Category Archives: human mind

Myth as transformative serial art

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di0908010

What is a myth? Ideally, something that lifts you up toward the light and shows you something greater than yourself, leaving a residue of a higher world.

I’ve watched The Laws of Eternity three times over the last week or so.  That is extremely unusual for me.  I have mentioned this before, that I hardly ever watch a movie twice, or read a comic twice, or even a book, because I have a very strong memory for stories.  The exception, I said, was religious or spiritual works.

It may be over the top to compare The Laws of Eternity with Holy Scripture, although I suspect the actual members of “Happy Science” probably regard the book that way.  The movie is not the same as the book. The movie is set in the world described in the book. Or at least that is the impression I get from reading scattered pages of the book online thanks to Google Books.  I may well order the books too, but not because I believe in them in a literal sense.  Or at least not the story part, about the civilization on Atlantis and Mu and other continents that supposedly rose from the sea and fell back into it over the last 100 000 years.

That is not to say that it is a bad thing to take it literally. Well, it is a bad thing in that it is not true.  But the purpose of a myth is not to be true in the scientific sense, but to be true to the soul. The myth exists in a higher world.  Remember what I use to say here?  “We create lower worlds, higher worlds create us.”  And that is why I watch the movie over again, because it creates me, or recreates me, just a little.  You may say it concentrates me, so that after watching it I find it easier to resist thoughts that are harmful and pull me towards Dissolution. Conversely, it becomes easier to think thoughts that are helpful and pull me toward the Light.

I had not expected that from an anime, to be honest.  And after watching it, I find it hard to enjoy the other anime, even those that don’t glorify extramarital lust.  (Japanese manga and anime have a somewhat undeserved reputation for perversity.  Not undeserved in that the ecchi does not exist, but it is not as dominant at home as in export to the west. In Japan, there is manga for the housewife, manga for the salaryman, manga for the small kids, sports manga and educational manga.  But many westerners want to look at the panties of high school girls, and there is manga for that too.  But enough about that on such a beautiful day.)

Back to myth and the higher and lower worlds. This is important. There is a science that relates only to the material world, and it is a good thing for its use.  But the human mind is free to travel to both higher and lower worlds, and indeed will do so virtually every hour of the day in normal people.  Mostly lower worlds, again in normal people, in the form of dreams and daydreams.  The deeper of these are the daydreams of wish fulfillment, in which the imaginary world exists to gratify and glorify the ego of the dreamer.

The myth is the opposite of this. The myth is NOT all about you.  It is about something much greater than you, something that dwarfs you and fills you with awe.  (If it does not, then it has to some degree failed its task as a myth.) “Myth” is not a synonym for “lie”, as it is perceived by some superficial people.  A myth may even be literally true, but its power lies in its ability to create something in us and fill us with conviction of something higher, greater and ideally better and more noble.

Note that what is a higher world depends on your starting point!  We all live in the same physical world, but we don’t all live in the same mental world or the same cultural world. For instance, the mythology of ancient Greek or Scandinavia may seem crude by your standards, but they may have been an ideal to reach up toward in the crude and cruel world of the Bronze and Iron ages.  To take another example that illustrates this: The law of Moses institutes the rule “an eye for an eye” (and a life for a life).  This is seen today as harsh, vengeful, even primitive.  But in the culture of the Bronze Age nomads, it was a big improvement, because the rules of the blood feud was more like “a life for an eye”, since both sides considered themselves more worth than their opponents, and the conflict escalated until one side was eradicated or both were so weakened that a third faction conquered them both.

So when I refer to Happy Science movies as “myth”, it says a lot about myself.  If I were a saint, I would be above that level, and it would be a waste of time at best.  But despite all my accumulated knowledge, I am no saint.  I have the wisdom of Solomon, but mostly before or after I need it.  (I always have it when someone else needs it, of course!) I despair of ever becoming a saint (your name for this state of being may vary) without the company of saints, but saints are not only few but also have better things to do than babysit me. And even if they did, I wonder if I could tolerate it, for I love freedom and aloneness.

