“Dr. Reginald “Reggie” Ray brings us four decades of study and intensive meditation practice within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as well as a special gift for applying it to the unique problems, inspirations, and spiritual imperatives of modern people. He currently resides in Crestone, Colorado, where he is President and Spiritual Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, founded with his wife Lee who is Vice-President, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to the practice, study and preservation of the teachings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the practice lineage he embodied.”

“A senior teacher in the lineage of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Reggie talks Dharma, controversy and guides the audience through a weird form of meditation.”

(via Elephant Journal)

(Related: “I Am So Over This Buddhism Shit” by Brad Warner via Suicide Girls)

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“Drinking and texting is a recipe for disaster, but you’re not likely to text an ex when you’re asleep in bed, right? Wrong, ’cause some now suffer from a sleep-texting affliction, it’s been claimed. According to a report by Texan newspaper The Star, a 24-year old Italy, Texas woman recently awoke to discover that she’d sent several text messages to her boyfriend - while she was fast asleep.

Although Jessica Castillo’s Pantech C300 phone required her to go through 11 menu options before reaching the text message screen, her state of slumber still didn’t prevent her typing out and sending a vaguely coherent message. Dr Ron Kramer, a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, claimed that sleep-texting is entirely possible because “texting for some of the younger generation is probably as ingrained as driving is for some”.

(via The Register)

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“It’s a sad fact that while most of us spend a sizeable part of our lives communicating with others — in face-to-face conversations, over the phone, in committee meetings, via e-mail and social networks — we seem more separate and disconnected than ever.

Genuine understanding seems to be the exception rather than the norm in everyday communication. We speak at each other, or past each other. We speak different conceptual languages, hold different values, embody different ways of seeing the world.

Much of the time, we’re not even listening to each other at all. The dialogue is a monologue. We fire salvos of information across the Internet, or shoot each other text messages, or blog or Twitter or Plurk about ourselves. But is anyone paying attention? And if they are, do they catch our drift? The trouble with much of what passes for communication today is that it’s all crosstalk. It’s a din, not a dialogue.

The noisy chatter reflects the fact that we don’t really know how to engage one another in authentic conversations. We simply haven’t learned the skills of listening closely to each other, of engaging in meaningful exchanges, and of finding shared sources of meaning. We lack the know-how and the tools.”

(via Scott London)

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“Did you know that one person in 20 has had a fight with a next-door neighbour? That one driver in four admits to committing an act of road rage? That cases of “air rage” rose by 400 per cent between 1997 and 2000? That stress has overtaken the common cold as the main reason for taking time off work?

We appear to be living in an age of rage. Earlier this week there seems to have been an incidence of “queue rage” in a supermarket during which a man was punched - and later died. The death raises the whole issue of apparently random acts of violence that are often the product of momentary losses of self-control.

“Check-out rage” is just one more to add to our already long long list of road, air, trolley, parking space and cyclist rage. It is why a motorist will follow a pedestrian on to a bus and stab him; why a shopper will break another shopper’s nose for something as trivial as bumping into his or her trolley. When I was riding in a taxi in London recently a cyclist hammered on the window in fury at a perceived (imagined, in my view) transgression by the driver. In a flurry of F-and-C-words he threw a fistful of coins at the taxi. As far as I could see nothing had happened.

Anger, humankind’s natural and healthy reaction to stressful situations, is increasingly being acted out via physical violence - even though we are richer, take more holidays and lead more comfortable lives than ever before. There are several theories as to why our society is becoming ever more infuriated. The fast pace at which we live our lives - “hurry sickness”, for instance, has taught us to desire and demand instant gratification.”

(via Times Online)

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“The patient sat with his eyes closed, submerged in the rhythm of his own breathing, and after a while noticed that he was thinking about his troubled relationship with his father. “I was able to be there, present for the pain,” he said, when the meditation session ended. “To just let it be what it was, without thinking it through.” The therapist nodded. “Acceptance is what it was,” he continued. “Just letting it be. Not trying to change anything.” “That’s it,” the therapist said. “That’s it, and that’s big.”

