraclitus' fragments: "...whatever it [thymos] wishes it buys at the price of the soul." Thymos, the earlier Greek experience of emotional consciousness or moist soul, did not belong in the underworld. So, to consider the dream as an emotional wish costs soul; to mistake the chthonic as the natural loses psyche. we cannot claim to be psychological when we read dream images in terms of drives or desires. Whatever counsel an analyst gives about emotional life, supposing it drawn from dreams, refers to his own experience, which he reflects from the dreams. It is not in the dreams. He is "sup-posing" them, that is, he is "putting into" them what he knows about life.
What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life. What one knows and has done in life may be as irrelevant to the underworld as clothes that adjust us to life and the flesh and bones that the clothes cover. For in the underworld all is stripped away, and life is upside down. We are further than the expectations based on life experience, and the wisdom derived from it."
-James Hillman, from The Dream and the Underworld
The pronounced distinction between emotion and soul, between emotional man and psychological man, comes out in another of Heraclitus' fragments: "...whatever it [thymos] wishes it buys at the price of the soul." Thymos, the earlier Greek experience of emotional consciousness or moist soul, did not belong in the underworld. So, to consider the dream as an emotional wish costs soul; to mistake the chthonic as the natural loses psyche. we cannot claim to be psychological when we read dream images in terms of drives or desires. Whatever counsel an analyst gives about emotional life, supposing it drawn from dreams, refers to his own experience, which he reflects from the dreams. It is not in the dreams. He is "sup-posing" them, that is, he is "putting into" them what he knows about life.
What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life. What one knows and has done in life may be as irrelevant to the underworld as clothes that adjust us to life and the flesh and bones that the clothes cover. For in the underworld all is stripped away, and life is upside down. We are further than the expectations based on life experience, and the wisdom derived from it."
-James Hillman, from The Dream and the Underworld
the subjectivity of subjectivity in providing health and education
So I am beginning to think that learning to interpret others' dreams wouldn't be all that useful in a therapeutic situation, since we each form our own interpretations of our dream imagery. Instead what might be useful is trying to determine techniques through which others could interpret their own dreams, and then learning the ways to pass this information on. Of course, this too might be a futile task, because not only do we each form our own interpretations but also we each form our own methods of interpreting. Just because I know the processes by which I substitute symbols for content in my own psyche doesn't mean your own processes may even resemble mine in the slightest. If their is a deeper physiological structure to mental processes these get taken up in radically different ways, and all the work that has been done to a establish a deeper collective mythological or archetypal interpretation of our experiences might as well be thrown out the window. The collective subconscious is still only approached from our own perspectives, and that includes the possibility of building psychic structures that reject it altogether.
The problem with such radical subjectivity however is that it seems to break down the possibility of being able to provide techniques for healing and education to anyone, even on day to day levels. I may think someone's excessive drinking is potentially unhealthy to them (and to othes), but for them drinking may offer a social lifeline without which they might feel stranded and even less able to deal with the contents of their lives. Suggesting to them that they consider not drinking, or find other less destructive social activities might actually be inimical to their well-being on a whole. Where is the line drawn between what a care-provider thinks is good for a person and what the person thinks is good for themselves? As a community interested in promoting collective well-being is sharing any set of techniques only reinforcing our beliefs about what we might think others might need, just as interpreting someone else's dream reinforces your beliefs about what the images might mean to them. Even the subjectively self-empowering presuppositions of neuro-linguistic programming, which attempts to model useful techniques in order to pass them on, has fallen prey to being used as a tool to get other people to do what you want them to do. Mind control doesn't seem such a health-promoting thing.
Even education systems whose primary concern is the proliferation of ideas do so with little regard to the individual learning methods of the students and to the actual validity or value of the information being passed on. You can't just have one teacher per student, because even then the teacher still may be teaching from their own set. And when politics and religion become too involved, and public education becomes little more than a vehicle for reinforcing memetic norms... Where are the individual needs in that?