Anyway, myth as serial art.  You know that there was no manga in the Bronze Age, or even a few centuries ago.  For most of known history, even writing was rare.  Instead we had stories.  The bard, or just the old crone of the village, would be surrounded by people longing to hear a story.  And then the old one would recite a story that had been told many times before, a story they knew from their own childhood, about the clever Hermes or the lovely Aphrodite or any of the thousands of other old stories.  But then like now, there were also many coarse and dirty stories that the menfolk told each other when the children were asleep (or pretended to sleep, at least) – stories that pulled the mind down in the gutter. In that sense, not much has changed with the arrival of the printing press, and manga, and anime.

So when I talk about myth, I mean a story that is transformative, in that it lifts the human spirit up toward something greater, grander, more permanent, and hopefully more noble. The myth would ideally leave a residue of the higher world and a kind of longing for it.

The opposite could also be called transformative, I suppose, but I prefer to call it dissipative. The self is dissipated, weakened, and find it harder to tolerate reality and the challenges of life.  This, I believe, is what causes the stereotypical otaku that lives in his room and hates all things that are not part of his hobby, and who cares nothing for the feelings of others.  But  this is not something new, and certainly not Made in Japan. It is a risk we run all the time, to sink down in a darkness of our own making. We need the help we can get, to move toward the Light.  But what helps one is not always what helps another. And I am as “other” as you are ever likely to find, so I won’t say you will get anywhere by following in my footsteps.  But at least you can see them at all, in a world where most people are like shadows, just shadows in the fog.

Good things are overrated

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di090718

Better to fulfill many small wishes than no big ones.  That’s just the beginning, but it is a beginning.

Misunderstand me right: I am not saying that we should not be grateful for the good things in our lives. I am saying that we should not be ungrateful for the good things we don’t have.

The human mind is a generator of desire. As long as it lives and is left to its own devices, the vital mind has no limit to its wants. If you were given a billion years to live and a benevolent fairy that would fulfill your every wish, you would not only be bored out of your mind. You would also end those billion years with as much desire as you had when you began.

I mean this literally. There is no end to our wanting, wishing, desiring and coveting. You may or may not believe that we humans are proportioned to the divine, to eternity and all in it. But do not doubt this, that our capacity for desire is at the very least greater than the visible universe. If every planet around every star was ours to do with as we wanted, we would still not be satisfied when the universe came to its natural end.

The human mind is like a wellspring that overflows with longing, and the human body is only like a cup to take that longing away. We just don’t have the capacity to keep up with our wishes: They always run ahead of us, like the headlights of a car or the rainbow ahead of those who chase it.

It is natural that we believe in fulfilling our wishes. After all, if we never did, we would be dead. We are the descendants of those who, through millions and millions of years, strived hard to fulfill their urges. Without doing so, they would not live and reproduce and eventually give rise to us. And even in our own lives, we learned early on that it helped to scream when we were hungry, and later to follow other needs with great energy. When our needs were fulfilled, the discomfort receded for a while, and we felt good. But soon some need or another rose again, and we had to take action again. Eventually this became ingrained in us, so that even when there was no need, we would look for some way to feel even better. When you believe you can have ecstasy, ordinary life is agony. Likewise when you are in agony, ordinary life seems like ecstasy. You think: If only I could have what I lost! But if you regain it, you once again forget it. This is human nature.

It is not necessary to run till you stumble and fall under the whip of relentless wishes. We can begin to trim off the excesses. For this to happen we need to calm our mind. Meditation is one such tool. If you are religious, you will hopefully also find help in prayer, chanting or other such activities. But in any case, my advice is to start at the top, to trim off the ludicrous excesses that are created by advertising and peer pressure. Become free inside, realize that you alone are responsible for your life, and that your choices will form it, not the judgment of others, least of all total strangers to whom you are as cattle.

There is much more to achieve. But it is already a great relief to shed the witless excesses caused by profiteers inflaming your desires. And I don’t mean just “adults-only” desires, although those are pretty good examples now that I think of it. But just as magazines for men alternate between underdressed women and relationship advice, so also magazines for women alternate between cakes and diets. They and their ilk create the problems they purport to solve. A simple life keeps the problems fewer and smaller to begin with.

