Exploring Life: Web Clips

Welcome to the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine (BHI), a world leader in the study, advancement, and clinical practice of mind/body medicine. On our website, you can find help if you're experiencing the negative effects of stress; learn how to elicit the relaxation response; review courses for health professionals; and sample a new line of relaxation CDs. Breathe deeply…exhale…and make the mind/body connection.

via Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine.

Beyond conscious breathing, which all meditation methods share, there is a wide variety of intentions and corresponding techniques. In the following table, several of the distinguishing characteristics of meditation are contrasted.

via The Types of Meditation.

” We’ve learned in 10 years that happy people are more productive at work, learn more in school, get promoted more, are more creative and are liked more. ” – Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D.

via Find Happiness – Secret of How to Find True/Authentic Happiness In Life, Pursuit of Happiness Online.

The world’s most comprehensive independent online magazine: written and edited by professionals, trusted by over twelve million monthly readers.

via Suite101.com: Online Magazine and Writers’ Network.

Nerdlife » The Internet and Thought

# Do you find yourself searching randomly for things that are on your mind? (Ironic how I’m trying to validate my method about how I validate ideas by seeking out others with the same views as me by seeking out others with the same method as me).
# Do you ever seek out opposite views for reasons other than amusement or trolling? Do you do this for things you feel very strongly about, or things you are on edge about?

Our unconscious brain makes the best decisions possible (12/27/2008)

Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002 Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that argued humans rarely make rational decisions. Since then, this has become conventional wisdom among cognition researchers

Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky’s research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions-but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.

“A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren’t based on conscious reasoning,” says Pouget. “You don’t consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with.”

Researchers find that memory storage molecule preserves complex memories (12/26/2008)

In a discovery that may one day lead to the ability to erase debilitating painful memories and addictions from the brain, researchers at SUNY Downstate Medical Center have found that a molecule known to preserve memories – PKMzeta – specifically stores complex, high-quality memories that provide detailed information about an animal’s location, fears, and actions, but does not control the ability to process or express this information. This finding suggests that PKMzeta erasure that is designed to target specific debilitating memories could be effective against the offending memory while sparing the computational function of brain…

“If further work confirms this view we can expect to one day see therapies based on PKMzeta memory erasure,” Dr. Fenton suggests. “Negative memory erasing not only could help people forget painful experiences, but might be useful in treating depression, general anxiety, phobias, post-traumatic stress, and addictions,” he adds.

Neural mechanisms of value bias in the human visual cortex (12/26/2008)

In addition, these modifications of neural activity were primarily driven by the reward history of each stimulus and not to self-reported estimates of stimulus value. “This result raises the intriguing possibility that these value related changes in brain activity operate largely via an implicit mechanism that is not necessarily accessible to the observer,” offers Dr. Serences.

Dr. Serences also observed activation in regions of frontal and parietal cortex that were associated with representing the difference between the value of the two objects; these areas were very active when one choice was much more valuable than the other, and less active when the choices were of approximately equal value. Interestingly, these cortical areas have been previously implicated in the process of anticipating and tracking rewards. “These findings suggest that these brain regions may provide signals to bias visual processing in favor of more valuable stimuli, perhaps so that valuable objects are processed more efficiently and have more of an impact on decision making and behavior,” concludes Dr. Serences.

The Forum for Contemplative Studies

The Buddhist Path very succinctly..

Nigel Wellings. 2006.
____________________________________________________________________

How things are – the three marks of existence
We start with how we and the entire universe are, this is described as having “the three marks of existence”. Firstly everything is impermanent, nothing lasts. Secondly, because of this we too do not last and so there is nothing about us, no self, that is eternal and unchanging. And lastly, because of this essential quality of transience, any one who attempts to found their happiness on the assumption that things will remain unchanging is bound to experience suffering. The three marks of existence: transience, no self, suffering.

The Base
How things are may also be put positively. Our underlying, fundamental and true nature, our Buddha nature, is already perfect and is only obscured by our ignorance of it. This nature is identical with the fundamental nature of the entire universe.

The illness, diagnosis, cure and the medicine – the Four Noble Truths
The noble truth of suffering, the cause of suffering, the cessation of suffering and the eightfold path leading to the cessation of suffering. Buddhism perceives physical and emotional life as ultimately unsatisfactory and the source of all suffering. It is the source of suffering because we are driven by desires that may never be completely fulfilled. The cure for this is to be no longer driven and alternatively to rest in our awakened nature. The medicine to realise this is the Buddhist path.