So then the question is raised, if it is near impossible to deal with individual health on such a radically subjective level, and it is equally as harmful to deal with it purely from the collective level, is there a balance between the two that respects individual concerns and situations within the broader context of the community (and the world)? If all the maps of this desert territory deteriote as quickly as they are drawn up, how can we ever find the oasis, and quench our thirst?
The problem with such radical subjectivity however is that it seems to break down the possibility of being able to provide techniques for healing and education to anyone, even on day to day levels. I may think someone's excessive drinking is potentially unhealthy to them (and to othes), but for them drinking may offer a social lifeline without which they might feel stranded and even less able to deal with the contents of their lives. Suggesting to them that they consider not drinking, or find other less destructive social activities might actually be inimical to their well-being on a whole. Where is the line drawn between what a care-provider thinks is good for a person and what the person thinks is good for themselves? As a community interested in promoting collective well-being is sharing any set of techniques only reinforcing our beliefs about what we might think others might need, just as interpreting someone else's dream reinforces your beliefs about what the images might mean to them. Even the subjectively self-empowering presuppositions of neuro-linguistic programming, which attempts to model useful techniques in order to pass them on, has fallen prey to being used as a tool to get other people to do what you want them to do. Mind control doesn't seem such a health-promoting thing.
Even education systems whose primary concern is the proliferation of ideas do so with little regard to the individual learning methods of the students and to the actual validity or value of the information being passed on. You can't just have one teacher per student, because even then the teacher still may be teaching from their own set. And when politics and religion become too involved, and public education becomes little more than a vehicle for reinforcing memetic norms... Where are the individual needs in that?
So then the question is raised, if it is near impossible to deal with individual health on such a radically subjective level, and it is equally as harmful to deal with it purely from the collective level, is there a balance between the two that respects individual concerns and situations within the broader context of the community (and the world)? If all the maps of this desert territory deteriote as quickly as they are drawn up, how can we ever find the oasis, and quench our thirst?
Saturday, May 07, 2005
...or neurolinguistic reprogramming
Something else Wilson mentions when talking about the mesopotamian use of dream interpreters is that the process of breaking down dream symbology may have been very similar to that of unpacking meaning from their newly created pictographic written language, which radically cahnged the way they approached the world. One might even wonder if their language came from an attempt at trying to represent their interpreted dreams in a more readily communicable form. The shift from dreams to memes, perhaps.
Sifting through lj, I came upon these presuppositions of neuro-linguistic programmingin an article about trance induction and biurnal beating in the chaosmajik community, which basically seeks to identify and pass on skill sets based on modeling "patterns of excellence," in the same way that high end memes operate. These suggestions reminded me of some of the guidelines we were trying to come up with today for providing radical health care that takes into account the subjective nature of people's expereinces, and the desire to pass on the skills necessary to enable others to take care of themselves in the way best fit for them.
"The fundamental presuppositions of NLP are:
1. The ability to change the process by which we experience reality is more often valuable than changing the content of our experience of reality. (i.e. Changing the structure of our communications and/or sensory
representations tends to make much more difference than changing the
content.)
2. The meaning of your communication is the response you get. (i.e. It's the responsibility of the healer/magi/communicator to change
their behavior if they're not getting positive and effective results, not the client's.)
3. All distinctions human beings are able to make concerning our environment and our behavior can be usefully represented through our visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory senses. (i.e. Everything we're able to do is driven by a corresponding set of
neurological processes, and can be modeled and understood in terms of how we're using our five perceptual senses.)
4. All of the resources an individual needs to effect a change in their life are already within them. (i.e. Human beings are whole and complete by nature, and all of the states and strategies we need to learn and do anything are already possible by recombining and/or restructuring what we already know in new ways.)
5. The map is not the territory, but the territory is the map. (i.e. Sensory perceptions are representations of our experience, not the
experience itself, and words are not reality, but merely subjective representations of reality. Although we create and change reality by
deriving behaviors from our internal models and resources, it's very valuable to have an open mind and the willingness to learn constantly from new experiences.)