The time spent chasing the ultimate happiness could be spent in a pretty high state of happiness that lasts for a much longer time. The ultimate happiness will elude you anyway, because the human brain is not able to sustain ecstasy for long. This is why even the fulfillment of the mating urge, so intense because nobody would do something so insane without a hefty reward, still lasts for such a short time. But the “penultimate happiness”, the joy and contentment that is not taking your breath away but is still really good, can be sustained for a long time. Such joy and contentment is cheap and readily available. If you do easy, fun things and help other people without getting paid for it, you will be much happier than if you struggle to get everything you want. This is attested by those who have tried. I have yet to meet anyone or hear from anyone who reduced their selfishness and regretted it. And I have yet to hear of anyone saying on their deathbed: “I wish I had paid more attention to advertising.”

Meditation’s part in life

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di090621

This tree did not become like that in 30 days either.  Keep it up.

I believe that meditation is a natural state of mind, one of several, just like the various phases of sleep and waking consciousness. All of these have their place in a healthy human life, but they have different weight through our lifetime.

In part I base this on the fact that meditation in some form (or some similar experience) is found in different cultures at different times of history as part of very different and sometimes opposing cultures. But it is also based on my own experience. As I like to say, I learned meditation from God. I was praying and I found it rude to just rattle off a wish list and hang up. So I waited for God, not necessarily to speak to me as some guy would do (I already knew better than that) but to somehow accept my presence. And in that wordless waiting, something began to know. This was where I learned to meditate, although I did not know it by name until a more advanced Christian came upon me when I thought myself alone with God, and commented on it.

Occasionally others will tell their own story about experiencing this inner stillness by some other name. I don’t think this would happen even sporadically if it were not a natural function of being human. And besides, the useful effects of regular meditation indicate that it is not some synthetic add-on to our lives but a vital part that are missing in many lives because we have become disconnected. In general, meditative practices have been connected with religion. As other aspects of religion have been overturned, such as its iron-age level of science, the meditative practices have also been discarded as people sought happiness through material abundance. This, as we know today, did not work out well. Desires run ahead of our acquisitions like the rainbow runs ahead of those who chase it. No matter what we have, we can always think of something more. That is not to say that abject poverty does not make us unhappy. But at some point, fairly early actually, there are other needs that also need to be met. One of these is meditation.

I believe that in our natural state, meditation will gradually expand later in life, while sleep gradually takes up less space. Because people fail to meditate, they only experience the lessening of sleep, and they suffer from insomnia. Middle-aged and elderly people lose productivity to a great degree because of this. Meditation will never completely replace sleep, for the simple reason that the replacement is a very slow process and we don’t live for centuries. But the 70 year olds who do meditate or pray a couple hours every day tend to be in many ways as vital as when they were young. Sure, the body becomes brittle and fickle over time, but their mind is far more resistant to the ravages of time.

It seems that the teen years are to natural time to learn meditation. But after this, it will tend to keep a low profile during the reproductive years, when attention is on the practical things day by day. Then comes the transformation to the third life stage, an event now called “midlife crisis”, although it need not be a crisis unless you cling to your withering youth. At this point, many people renew their interest in meditation, and also find it easier.

There are a few who have gone ever deeper on the Innerways at a time when others were satisfied with building up their outer lives. These few tend to become shining examples, but is this because of their practice or were they always different, since they already long ago chose differently? We cannot decide this by a controlled experiment, because it takes place for the longest time in a realm where no one can get in and see what you actually do. Only when the results become obvious can we know. Or that is how it used to be. Today it is possible with scientific instruments to measure roughly what is going on in the brain. Not each particular thought, but whether you are sleeping, thinking, meditating or daydreaming. Perhaps we will get more scientific data on this soon?

But we already know that for many people, meditation (or some other spiritual practice) is the missing ingredient to a calmer, happier and often longer and healthier life. And mid-life is certainly not too late to get started. Why should your last decades be darker and more troubled than necessary? Even a little practice each day adds up to a great change over time. In fact, a little is exactly where one should start. If you keep watering that little sprout, it will grow all by itself, until it becomes a mighty tree, obvious to anyone who passes by.

Meditation: mind and body

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di090620

The mind can quickly create feelings of joy or pain, which have virtually no connection with the long time effects of what we do.

Meditation (and its recent love child with science, brainwave entrainment) is not a matter of belief. It is a matter of experience. I will comment today on some of these experiences and their time frame, which is very different for each perspective: Mind, body and spirit.