This exercise in focused awareness and mental catch-and-release of emotions has become perhaps the most popular new psychotherapy technique of the past decade. Mindfulness meditation, as it is called, is rooted in the teachings of a fifth-century BC Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha. It is catching the attention of talk therapists of all stripes, including academic researchers, Freudian analysts in private practice and skeptics who see all the hallmarks of another fad.

For years, psychotherapists have worked to relieve suffering by reframing the content of patients’ thoughts, directly altering behavior or helping people gain insight into the subconscious sources of their despair and anxiety. The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process — and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach. “The interest in this has just taken off,” said Zindel Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where the above group therapy session was taped. “And I think a big part of it is that more and more therapists are practicing some form of contemplation themselves and want to bring that into therapy.”

(via The International Herald Tribune)

(Related: “Sit down, shut up, breathe:Can meditation make you a calmer, more compassionate person?” via The SF Gate)

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“This new video is showing up everywhere on the internet, but we thought we had to post it after watching it closely ourselves - as Ken Wilber’s passion for major political issues, and the clarity with which he deploys applied integral theory (at least in terms of AQAL) is something to behold.

Whatever your opinion of this integral-type theorizing (and jargon), this 30 minute video demonstrates just how accurate and useful a calibrated integral framework can be when we attempt to understand the broad currents of cultural and development change.”

(via Integral Praxis. For those unfamiliar with Wilber’s Integral Theory, Dedroidify has a good summary)

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“Religious leaders have contended for millennia that burning incense is good for the soul. Now, biologists have learned that it is good for our brains too. In a new study appearing online in The FASEB Journal, an international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression. This suggests that an entirely new class of depression and anxiety drugs might be right under our noses.

“In spite of information stemming from ancient texts, constituents of Bosweilla had not been investigated for psychoactivity,” said Raphael Mechoulam, one of the research study’s co-authors. “We found that incensole acetate, a Boswellia resin constituent, when tested in mice lowers anxiety and causes antidepressive-like behavior. Apparently, most present day worshipers assume that incense burning has only a symbolic meaning.”

(via PhysOrg)

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“The Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast has a fascinating interview with psychologist Daniel Freeman who discusses his recent study that used virtual reality to study paranoid thinking.Freeman has pioneered the use of VR in studying paranoia to try and understand how individual psychological differences contribute to suspiciousness and fear.

Of course, it’s possible to use real life environments to see how exposure relates to paranoid thinking. In fact, the same research group has studied how patients with paranoid delusions react to urban environments. Those familiar with South East London might be interested to know that stressful urban stimulus in this experiment was a walk down Camberwell High Street (as a resident of Camberwell it is disconcerting, although not entirely surprising, to find out I’m living in an experimental condition used to induce paranoid reactions).

For a scientific point of view, one difficulty with using real-life environments to study paranoia is that they are constantly changing and reactive. This latter point is important because people who are very paranoid might, for instance, behave in a manner that other people find strange and that attracts attention, or in a way that sparks hostility in others. One way of getting round this is to expose all participants to a virtual reality environment programmed to be identical, so any differences in paranoid thinking between individuals are almost certainly related to how they interpret the situation and not how the environment reacts to them.”

(via Mind Hacks)

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“If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last 30 years I’m pretty sure you know who Bruce Lee was. If you have, then you may be interested to know that Lee was a very famous martial artist and actor who sparked the first big interest of Chinese martial arts in the West in the 60’s and 70’s. But besides being an awesome fighter and iconic figure Lee also had some very useful things to say about life.

Here are 7 of my favourite fundamentals from Bruce Lee.

1. What are you really thinking about today?

“As you think, so shall you become.”