6. The positive worth of the individual is held constant, while the value and appropriateness of internal / external behaviors is questioned. (i.e. There is no such thing as a "bad" or "evil" person, and all human beings are inherently good / spiritually perfect by nature. However, within most contexts, some behaviors get better results and/or tend to be more socially acceptable than others.)
7. There is a positive intention motivating every behavior, and a context in which every behavior has value.
(i.e. Even behaviors that seem overtly negative on the surface are still being driven by positive values and worthwhile motivations, although these may well be out of awareness for the person performing the behaviors in question. Correspondingly, most "problem" behaviors tend to represent past adaptations to challenging or incongruent environments that ensured survival and success for the individual, but have been overgeneralized.)
8. All results and behaviors are accomplishments, whether they achieve the desired outcomes within a given context or not.
(I.e. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback. Every strategy produces whatever results it does consistently within any specific context, even if the results are not the ones desired. In addition, the ability to do anything and get any set of results represents an act of neurological learning for the individual; thus, with appropriate restructuring and contextualization, negative content and ineffective strategies can be transformed into positive and functional resources.)"
Of course, I imagine these techinques could just as easily be called metaprogramming, or cultural deprogramming, as the word programming itself at least in my mind carries with it some severely mechanistic interpretations, and NLP itself fell from its original intentions to become a toolkit for marketing agents and ad creeps. Like the sumerian me if you had the instructions in your hand for how to get people to do things and wanted money or power, what would you do with them? If I'm not mixing my myths, isn't hoarding this knowledge why babel fell in the first place?
Remember, always share information responsibly.
Sifting through lj, I came upon these presuppositions of neuro-linguistic programmingin an article about trance induction and biurnal beating in the chaosmajik community, which basically seeks to identify and pass on skill sets based on modeling "patterns of excellence," in the same way that high end memes operate. These suggestions reminded me of some of the guidelines we were trying to come up with today for providing radical health care that takes into account the subjective nature of people's expereinces, and the desire to pass on the skills necessary to enable others to take care of themselves in the way best fit for them.
"The fundamental presuppositions of NLP are:
1. The ability to change the process by which we experience reality is more often valuable than changing the content of our experience of reality. (i.e. Changing the structure of our communications and/or sensory
representations tends to make much more difference than changing the
content.)
2. The meaning of your communication is the response you get. (i.e. It's the responsibility of the healer/magi/communicator to change
their behavior if they're not getting positive and effective results, not the client's.)
3. All distinctions human beings are able to make concerning our environment and our behavior can be usefully represented through our visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory senses. (i.e. Everything we're able to do is driven by a corresponding set of
neurological processes, and can be modeled and understood in terms of how we're using our five perceptual senses.)
4. All of the resources an individual needs to effect a change in their life are already within them. (i.e. Human beings are whole and complete by nature, and all of the states and strategies we need to learn and do anything are already possible by recombining and/or restructuring what we already know in new ways.)
5. The map is not the territory, but the territory is the map. (i.e. Sensory perceptions are representations of our experience, not the
experience itself, and words are not reality, but merely subjective representations of reality. Although we create and change reality by
deriving behaviors from our internal models and resources, it's very valuable to have an open mind and the willingness to learn constantly from new experiences.)
6. The positive worth of the individual is held constant, while the value and appropriateness of internal / external behaviors is questioned. (i.e. There is no such thing as a "bad" or "evil" person, and all human beings are inherently good / spiritually perfect by nature. However, within most contexts, some behaviors get better results and/or tend to be more socially acceptable than others.)
7. There is a positive intention motivating every behavior, and a context in which every behavior has value.
(i.e. Even behaviors that seem overtly negative on the surface are still being driven by positive values and worthwhile motivations, although these may well be out of awareness for the person performing the behaviors in question. Correspondingly, most "problem" behaviors tend to represent past adaptations to challenging or incongruent environments that ensured survival and success for the individual, but have been overgeneralized.)