When you sit down and shut up for the first time, your MIND will release a surge of unbound awareness. If you sit in a quiet place with your eyes closed, that awareness will not be able to attach itself to sights and sounds, but will instead rush to attach to objects of the mind: Thoughts, emotions, memories, bodily sensations. These experiences are then drawn to the mind by free awareness, and will seem magnified because they are not drowned out by the usual activity of the mind. They can be pleasant, or unpleasant, or just plain weird. But by and large they will be somehow unusual. And one thing more: They will all pass. Some will fade as soon as you end the session, but in any case a regular practice of meditation will withdraw attachment and at the very least they will fade then.

This means a double threat to the casual would-be meditator. If the first experience is painful or frightening, you will not want to do it again at all. But if the first experience is pleasurable, then when it starts fading you will be upset and disappointed. Most likely you will then move on to some alternative technique, hoping to get that first rush of goodness again. In either case you fail to reap the benefits of a regular meditation practice.

While the mind acts literally in the blink of an eye, the body adapts more slowly. When you have a new experience of any kind, the brain will start growing new connections. The more unusual the experience, the more new connections in the brain. For most people, just sitting down and shutting up is a truly alien experience at first. If you used brainwave entrainment you will quickly experience some degree of synchronization between the two hemispheres of the brain, which should encourage growth of connections between these two halves. (With unaided meditation, this will happen somewhat later and more gradually.) It is not a good idea to overdose on these things, as I have reported elsewhere. It can cause seriously trippy side effects that can even be similar to psychoactive drugs, or at the very least weird and sometimes scary dreams.

The changes in the brain start within hours and continue for several weeks as the new connections grow and mature. After this they will be maintained for a while, but will slowly become more permanent and continue to grow if you repeat your practice regularly. After decades of meditation, there are large visible changes to the brain, with some parts of the brain being visibly larger and having more gray matter than in people who don’t meditate (or pray, or chant, etc) habitually. But long before this you should be able to notice that you are more emotionally stable, thinking more clearly, learning easier and sleeping better (albeit not necessarily more). Stress related illnesses will have less and less power over you. Eventually your mental health will reach a level where you see some of your past habits and thought patterns as sheer insanity.

As you can see, there is no real connection between the first rush of experience when you try meditation (or brainwave entrainment) and the lasting benefits after years of practice. The first is just a rush of new experience; the latter is a fundamental change of who you are in this world. If you just keep repeating your mantra, or count slowly to four, or chant the Holy Name, or listen to the binaural sound track, you will change. More exactly, because meditation is a natural part of human life (despite being repressed in some cultures), you will change into who you were meant to be. More about that “natural part” thing in our next update, Light willing.

Brainwave entrainment update

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di090612

You probably wonder if I have forgotten all about the brainwave entrainment projects I wrote about this spring? After all, I am a self-confessed fadboy, only my fads are out of sync with the rest of society, as am I generally. Or perhaps YOU have forgotten about them, although Holosync in particular has shot past anime in my site’s referrals. Anyway, no, I have not forgotten.

I still use the Holosync Dive track pretty much every workday morning, although I have skipped it a few times. It is a nice enough way to wake up – not beautiful, but a reasonable compromise between sleep and wakefulness. Holosync does not require actual meditation, and frankly I don’t find it conductive to traditional meditation either. The crystal (?) bowls, while somewhat more melodic than actual pots and pans such as your toddler may bang on, are still more in that direction than actual musical instruments in the European sense.

Still, it is half an hour to sit down and shut up, always a good thing in a hectic world. You might think I do nothing else, being unimaginably single for life and having the whole house to myself. But with The Sims 3 out now, it is so very easy to jump into a simpler pocket universe where there is always something going on. Stealing half an hour from sleep (thanks to the 10 minutes of delta at the end, which is as much as you get from 90 minutes of sleep in the morning) is a pretty good deal.

While I don’t find Holosync particularly pleasant, LifeFlow 8 has a certain appeal. It is the third and lowest of the alpha levels, the next being the 7 Hz theta level. Actually LF7 is a bit higher, to resonate with the Schumann Resonance, the natural base resonance of Earth’s ionosphere. I am not sure how useful that is, but some like to have that option. But enough about that. I have only heard a shorter sample of it and it did not resonate with me, at least yet.