The canon of teachings – the Buddhist Tripitaka
The heart motivation behind all Buddhist writing is to bring the three root passions, greed, hatred and ignorance to an end. There are three collections of writings, called the Tripitaka: 1. Rules conditioning the living of a monastic life that supports the Buddhist path, the Vinaya. 2. Stories of the Buddha and his students meeting other people and talking about the path, the Sutras. 3. And all the teachings contained in these conversations condensed and abstracted into a theory of how everything arises and dissolves. This last steers the path between believing things have something timelessly real about them, eternalism, and the opposite, that they do not exist at all, annihilationism, the Abidharma.

Buddhist practice – refuge and the eightfold path
This always begins with our taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The teacher, his teaching and the community who practice the teaching. It then continues with the eightfold path which may be divided into three sections: 1. Conduct consisting of generosity and not harming others through our speech, actions or livelihood. 2. Meditation consisting of developing through effort, concentration and mindfulness. This is also called concentration and insight. 3. And these two leading to wisdom – in the Theravada tradition this is the profound experiential knowledge of the three marks of existence that leads to awakening and liberation from suffering. In the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions this is the recognition of the “nature of mind”, our always, already awakened Buddha nature, achieved through the generation of compassion and the recognition of shunyata, emptiness.

The fruit – the end of the path
Different traditions envisage this slightly differently. The Theravada holds an ideal of becoming spiritually enlightened and passing away beyond any further rebirths and consequent suffering. The Mahayana and Vajrayana hold an ideal of pausing at the last step of this journey and lingering in the world, over countless lifetimes, until such a time that ones actions have enabled all sentient beings to reach enlightenment. The paths of the Arhat and Bodhisattva respectively.

N.W. January 2006

The Tree of Contemplative Practices

Rewiring The Brain: Living without Stress and Anxiety through the Power of Consciousness by Rajnish Roy

PREFACE

Though at one level, stress is the running thread of this book, its scope is much wider. The larger focus is to forge acquaintance with one’s self by understanding its constructs of feelings, thoughts, memories, and why one behaves the way one does. It is an exploratory journey in our inner world, where the roots of our aspirations, ambitions, pride, and prejudice lie. We go through myriads of joys

and sorrows in the long course of life, but hardly have the patience to pause and ponder over the reasons that make them.

Does it matter? Yes, much more than perhaps one realizes.

Stress should not be seen as an isolated issue. It betrays the quality of individual self in its ceaseless action of living. We have one and only life—the most precious thing we happen to possess, and it is but natural that we struggle hard to do our utmost to make it a wonderful experience. Stress, in its overt or covert forms, works as a persistent factor that undermines the spontaneity, joy, and beauty of life.

In this competitive and complex world, one faces countless factors of stress that are unavoidable and immutable, including illness, accident, or death. There are some other factors that can be altered through efforts, which play a more decisive role in life. These are individual attitude, mental tendencies, and ways one interacts with external world. There is much truth in the saying, “Life is 10

percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it.”

An objective understanding of these individual factors means that half the battle of tackling stress is won. Hence, the book seeks to help the reader face and understand the workings of inner self and its intricacies without resorting to psychological escape or suppression.

Yet an objective understanding is only the first step. It does not resolutely change our mental habits and conditionings that are hardwired in the brain. The negative emotions that fuel stress and anxiety have unyielding force, often not amenable to reason. Similarly, drills of positive thinking and self-hypnotism through beliefs and ideologies accrue only temporary solace and euphoria that wears off sooner than expected

Ellen J. Langer

Dr. Ellen Langer is a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. Her books written for general and academic readers include Mindfulness and The Power of Mindful Learning, and the forthcoming Mindful Creativity.

Dr. Langer has described her work on the illusion of control, aging, decision-making, and mindfulness theory in over 200 research articles and six academic books

Why is it so difficult to look at ourself, inwardly ? – Krishnamurti Network

We generally believe, act and think through external means as organizations, tools, authorities of the state, or of the social, professional or religious hierarchy, our family, or the society itself with its perpetual pattern of acceptance of the world as it is with its competition and conflict between human beings, men, women, groups, communities, nationalities, etc.

In this state of constant stimulation by the exernal world, outwardly, there is no freedom and no security at all. I can believe to be secured because I have a certain nationality, or a certain social position, or I’m a respectable professional, but inwardly is there any security at all in this chaos of all sort of wars and incertitudes which is the fragmented planetar society where we live in all together ?

We can be in constant struggle for earning our dailylife, unemployed or not satisfied by what we’re doing, and so we pass our life to solve external problems or to struggle against oneself, and in being caught with these problems, we search a solution through political, religious or organized means, or we search to escape from the related fear in various external or internal activities through what we’ve learned from the society, its psychologists, philosophers, and others managers of the mind, or in reading K works as a mean to stimulate ourselves in this life.