8. All results and behaviors are accomplishments, whether they achieve the desired outcomes within a given context or not.
(I.e. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback. Every strategy produces whatever results it does consistently within any specific context, even if the results are not the ones desired. In addition, the ability to do anything and get any set of results represents an act of neurological learning for the individual; thus, with appropriate restructuring and contextualization, negative content and ineffective strategies can be transformed into positive and functional resources.)"
Of course, I imagine these techinques could just as easily be called metaprogramming, or cultural deprogramming, as the word programming itself at least in my mind carries with it some severely mechanistic interpretations, and NLP itself fell from its original intentions to become a toolkit for marketing agents and ad creeps. Like the sumerian me if you had the instructions in your hand for how to get people to do things and wanted money or power, what would you do with them? If I'm not mixing my myths, isn't hoarding this knowledge why babel fell in the first place?
Remember, always share information responsibly.
free onierocritical therapy
What a day. I feel like everything has changed. I can't remember the last time a day hasn't felt like this, and it keeps getting more intense. So I guess it must be true.
A long night of wonder, little sleep, crazy dreams, and heading over to the bookstore early for the meeting of the street health empowerment network, or the community health collective, or whatever we end up calling it. I can't believe how smoothly things ran, like an intimate conversation where we shared our stories and hopes and ideas for dealing with becoming a viable resource for helping us learn to support the health of ourselves and the people around us. I feel good about this, really good. Certainly it's a big task we've set out for ourselves, but personally it feels like a challenge I've desperately been needing to take up. And this is the time for it. The next meeting may focus around our experiences with dealing with mental health issues and crises and could feature some more of the roleplaying that played such a surprisingly insightful role in today's session. Giving reign to a creative chaos sometimes accomplishes so much more than any well ordered process, and the tangents offer a break from our routine ways of handling our lives. Perhaps psychotherapy could benefit from such an approach shift as well.
After my evening siesta I enjoyed the last bit of sun on the porch, reading Peter Lamborn Wilson's book on initiatic dream traditions in sufism and taoism, "Shower of Stars", as I have taken on a renewed focus to processing the contents of my dreams. Not only do I find some of my best inspiration from the oneiric realms, but regularly use their symbolic content to analyze and gain just a bit more insight into the often subconscious tensions that build up through each day. And with this recent relapse of intention I am beginning to suspect that I can use my dreams to get beneath some of the deep set fears and inhibitions that have plagued my life from an early age. What if I were able to turn this outward and develop the skills necessary to help others break through there own processing blocks with the keys they have already been given? The symbology of our dreams is radically subjective, as they seem to spring from the personal meanings we give to the experiences of our lives, so that no two people have the exact same imaginal constructs of any given concept. Which of course has kept anyone from writing a good dream dictionary or symbol directory. There may be some generalized collective interpretations, but a bee may not represent wealth or labor to someone who had a trauma of being stung by one as a kid. But many cultures, as far back as the sumerians, have employed dream interpreters that played a large role in determining the secret desires of people and kingdoms, using not only these archetypal interpretations but a long time report with the personal sybology of the specific dreamers they are working for. I don't know whether dream analyzation plays much of a role in modern psychotherapy, but I imagine as a culturaly-necessary position, the dream interpreter has gone the way of palm readers, tarot readers and other such divinatory oracles.
Personally I suspect the bubble's going to burst on the whole post-modern 'appearence is appearence devoid of meaning unless we put it there ourselves' take on life, and people will move on to taking their own subjective interpretations of reality as the standard with which to live their lives. Fostering a sense of the individual's own story and desires as being just as vaild, if not more so, than the consensual (and monoculturaly proscribed) norms. In such a world maybe there would be a place for onierocritical therapy, and a simple dreamer like me could find some honest work doing what he loves. At least until people learn to unpack their own dreams.