LifeFlow 8, on the other hand, did. Even though the musical instruments on it are not particularly pleasant (some kind of trombone perhaps, or some weird form of bagpipe?), I immediately felt at home with it. I had not felt that way with the first two levels. I found them honestly to be a distraction rather than a help for meditation. I felt that I would normally meditate deeper than that when I meditated naturally and spontaneously. But with LF 8, it seemed strangely familiar. It did indeed feel like it resonated with me. Putting on the headphones, I would move into non-thinking mode in a matter of heartbeats, much as when meditating spontaneously.

For the non-meditating reader, thinking may sound like a good thing and non-thinking may sound like something your spouse does too much of. That is not quite what I mean. I believe that humans normally daydream when they don’t think. That is, while they are staring blankly, they are actually reliving memories or seeing images of things they want (or fear, for those of a less lucky mental constitution). I don’t do that, but that’s another chapter. What I talk about here is a state of brain where I don’t talk to myself, don’t visit imaginary worlds, but just am. I exist, I observe my own mind casually, but I don’t interact with it. Thoughts still come up, but I don’t think them. I don’t agree or disagree with them, I don’t extend them or compare them, and I don’t subvocalize them.

Usually when verbally oriented people think (and I believe that is most of us), we subvocalize like crazy. That is to say, we partially form the words we think, with our vocal tract, even if we don’t say them or even whisper them, even with our mouth closed, there are still small movements of the muscles we use when we talk. Sensors made with modern sensitive electronics can pick up these movements and actually play your thoughts out loud, although this can still only be done in a laboratory setting and with equipment placed directly on your body. So the CIA cannot actually monitor your thoughts from a distance, and never will with this technology. It just serves as proof that people are indeed directing their thought with the muscles of their vocal tracts. Once you are aware of this, you can start looking for it in yourself, and learn to shut down the whisper of the muscles. Or it could happen spontaneously, when you enter a state of mind where you have nothing you want to say.

For me, this happened first when I prayed to God. At first, I had prayed the American way, rattling off a wish list to God and hanging up. But I considered that this was pretty rude if God was real, and you would not do it in the first place if not. So after talking to God, I started to wait in case he had something to say to me. Some people report that God does actually speak to them. Perhaps they have a different mental constitution than I. God did not speak to me the way people do. But while waiting for him, I had nothing more to say, not even in my thoughts, since God supposedly reads those too. And so, perhaps for the first time in my life, I fell silent inside.

What happened after that, regarding my prayers, is of no concern to this article. But once I knew that it was possible to be silent inside, I could also practice this even when not in prayer. I don’t do that much, because life is full of fun things to do, one after another, and you could live for a million years and not stop having fun. But sometimes I really want that quiet, even though I am not sleepy. Because it is… not fun, exactly, but good. When you don’t have much food, food is good, and when you don’t have much quiet, quiet is good. I guess it is part of the recipe for being human.

It is this silence inside, ironically, that the soundscape of LifeFLow 8 reminds me of. The actual sound is outside the skull and after a few seconds I barely notice it. The quiet is inside, where I retreat to.

For those who have not meditated even casually for a long time, it may be another frequency (probably a higher one) that resonates best with you. Or you may have to get used to the process from scratch first. In the past I would have tried to tell you how, but there is an excellent introduction on Project Meditation, for free. You can even download free spoken instructions and timers of various lengths. I personally did not use a mantra when I first started scientific meditation, I simply counted very slowly to four. Some count to ten. Some just observe their breath. But mantra is probably the most common. Anyway, you probably know all this if you read this entry, unless you are a concerned relative or friend.

So to reiterate: Holosync is an alternative to meditation, while LifeFlow is a way to trigger and maintain meditation. I recommend Holosync when one is sleepy and LifeFlow when not, personally. I am not going to buy the second and later levels of Holosync though. I can afford the rather steep price, but I don’t for a moment believe in the “carrier frequency” theory, and I certainly don’t want affirmations in my meditation. They are an abomination, as far as I am concerned. Perhaps I will write about why, one day, or perhaps not. This is plenty for today.

Demons inside

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di090604

This is not a broken mirror, although it is heading that way. It is certainly not working as intended.  Seeing someone else in the mirror is usually a sign that things are pretty bad. But sometimes you only fail to see yourself.

I woke up this morning (which is a good thing) and what’s more, I woke up to the clock radio (another good thing, as it had somehow failed to wake me yesterday, as the volume was mysteriously turned down to zero, causing me to come a bit late to the course where we learned to use our new software tool.  I caught up though.)  The song they were playing was certainly suited to wake me up as well. Even not knowing who was singing (Anne Grete Preus turns out to be fairly famous here) I knew this was a work of the Adversary, that is to say, the spiritual current that takes me farther from my goal.  Your goal may vary.