Perhaps the most basic statement of how we work. Think about what you are thinking today. What do those thoughts say about you? About your life? And how well do they really match your plans for your life and your image of yourself? It’s easy to forget about this simple statement in everyday life. It’s easy to be quite incongruent with what you think on an ordinary day compared to how you view yourself and your goals. A simple external reminder such as a post-it with this quote can be helpful to keep you and your thoughts on the right track.”

(via The Positivity Blog. h/t: 43 Folders)

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In these trails, subjects overwhelmingly chose to preserve equity at the expense of efficiency, Hsu said. “They were all quite inequity averse.” The findings support other studies that show that most people are fairly intolerant of inequity.

The animation, in conjunction with the fMRI, allowed the researchers to view activity in the brain at critical moments in the decision-making process. After analyzing the data, they found that different brain regions – the insula, putamen and caudate – were activated differently, and at different points in the process, Hsu said.

Activation of the insula varied from trial to trial in relation to changes in equity, while activity in the putamen corresponded to changes in efficiency, he said.

In contrast, the caudate appeared to integrate both equity and efficiency once a decision was made.

The involvement of the insula appears to support the notion that emotion plays a role in a person’s attitude towards inequity, Hsu said.

Full Story: Eureka

(via Tomorrow Museum)

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This really piqued my interest.

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There are many people out there who belong to this church and don’t even know it exists. So here’s an introduction:

“This site won’t help you do anything. I’m not trying to help you become more focused, motivated or confident. As the most happily apathetic, bitter and cynical person possibly inhabiting the planet, I’m not qualified to do so, and furthermore, I couldn’t care less. If you’re deluded enough to think your life could be made meaningful if only you might happen across the right website to assist your personal development into something other than the aimless, insignificant conglomeration of matter you are, fine; but this isn’t the one. Like life itself, there is nothing meaningful to be found on this site. The Church of Apathy is a place for those enlightened enough to understand that there is no god, meaning to life, or such thing as free will to enjoy our indifference and the failure it inevitably breeds, because it is easier and, within the context of the big picture of the impermanent universe in which we reside, holds the same value as trying and “succeeding” - absolutely zero. That’s it.*
- Reverend Bob

(Chuurch of Apathy)

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“The One True Church Of Mammon is a community of increase and abundance. The spiritual center of the church is a bar of pure silver currently located in New Hampshire. This dense metal object is at all moments, from now until the end of the days, commanding members of its community to fulfill personal ambitions and to GAIN, and it transmits this permanent, unrelenting order like a radio transmitter that is broken and cannot be turned off. The silver object receives its authority from those who focus attention upon it, and by its nature it imparts immediate and instant power to those in the act of obeying its single order. This concentration of power is openly available for anyone who, in their own unique manner, brings attention to the object and receives its permanent command to GAIN.”

(The One True Church of Mammon. H/T: Mind Control 101)

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Though the score is most probably much higher in atheism and science’s favour, I’d like to take this opportunity for all the believers in magic out there to take a look at a recently publicised event in India (link):

On 3 March 2008, in a popular TV show, Sanal Edamaruku, the president of Rationalist International, challenged India’s most “powerful” tantrik (black magician) to demonstrate his powers on him. That was the beginning of an unprecedented experiment. After all his chanting of mantra (magic words) and ceremonies of tantra failed, the tantrik decided to kill Sanal Edamaruku with the “ultimate destruction ceremony” on live TV. Sanal Edamaruku agreed and sat in the altar of the black magic ritual. India TV observed skyrocketing viewership rates.

Definitely worth the read.

Not to say I’ve not had my own peculiar results, but I attribute it more to a level of “reality hacking” I’ve learned over the years via my interest in chaos magic, rather than so-called magick in the (traditional?) sense of the word.

Two interesting reads to follow-up the above with are on Psychology Today, dealing with magic:

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a God

I had a good talk about this with Erik Davis, the author of TechGnosis. He told me, “In the magical worldview, the world is kind of like a language. If you know the spells or the signs or the symbols you can effect change.” Hard physics has discredited that soft outlook, “but with cyberspace and technology and the Internet it’s a human space, or it’s all a constructed space. And on its most basic level, it’s constructed of language.” Maybe not English, but computer code.