Right after I put down the book, Z called and told me about a dream she had last night of dropping two apples and not being able to pick them up, and asked me if I knew what it might mean, even before I could tell her about my schemes. But she's just intuitive like that, and would be the first person for me to practice on, since our relationship runs long and deep and I already have a bit of a lead on what her take on these symobls might be. And later J told me his dreams, and both seemed satisfied by my interpretations (well, J seemed much more blown away than just satisfied), and it occurs to me that people often share their dreams with me unprovoked. I guess the next step would be to start paying a lot closer attention, and do some research on previous work in the field.
A long night of wonder, little sleep, crazy dreams, and heading over to the bookstore early for the meeting of the street health empowerment network, or the community health collective, or whatever we end up calling it. I can't believe how smoothly things ran, like an intimate conversation where we shared our stories and hopes and ideas for dealing with becoming a viable resource for helping us learn to support the health of ourselves and the people around us. I feel good about this, really good. Certainly it's a big task we've set out for ourselves, but personally it feels like a challenge I've desperately been needing to take up. And this is the time for it. The next meeting may focus around our experiences with dealing with mental health issues and crises and could feature some more of the roleplaying that played such a surprisingly insightful role in today's session. Giving reign to a creative chaos sometimes accomplishes so much more than any well ordered process, and the tangents offer a break from our routine ways of handling our lives. Perhaps psychotherapy could benefit from such an approach shift as well.
After my evening siesta I enjoyed the last bit of sun on the porch, reading Peter Lamborn Wilson's book on initiatic dream traditions in sufism and taoism, "Shower of Stars", as I have taken on a renewed focus to processing the contents of my dreams. Not only do I find some of my best inspiration from the oneiric realms, but regularly use their symbolic content to analyze and gain just a bit more insight into the often subconscious tensions that build up through each day. And with this recent relapse of intention I am beginning to suspect that I can use my dreams to get beneath some of the deep set fears and inhibitions that have plagued my life from an early age. What if I were able to turn this outward and develop the skills necessary to help others break through there own processing blocks with the keys they have already been given? The symbology of our dreams is radically subjective, as they seem to spring from the personal meanings we give to the experiences of our lives, so that no two people have the exact same imaginal constructs of any given concept. Which of course has kept anyone from writing a good dream dictionary or symbol directory. There may be some generalized collective interpretations, but a bee may not represent wealth or labor to someone who had a trauma of being stung by one as a kid. But many cultures, as far back as the sumerians, have employed dream interpreters that played a large role in determining the secret desires of people and kingdoms, using not only these archetypal interpretations but a long time report with the personal sybology of the specific dreamers they are working for. I don't know whether dream analyzation plays much of a role in modern psychotherapy, but I imagine as a culturaly-necessary position, the dream interpreter has gone the way of palm readers, tarot readers and other such divinatory oracles.
Personally I suspect the bubble's going to burst on the whole post-modern 'appearence is appearence devoid of meaning unless we put it there ourselves' take on life, and people will move on to taking their own subjective interpretations of reality as the standard with which to live their lives. Fostering a sense of the individual's own story and desires as being just as vaild, if not more so, than the consensual (and monoculturaly proscribed) norms. In such a world maybe there would be a place for onierocritical therapy, and a simple dreamer like me could find some honest work doing what he loves. At least until people learn to unpack their own dreams.
Right after I put down the book, Z called and told me about a dream she had last night of dropping two apples and not being able to pick them up, and asked me if I knew what it might mean, even before I could tell her about my schemes. But she's just intuitive like that, and would be the first person for me to practice on, since our relationship runs long and deep and I already have a bit of a lead on what her take on these symobls might be. And later J told me his dreams, and both seemed satisfied by my interpretations (well, J seemed much more blown away than just satisfied), and it occurs to me that people often share their dreams with me unprovoked. I guess the next step would be to start paying a lot closer attention, and do some research on previous work in the field.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
The Shamatha Project
The trend of western scientific institutes recognizing the potential of eastern meditation practices continues with...