The song was plain and had the more impact for it.  I shall simply translate it into plain English as well.  (Norwegian readers should be able to locate the lyrics by searching for the word “spøkelseshær”  (army of ghosts), which is uncommon in our language. )

A song about when you see yourself in broken mirrors
And dig up the terrain when the map is wrong
When the world goes against you
is anyway
no one as hard-working as
the demons inside oneself.

Let’s pause there.  So far it is disturbingly true. Of course, there are more than one type of demons, we’ll come back to that soon.  But the blatant demons that make life hard for even those who don’t believe in demons, they are more reasonably described as “mind parasites”.  I picked up that phrase from Robert W. Godwin, not sure if he made it himself.  Jung called them complexes. In computing, we actually use the word “daemon” about independent processes that mind some limited task on their own, like fetching or delivering mail.  In essence, these are parts of our psyche that don’t answer to the conscious I.  They do what they bloody well want, either to help or to hinder or simply ignoring their host as they pursue their own agenda.  At worst, they seem to take a perverse pleasure in making life miserable.

To no small extent, these mind parasites are downloaded from one’s parents or other family members during early childhood, which explains why they are so resistant to logic: They were ingrained before we had even a coherent view of the physical world, much less abstractions like logic. It is certainly possible to acquire, cultivate and even create mind parasites later in life as well, but the early ones tend to be the most powerful, and often there are early events that carry the seed for later ones.  For instance, our very early exploration of sexual and erotic nature may not be very positive, but this is unlikely to become much of an issue until puberty, at which point it may get magnified to disastrous proportions.  Also our relationship with food may take years or decades to reach its full magnitude, and yet in the end may maim or kill us.

No opposition from outside is likely to reach quite the level of tormenting power that a complex or mind parasite has, lodged in the very psyche like some kind of festering infection.

I don’t want to see you there anymore
You fight with shadows and an army of ghosts
For you are good enough
more than good enough
Good enough
as you are.

I’m not usually tormented by the voices in my head.  There is some reasonable paranoia (reasonable in the context of having spent all my adult life in a job which would strongly motivate some small part of the populace to attack me on sight if they knew, or at least make my life unpleasant in whatever way they could get away with).  But for the most part, I lead a rather paradisical life.  But that is not really my goal.  Well, in theory it is not.  In practice, it is very hard to break out of paradise upward.  Which is why most of those who have escaped it and continued their spiritual journey, have done so by being forcibly evicted from paradise.  Illness, economic ruin, the death of a loved one, or some other calamity.  I would rather not incite fate that badly, of course.

The Adversary, as I mentioned above, the countercurrent that contradicts the cosmic love, will happily keep the tormented in torment for as long as they live.  But failing that, it will work just as hard to keep the oblvious in oblivion.  And so for those of us who were comparatively blessed in terms of upbringing and temperament, or who have by grace or serendipity been able to reach a safer haven… for us, the voices in our head whisper still.  Now they whisper:  “You are good enough, more than good enough, as you are.”

For those of you still steeped in the Christian lore, you may remember the pharisees and scribes of that time.  There are people like that today as well, but more disturbing, there is an inner pharisee lying in wait for any of us should we come so far as to become distinct from ‘tax collectors and “sinners”.’  You don’t even have to be actually religious, although it doesn’t hurt unfortunately.  Once you are no longer reminded by your conscience (or the police and creditors), once you can take a breather with the burning Sodom safely hidden beyond the hills, the voice is waiting for you.  To tell you that you are better than the rest, that you deserve to be treated with respect and enjoy privileges.  And above all, that there is no need to press onward.  You are good enough, more than good enough, the way you are.

In closely related news, I bought Sims 3 today.  Full report later. Perhaps.  If I manage to break out from the paradise that playing the new game is.

Holosync vs. LifeFlow

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Or, more exactly, not. Something I have noticed on the Project Meditation forum is that there are people who go for LifeFlow because it is cheaper than Holosync, which they have considered before or even started with. (I am guilty of picking up LifeFlow after Holosync as well, although for other reasons. Holosync has a lot more PR, so people tend to discover it first.)