Magical Thinking

Magical thinking springs up everywhere. Some irrational beliefs (Santa Claus?) are passed on to us. But others we find on our own. Survival requires recognizing patterns—night follows day, berries that color will make you ill. And because missing the obvious often hurts more than seeing the imaginary, our skills at inferring connections are overtuned. No one told Wade Boggs that eating chicken before every single game would help his batting average; he decided that on his own, and no one can argue with his success. We look for patterns because we hate surprises and because we love being in control.

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“Born without legs, Kevin Connolly snaps photos of people staring at him — turning the watchers into the watched. When Kevin Connolly was ten years old his family took him to Disney World, but for some theme park visitors that day, it was Connolly who quickly became the main attraction.

“I remember distinctly being surrounded by Japanese tourists trying to take my photograph without talking to me or asking me,” he says from his apartment in Bozeman, Montana. “My dad was right behind me, and I remember him getting pretty frustrated with the whole process, because it was something that was happening every single day.” Born without legs, Connolly was already used to the stares of strangers — but that moment would help him start to understand that the lens could work in both directions.

On a solo trip to Europe, more than a decade later, he was riding his skateboard down a Vienna street when he felt a man staring at him. Connolly lifted his camera to his hip, pointed it toward the man and without even looking through the viewfinder, clicked off five or six shots. Connolly would repeat that action 32,000 more times during his travels, creating a diverse portfolio of individuals from a broad assortment of countries. He posted some of these images online, under the title “The Rolling Exhibition.”

(via Yahoo News)

(The Rolling Exhibition)

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“Our capacity for self control may be running on empty.
Every day, we pressure ourselves to control our impulses—to work harder rather than go home early, to avoid sugar, carbohydrates, and transfats; to save instead of spend; and to exercise courtesy rather than snap at the barista who flubbed our order. Meanwhile, we can’t ride the subway, turn on the TV, or open a magazine without finding an ad urging us to self-indulge. Balancing these two competing forces sometimes seems impossible. A new report from two Canadian researchers suggests why: Our capacity for self-control is far shallower than we realize.

“People have a limited amount of self-control, and tasks requiring controlled, willful action quickly deplete this central resource. Exerting self-control on one task impairs performance on subsequent tasks requiring the same resource,” write Michael Inzlicht and Jennifer N. Gutsell in their article in the journal Psychological Science. In their experiment, Inzlicht and Gutsell separated 40 individuals into two groups. In both groups, participants were fitted with EEG monitoring equipment and made to watch a disturbing wildlife documentary.

One group was asked not to display any reaction to the gruesome subject matter; the other group was instructed simply to watch the footage and not proscribed a reaction. Afterwards, both groups completed a rapid-fire color-matching test requiring a controlled response. The test showed that people who had suppressed their reaction to the documentary (measurable via the EEG readout) performed less well on the color-matching test.

According to the authors, the study “suggests a neuroscientifically informed account of how self-control is constrained by previous acts of control [and] that mental fatigue can occur relatively quickly and affect tasks unrelated to the depleting activity.” In other words, exercising control on one task makes it harder to exercise control on the task immediately following.”

(via The Futurist)

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“The Memory Palace is one of the most powerful memory techniques I know. It’s not only effective, but also fun to use — and not hard to learn at all.

The Memory Palace has been used since ancient Rome, and is responsible for some quite incredible memory feats. Eight-time world memory champion Dominic O’Brien, for instance, was able to memorize 54 decks of cards in sequence (that’s 2808 cards), viewing each card only once. And there are countless other similar achievements attributed to people using the Memory Palace technique or variations of it. Even in fiction, there are several references to the technique. In Thomas Harris’ novel Hannibal, for example, serial killer Hannibal Lecter uses Memory Palaces to store amazingly vivid memories of years of intricate patient records (sadly, it was left off the movie).