The Shamatha Project
"This unique study includes a detailed longitudinal examination of the neural, cognitive, and socio-emotional effects of intensive training in Shamatha meditation, aimed at enhancing the stability and vividness of attention. The research team includes experts in the cognitive and neuroscientific study of attention, visualization, cognitive control, and sensori-motor processing; emotion and mental health; compassionate, prosocial behavior; longitudinal statistical analyses; and Buddhism. Several of the investigators are skilled in the use of modern, noninvasive neuro-imaging techniques; most have been engaged for years in conferences, seminars, and work groups related to establishing conceptual and methodological connections between Buddhist practice, psychological science, and neuroscience.
The research project will be coordinated by the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, headed by Dr. George R. Mangun, an international leader in the cognitive neuroscience of attention. I am organizing the meditation training.
According to the Buddhist tradition, the achievement of Shamatha involves a state of sustained, voluntary attention, characterized by exceptional stability and vividness, which can be sustained effortlessly for at least four hours.
The proposed project will involve assessment of both cognitive and socio-emotional variables at several points in time across the one-year study. Behind the specific assessments lie two major questions:
* How plastic, or subject to training, are the cognitive and socio-emotional skills we assess behaviorally?
* What measurable brain changes underlie the behavioral (performance) changes?
The Shamatha Project is expected to have a number of benefits for the study participants, for many others interested in the techniques explored, and for an array of psychological and neuroscientific disciplines that study attention, emotion, emotion regulation, and personal development.
Our brain-imaging and behavioral findings should be useful for treating people with a variety of cognitive and emotional disorders, such as ADHD, anxiety, depression, excessive anger, and insomnia. All of these mental problems are closely related to the ability to control attention and regulate emotion. We expect that relatively soon after the Shamatha training begins, measurable changes will occur in these abilities, suggesting that certain aspects of the training could be relatively easily incorporated into daily life situations for persons outside a retreat setting.
For the proposed study, participants will reside in a contemplative research facility, optimally suited for scientific and contemplative research, over a twelve-month period. The training program will emphasize:
* training in mindfulness of breathing to induce relaxation of the body and mind and develop the stability and vividness of attention;
* training in "settling the mind in its natural state," in which one observes mental events without distraction and without grasping;
* training in "Shamatha without an object," in which the attention rests simply in being aware of being aware, with no other object."
[via cadmus
The Shamatha Project
"This unique study includes a detailed longitudinal examination of the neural, cognitive, and socio-emotional effects of intensive training in Shamatha meditation, aimed at enhancing the stability and vividness of attention. The research team includes experts in the cognitive and neuroscientific study of attention, visualization, cognitive control, and sensori-motor processing; emotion and mental health; compassionate, prosocial behavior; longitudinal statistical analyses; and Buddhism. Several of the investigators are skilled in the use of modern, noninvasive neuro-imaging techniques; most have been engaged for years in conferences, seminars, and work groups related to establishing conceptual and methodological connections between Buddhist practice, psychological science, and neuroscience.
The research project will be coordinated by the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, headed by Dr. George R. Mangun, an international leader in the cognitive neuroscience of attention. I am organizing the meditation training.
According to the Buddhist tradition, the achievement of Shamatha involves a state of sustained, voluntary attention, characterized by exceptional stability and vividness, which can be sustained effortlessly for at least four hours.
The proposed project will involve assessment of both cognitive and socio-emotional variables at several points in time across the one-year study. Behind the specific assessments lie two major questions:
* How plastic, or subject to training, are the cognitive and socio-emotional skills we assess behaviorally?
* What measurable brain changes underlie the behavioral (performance) changes?
The Shamatha Project is expected to have a number of benefits for the study participants, for many others interested in the techniques explored, and for an array of psychological and neuroscientific disciplines that study attention, emotion, emotion regulation, and personal development.