Considering all of this, why does it appear that looking into oneself seems to be so difficult ? Is it that the brain is so conditioned to act by external means, inwardly and outwardly, that it seems to us that there is no other alternative ? Is it that we’re not free to look at ourself without any interferences, without any prejudices whatsoever ? Is it that we don’t know how to have a quality of mind which is clear, objective, sane and rational, but at the same time we feel that such a mind is necessary, bringing conflict in ourself between what is and what it should be ?

How to deal with this whole question of oneself, of being related ?

PsyBlog: 12 Laws of the Emotions

Explore your feelings, and how they affect your behaviour, with this new series on the psychology of the emotions.

We tend to think of our emotions as having laws unto themselves, but one psychological researcher has suggested that our emotions do follow certain general rules.

This post begins a new series on the psychology of emotions with Professor Nico Frijda’s twelve laws of the emotions (Fridja, 2006). As for most laws there are exceptions, but these have been synthesised from years of psychological research and hold true much of the time..

PsyBlog: Can Cognitive Neuroscience Tell Us Anything About the Mind?

“No amount of knowledge about the hardware of a computer will tell you anything serious about the nature of the software that the computer runs. In the same way, no facts about the activity of the brain could be used to confirm or refute some information-processing model of cognition.” (Coltheart, 2004, p.22)

I personally don’t know enough about cognitive neuroscience to argue whether or not this statement is true, but it certainly has intuitive appeal. Considering the enormous quantity of money going into cognitive neuroscience right now, it seems unlikely this would be a majority view amongst psychologists. Not that scientist are slaves to money, of course…Ahem…

PsyBlog: What Everyone Should Know About Their Own Minds: 6 Introspective Insights From Psychology

Classic psychology studies show just how little access we have to the workings of our own minds.

Ever wondered where your opinions come from, how you manage to be creative, or how you solve problems? Well, don’t bother. Psychology studies examining these areas and more have found that while we’re good at inventing plausible explanations, these explanations are frequently completely made-up.

In this series of posts, I examine some of the classic findings in psychology that show we have precious little insight into our own thought processes.

1. The Hidden Workings of Our Minds
How do great artists create? How do brilliant scientists solve the hardest problems in their field? Listen to them try to explain and you’ll probably be disappointed. Artists say mysterious things like: “The picture just formed in my mind.” Writers tell us that: “I don’t know where the words come from.” Scientists say they: “Just had a hunch.”

» Read on about the hidden workings of our minds -»

2. Our Secret Attitude Changes
When you change your attitude about something, do you know why? Psychologists have argued that the inner workings of our minds are largely hidden away from us. One aspect of this is the surprising finding that people are often unaware when they have changed their attitudes.

» Read on about our secret attitude changes -»

3. Why Problem Solving Itself is a Puzzle, Even to Poincare and Picasso
The process of human creativity is both fascinating and, at the same time, mystifying. Understanding the mental processes of great thinkers offers an enormous reward to any who can replicate them: immortality. Perhaps if we really understood what was going through their minds, we too could create an object or idea that would live long after our deaths

» Read on about why problem solving is a puzzle -»

4. What We Don’t Know About Shopping, Reading, Watching TV and Judging People
Here are four everyday situations – shopping, reading, watching TV and judging other people – and four experiments that show how little we know in each situation about what’s really going on in our minds.

» Read on about shopping, reading, watching TV and judging people -»

5. When We Are Fools to Ourselves
Are the mistakes we make about our own thought processes systematic in any way? Nisbett and Wilson (1977) provide five factors likely to have a huge effect on how accurately we report our own higher mental processes. These give us useful clues about when we’re most likely to be fooling ourselves.

» Read on about when we are fools to ourselves -»

6. At the Heart of Attraction Lies Confusion: Choice Blindness
Across a crowded room your eyes lock with an attractive stranger. You look away, you look back. The first hint of a smile plays across their lips. Suddenly you’re nervous, your mind goes blank, you want to go over and you want to run away, both at the same time. You turn around too fast, bump into someone, almost spilling your drink. ‘Wow,’ you think as you recover, ‘Now, that’s what I’m talking about!’.

» Read on about choice blindness -»

PsyBlog: How to Choose Happiness: Combat 5 Decision-Making Biases

“Life is the sum of all your choices.” –Albert Camus

Happiness is in our hands if only we could make the right decisions in life. Decisions often rely on making accurate predictions of how we will feel in the future. Unfortunately for us psychologists have shown that there are five major biases in the way we predict our future emotional states.

The good news is that psychological research reveals that each of these biases can be countered. Understanding and remembering these five biases will help you make decisions that will increase your happiness.