Of course, most of us are not in Dominic’s memory championship line of business (or in Hannibal’s line of business for that matter). But still, the Memory Palace technique is amazingly effective in all kinds of endeavors, such as learning a foreign language, memorizing a presentation you’re about to deliver, preparing for exams and many others — even if all you want is to jog your memory.”

(via Litemind)

(Related: “The Art of Memory” via Renaissance Magazine. “The Art of Memory” by Edward Tanguay)

(A more occult/magickal look at “The Art of Memory” via The Society of Guardians)

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When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.

In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’ “

Full Story: Wall Street Journal.

(Thanks Danny!)

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“A word of warning to those who believe in lucky numbers, auspicious colors and star-crossed dates: Beware. The Ides of March are upon us. Only those familiar with history or William Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar” readily may recognize the reference to March 15, the day of Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C. The Roman calendar designated monthly Ides, or midpoint, days that fell either on the 13th or 15th day, depending on the month.

After Caesar’s untimely exit, superstitious Romans well may have avoided launching a business, marriage or other important venture on a date so cloaked in doom it eventually entered the lexicon as a metaphor for impending catastrophe. Despite vast advances in knowledge and technology over the last 2,000 years, it turns out people today aren’t so different from the ancients when it comes to superstition and the way it affects decision-making and the economy, according to new research.”

(via The Chicago Tribune)

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Good guidelines for an ethical debate on just about any subject.

“Have you been frustrated, friends? Have you tried to talk to a fundamentalist about science? You’re frustrated, because you know that good social policy, violence prevention, social welfare, and our environment depend on ethical application of scientific thought. The stakes are high, but you can’t get through to them. Political and superstitious social policy pertaining to mental health have been disastrous. The drug war, the sorry state of mental health services, and the killing of fifteen year old Lawrence King exemplify this harm. What can you do?

Allow me to offer two suggestions that will keep you from wasting time on the people who will not engage you in a sincere way, and that might even win over some folks to your way of thinking. Each of the following is a betting game. Bet enough to make it spicy. If you can, get others to bet as people do in an office pool. This will hold people’s interest. The money won can go to a charity of the winner’s choice. Is $5 too much? Is $100 too little? Have a trusted third party hold the cash.

When you challenge the person to one of these games, if they refuse, then you would have been wasting your time having a discussion. I have never seen anything come of a discussion with a person who fades out when some accountability is introduced into the discussion. Also, if they refuse, it makes a statement about their credibility to anyone present, so make the challenge very publicly.”

(via Brain Blogger. Part 2: The 10 Ethical Debating Rules. Part 3: More Ideas)

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“Researchers from EPFL and Caltech have made an important neurobiological discovery of how humans learn to predict risk. The research, appearing in the March 12 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, will shed light on why certain kinds of risk, notably financial risk, are often underestimated, and whether abnormal behavior such as addiction (e.g. to gambling or drugs) could be caused by an erroneous evaluation of risk.

Planning entails making predictions. In an uncertain environment, however, our predictions often don’t pan out. And erroneous prediction of risk often leads to unusual behaviour: euphoria or excessive gambling when risk is underestimated, and panic attacks or depression when we predict that things are riskier than they really are. To understand these anomalous reactions to uncertain situations, we need to look to the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie how we learn to predict risk. Surprisingly little research has been done in this topic, and we do not yet know precisely how the brain is involved in our estimation of risk.”

(via Medical New Today)

(Thanks Kaos829!)

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“Most of us experience ‘gut feelings’ we can’t explain, such as instantly loving – or hating – a new property when we’re househunting or the snap judgements we make on meeting new people. Now researchers at Leeds say these feelings – or intuitions – are real and we should take our hunches seriously. According to a team led by Professor Gerard Hodgkinson of the Centre for Organisational Strategy, Learning and Change at Leeds University Business School, intuition is the result of the way our brains store, process and retrieve information on a subconscious level and so is a real psychological phenomenon which needs further study to help us harness its potential.