Our brain-imaging and behavioral findings should be useful for treating people with a variety of cognitive and emotional disorders, such as ADHD, anxiety, depression, excessive anger, and insomnia. All of these mental problems are closely related to the ability to control attention and regulate emotion. We expect that relatively soon after the Shamatha training begins, measurable changes will occur in these abilities, suggesting that certain aspects of the training could be relatively easily incorporated into daily life situations for persons outside a retreat setting.
For the proposed study, participants will reside in a contemplative research facility, optimally suited for scientific and contemplative research, over a twelve-month period. The training program will emphasize:
* training in mindfulness of breathing to induce relaxation of the body and mind and develop the stability and vividness of attention;
* training in "settling the mind in its natural state," in which one observes mental events without distraction and without grasping;
* training in "Shamatha without an object," in which the attention rests simply in being aware of being aware, with no other object."
[via cadmus
Sunday, May 01, 2005
the quest for spiritual well-being
I attended two fires this Beltane eve. At the first small ceremony we offered up those things we wanted to destroy in ourselves; bad habits, old loves, social and financial insecurities, routine fears. Small symbolic prayers to break with the old and create that space for something new to possess us. Afterwards I left the eagles’ château for the witch’s farm, where a larger fire raged, and handfuls of seeds were being tossed to the winds in celebration of change and new growth. As I leaped over the flames I wondered, just what am I intending to become?
Earlier I had tea with Z, and we got into a lengthy discussion about Spirituality. She asked why some people feel a need to find something larger than themselves to believe in or "communicate" with, extreme experiences that really reaffirm their existences; when other people are perfectly content relying on themselves and daily life around them. I joked that the reason for me is mostly entertainment. I was raised to believe in belief, and having rejected that only found that I really am a part of something much larger. Even if you wanted to put that in the terms of all of us being on this earth or in this galaxy together, or that atomic, social, and galactic structures (and a lot of things between) seem to display some surprisingly self-similar features. Without religion the universe can still be pretty mystifying, and that boggles me and makes me very curious to see what it has to offer. It certainly excites me more than television, or drinking all the time. Especially that liminal zone of spirituality where our perceptions of reality seem to be able to alter the reality we perceive. I’ve seen some things that have changed my whole world, and wonder if they could be cultivated in order to have a more reliable control over creating real changes in ourselves and our lives.
Of course at this point all the talk of government and military psionics tests comes out and we’re faced with that age old of question of ‘do we really want to mess with this?’ Where is that line between responsibility and power, and do we want to cross it? Is there even a line there at all, and not some jagged fractaling coastline of confusion where each situation demands the ability to be responsive in some new and challenging way? I don’t know, but it worries me that there’s been a renewed governmental interest in the use of psychotropics and on its citizens and military. Should not the people also be informed of the dangers and benefits of the extreme states potentially at their disposal? I don’t know that either, most of this has been occult and occluded for a really long time and maybe that was a good thing. But I suspect we still have to deal with the collective potential of belief one way or another, and hopefully in a manner that heals the environment and all its inhabitants, if such a thing is possible.
After the stars came out and the fire died down a little, G and I started talking about the upcoming meeting of the Street Health Empowerment Network, which sounds like it will attempt to be a community health group and emergency response network for our local radical/arts community. We don’t trust the corporate care systems and seek a greater level of autonomy over the methods with which we can keep ourselves physically, mentally, and emotionally well. I know I wouldn’t want to bring a lot of my ‘beliefs’ to a therapeutic situation with standardized prescriptions of reality, when even being homeless or distrusting the government could get you locked up or on medication. The name of the group comes from Traditional Chinese Medicine, as an acronym of shen, the Chinese word for soul or spirit, that must be balanced along with the emotions, energies, elements and bodily fluids in order to stay healthy. The question of course that comes to my mind is, just what is ‘spiritual health’, and how can we maintain it in our selves and our communities?