Unlocking the mysteries of memory (12/10/2008)

Researchers led by Prof. Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon at Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine, are proving scientifically what scientists have always suspected — that the neurons excited during an experience are the same as those excited when we remember that experience. This finding, reported in the prestigious journal Science in October, gives researchers a clearer picture of how memory recall works and has important implications for understanding dementias such as Alzheimer’s, in which fragments of the memory puzzle seem to disintegrate over time.
A Rare Glimpse Inside Your Brain

“This is a rare opportunity to see how neurons, the basic units of cognition, work during the act of recall,” says Prof. Fried from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where he is also a full professor. “It’s unique because we’re able to look at single cells in the brain when people spontaneously retrieve something from inside their memory without any cue from outside.”

The research was challenging and could only be done on human subjects ¯ other animals lack the ability to verbalize their memories. “Taking a look at individual neurons can only be obtained under special circumstances,” he says. “This is what we’ve managed to achieve.”

Monitoring the subjects’ brain activity as electrodes recorded individual neurons, Prof. Fried and his Israeli colleagues, were effectively able to “see” real human memory recall in action, in real time. This is unprecedented, say his peers, who laud this research as “foundational.”

=== JKrishnamurti.org – Daily Quote ===

Aloneness in Which There Is No Fear

It is only when the mind is capable of shedding all influences, all interferences, of being completely alone…there is creativeness.

In the world, more and more technique is being developed – the technique of how to influence people through propaganda, through compulsion, through imitation…There are innumerable books written on how to do a thing, how to think efficiently, how to build a house, how to put machinery together; so gradually we are losing initiative, the initiative to think out something original for ourselves. In our education, in our relationship with government, through various means, we are being influenced to conform, to imitate. And when we allow one influence to persuade us to a particular attitude or action, naturally we create resistance to other influences. In that very process of creating a resistance to another influence, are we not succumbing to it negatively?

Should not the mind always be in revolt so as to understand the influences that are always impinging, interfering, controlling, shaping? Is it not one of the factors of the mediocre mind that it is always fearful and, being in a state of confusion, it wants order, it wants consistency, it wants a form, a shape by which it can be guided and controlled. And yet these forms, these various influences create contradictions in the individual, create confusion in the individual. …Any choice between influences is surely still a state of mediocrity.

…Must not the mind have the capacity to fathom – not to imitate, not to be shaped – and to be without fear? Should not such a mind be alone and therefore creative? That creativeness is not yours or mine, it is anonymous.

The Book of Life – December 7

About the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society

The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society works to integrate contemplative awareness into contemporary life in order to help create a more just, compassionate, and reflective society.

Contemplative practices, including prayer, meditation, yoga, and many contemplative arts, help individuals regain balance and calm in the midst of challenging circumstances. This state of calm centeredness provides effective stress reduction and can also help address issues of meaning, values, and spirit. Contemplative practices can help people develop greater empathy and communication skills, improve focus and concentration, reduce stress and enhance creativity. In time, with sustained commitment, they cultivate insight, wise discernment, and a loving and compassionate approach to life.

Krishnamurti Foundation of America – Overview

The Krishnamurti Foundation of America is located in Ojai, California. It was founded in 1969 by Jiddu Krishnamurti, who lived from 1895 to 1986, and is regarded as one of the greatest philosophical and spiritual figures of the twentieth century. There are also Krishnamurti foundations in England (Krishnamurti Foundation Trust); India (Krishnamurti Foundation India); Canada (Krishnamurti Educational Centre); and Spain (the Fundacion Krishnamurti Latinoamericana).

The Secret :: Official Web Site of The Secret Movie :: Law of Attraction

The Secret reveals the most powerful law in the universe. The knowledge of this law has run like a golden thread through the lives and the teachings of all the prophets, seers, sages and saviors in the world’s history, and through the lives of all truly great men and women. All that they have ever accomplished or attained has been done in full accordance with this most powerful law.

[Note: my belief is that this is superficial and misleading]

What the Bleep Do We Know!? & What the Bleep!? – Down the Rabbit Hole

What the BLEEP Do We Know — First released in theaters in 2004, WTBDWK!? went on to become one of the most successful documentaries of all time. Now distributed in over 30 countries, it has stunned audiences with its revolutionary cinematic blend of dramatic film, documentary, animation and comedy, while serving up a mind-jarring blend of Quantum Physics, spirituality, neurology and evolutionary thought.

Mind & Life Institute

The Mind & Life Institute is an independent, not-for-profit organization devoted to establishing a mutually respectful working collaboration and research partnerships between modern science and Buddhism – two of the world’s most fruitful traditions for understanding the nature of reality and promoting human well-being.