There are many recorded incidences where intuition prevented catastrophes and cases of remarkable recoveries when doctors followed their gut feelings. Yet science has historically ridiculed the concept of intuition, putting it in the same box as parapsychology, phrenology and other ‘pseudoscientific’ practices.

Through analysis of a wide range of research papers examining the phenomenon, the researchers conclude that intuition is the brain drawing on past experiences and external cues to make a decision – but one that happens so fast the reaction is at a non-conscious level. All we’re aware of is a general feeling that something is right or wrong.”

(via University of Leeds)

(Thanks Dedroidify!)

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This is all over the Internet this morning. New photos from Abu Ghraib. I haven’t the words.

Video presentation by and Wired interview with Philip Zimbardo.

Photos.

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The English professor at Wake Forest University wants to be clear that he is not “romanticizing” clinical depression and that he believes it is a serious condition that should be treated.

But he worries that today’s cornucopia of antidepressants — used to treat even what he calls “mild to moderate sadness” — might make “sweet sorrow” a thing of the past.

“And if that happens, I wonder, what will the future hold? Will our culture become less vital? Will it become less creative?” he asks.

[…]

We can picture this in the primitive world. While the healthy bodies of the tribe were out mindlessly hacking beasts or other humans, the melancholy soul remained behind brooding in a cave or under a tree. There he imagined new structures, oval and amber, or fresh verbal rhythms, sacred summonings, or songs superior to even those of the birds. Envisioning these things, and more, this melancholy malingerer became just as useful for his culture as did the hunters and the gatherers for theirs. He pushed his world ahead. He moved it forward. He dwelled always in the insecure realm of the avant-garde.

This primitive visionary was the first of many such avant-garde melancholics. Of course not all innovators are melancholy, and not all melancholy souls are innovative. However, the scientifically proved relationship between genius and depression, between gloom and greatness suggests that the majority of our cultural innovators, ranging from the ancient dreamer in the bush to the more recent Dadaist in the city, have grounded their originality in the melancholy mood. We can of course by now understand why.

Full Story: NPR.

Counter arguments: Hedonistic Imperative.

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“[…] Looking at what we see as “occultism” today is not same way in the past. Historically speaking, the subjects that are included in occultism, such as astrology, magic, alchemy, qabalah, and the like, were not excluded or pushed to the periphery of society and not distrusted like they are today. In fact, they were integral parts of how society investigated the world around them and were technologies used to discern the hidden aspects of the universe. Occultism, per se, is a modern concept-it arose in the later 19th century. In the past the occult was seen as integral part of the world. After all, the word occult means “hidden.” When astrologers investigated the charts, they were attempting to see the hidden or occult influences and determining causes deriving from the celestial sphere; when alchemists experimented with matter, they were attempting to determine the hidden or occult properties of matter; when qabalists, Christian, Arabic, or Jewish alike, explored the qabalah, they were seeking to understand the hidden influences of the divine and how they manifested in our world. In essence, they were all seeking to understand the hidden aspects of reality; the things people did not see operating on a day-to-day basis.

Today, because of the influence of science and other societal structures, many of the early ways of investigating the hidden world have been determined as invalid and excluded. These formerly accepted practices, such as astrology, have been determined to be worthless, or at most, for occasional amusement and not anything to be taken seriously. Those still searching for the occult side of things do not always agree and still give validity to such techniques. Other times the technique or practice transforms, such as alchemy. It evolved into modern chemistry on one hand, and symbolic alchemy on another; the latter being employed by magicians mapping certain processes and Jungian psychologists. Regardless of the technique, the salient point remains, there are hidden forces at work in the world around us and in us and occultism is the process by which these processes are investigated and exposed.”

(via The Treasure House of Pearls)

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