And that’s a big question that could take life times to answer. The quick answer that comes to mind is having a life that is meaningful and exciting and fulfilling. Not in some grossly materialistic way as the current paradigm rests, but a level of existential comfort and joy and wonder in being. That at least for me is symptomatic of my spiritual health, though I’m still not sure just how to achieve or manage it regularly, much less help others in finding their own. Hell, there are likely whole traditions of spiritual healing at my electronic fingertips that I just don’t know of yet. Even TCM itself takes a dynamic, interconnected systems approach in which our health is effected by our environments (and assumably the other way around), already taking more into account than western medicine.
Perhaps this points to the Work for Others I need to balance my intense inner Work for Selfie. Talk about new growth…
Earlier I had tea with Z, and we got into a lengthy discussion about Spirituality. She asked why some people feel a need to find something larger than themselves to believe in or "communicate" with, extreme experiences that really reaffirm their existences; when other people are perfectly content relying on themselves and daily life around them. I joked that the reason for me is mostly entertainment. I was raised to believe in belief, and having rejected that only found that I really am a part of something much larger. Even if you wanted to put that in the terms of all of us being on this earth or in this galaxy together, or that atomic, social, and galactic structures (and a lot of things between) seem to display some surprisingly self-similar features. Without religion the universe can still be pretty mystifying, and that boggles me and makes me very curious to see what it has to offer. It certainly excites me more than television, or drinking all the time. Especially that liminal zone of spirituality where our perceptions of reality seem to be able to alter the reality we perceive. I’ve seen some things that have changed my whole world, and wonder if they could be cultivated in order to have a more reliable control over creating real changes in ourselves and our lives.
Of course at this point all the talk of government and military psionics tests comes out and we’re faced with that age old of question of ‘do we really want to mess with this?’ Where is that line between responsibility and power, and do we want to cross it? Is there even a line there at all, and not some jagged fractaling coastline of confusion where each situation demands the ability to be responsive in some new and challenging way? I don’t know, but it worries me that there’s been a renewed governmental interest in the use of psychotropics and on its citizens and military. Should not the people also be informed of the dangers and benefits of the extreme states potentially at their disposal? I don’t know that either, most of this has been occult and occluded for a really long time and maybe that was a good thing. But I suspect we still have to deal with the collective potential of belief one way or another, and hopefully in a manner that heals the environment and all its inhabitants, if such a thing is possible.
After the stars came out and the fire died down a little, G and I started talking about the upcoming meeting of the Street Health Empowerment Network, which sounds like it will attempt to be a community health group and emergency response network for our local radical/arts community. We don’t trust the corporate care systems and seek a greater level of autonomy over the methods with which we can keep ourselves physically, mentally, and emotionally well. I know I wouldn’t want to bring a lot of my ‘beliefs’ to a therapeutic situation with standardized prescriptions of reality, when even being homeless or distrusting the government could get you locked up or on medication. The name of the group comes from Traditional Chinese Medicine, as an acronym of shen, the Chinese word for soul or spirit, that must be balanced along with the emotions, energies, elements and bodily fluids in order to stay healthy. The question of course that comes to my mind is, just what is ‘spiritual health’, and how can we maintain it in our selves and our communities?
And that’s a big question that could take life times to answer. The quick answer that comes to mind is having a life that is meaningful and exciting and fulfilling. Not in some grossly materialistic way as the current paradigm rests, but a level of existential comfort and joy and wonder in being. That at least for me is symptomatic of my spiritual health, though I’m still not sure just how to achieve or manage it regularly, much less help others in finding their own. Hell, there are likely whole traditions of spiritual healing at my electronic fingertips that I just don’t know of yet. Even TCM itself takes a dynamic, interconnected systems approach in which our health is effected by our environments (and assumably the other way around), already taking more into account than western medicine.
Perhaps this points to the Work for Others I need to balance my intense inner Work for Selfie. Talk about new growth…
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