The thing is, the two competitors have quite different approaches. You cannot just substitute one for the other and use them in the same way, then expect the same results. Oh, there are similarities: They both use binaural beat technology to create a standing wave in the brain of a desired frequency, and they both warn their users that this may cause weird experiences as formerly unconscious material comes to the surface. Even unpleasant or scary stuff to some degree. But they both maintain that for most people, the pleasant experiences dominate. And reports from several users seem to bear all of this out.

However, Holosync uses more of a “brute force” approach. They start with delta waves from day one, which may be nice if you want to substitute meditation for sleep, but is very hard to assimilate. They actually claim that the intention is to overload certain parts of the brain in the hope that it will reorganize on a higher level of efficiency. I have mocked this in the part, I hope, saying that if so they should play the sound of screaming babies. No other sound overloads my brain at least faster than that. Clearly that cannot be what happens, or at least not the only thing that happens.

LifeFlow takes a different approach. While meditation is optional with Holosync, it is a central part of the recommended use for LifeFlow. And LifeFlow starts with pure alpha wave soundtracks, a form of brain waves that occur naturally in humans while awake, although it is most common just as we are about to fall asleep. Still, many people experience alpha waves simply by relaxing and closing their eyes. And if that is not, rolling the eyes back gently (as if trying to look through your forehead right above your nose, the so-called “third eye”) will usually trigger it. To further recognize this type of brainwaves, you will notice that it is incompatible with mathematics and other stuff that normally would make you furrow your brows to solve problems. Even long sentences may be hard to handle in this mode. However, you are still very much aware, in fact in some ways more than before. More present, perhaps. And sounds may sometimes seem louder.

Anyway, you should be able to recognize the alpha waves from daily life. If all goes well you should be able to spend most of the meditation session in this state. Not that you can’t do that without artificial stimuli too. But after about a month, you move on to a slightly deeper alpha level. Each month you get access to a deeper frequency. After something like three or four months, you are within the range we call theta waves. I think those are kind of overrated, they appear naturally in shallow sleep if I understand it correctly. Contrary to the claims on their website, vivid dreams (REM) actually use beta, same as waking thought and experiences. Although in me at least, dreams during shallow sleep can be scaringly intense and lifelike, as I have written about earlier this spring.

Over the course of about a year, you gradually get used to lower and lower frequencies, until you can supposedly experience delta waves and remain conscious, or at least aware. I wonder about that. It probably takes much longer time for most. But at least it should be theoretically possible.

I still use Holosync to wake up in the morning. It has a great combination of the meditative background sounds and the clanging of metal bowls that helps keep one awake even if sleepy. But I am not so sure about the psychoactive effects. The standing wave seems to remain confined to the deeper layers of my brain (and it probably is real, since I seem to need less sleep when I use it regularly) but my mind is not affected, or not noticeably.

This may be just as well, since without getting used to lower frequencies gradually, I would almost certainly go into deep sleep. The ability to retain witnessing awareness during deep sleep is something only the most adept meditators experience. (Although it can happen spontaneously once or a few times in life for others. It happened to me once when I was sick and had been awake at a time where I should normally be in deep sleep. I did fall asleep again, but somehow I did not lose consciousness completely. I have described it as a single candle somehow burning in the lightless deep somewhere in the ocean, hundreds of yards below the surface and its light, but it was not actually scary, and it was not actually a candle, just the “light” of awareness. Perhaps a better description is in the song by G.O.L: “All sound had died away, and it was quite dark. But in the void and in the silence, there was still a kind of knowledge, a faint awareness. Awareness not of name or person, and not of memories of the past. The awareness knew only itself.” Unlike the rest of their song, however, the experience was absolutely peaceful and not at all creepy. Merely detached awareness, without reflection or wishes.)

Now, I have no such experiences with either Holosync or LifeFlow, and I don’t know if I ever will. Probably not. I seem to be quite resistant to the actual experiences, which is ironic since I can have intense experiences of alternate states from music or sometimes silent meditation. But I hope to continue my experiments for some time to come, if I have some time to come at all. (Not that I know anything else.)

Sitting down, shutting up

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di090508

I need to calm myself down!  If you sometimes feel like that, you may want to read this. If not, you may NEED to read it…

I was thinking to write about the two brainwave entrainment systems I have tested this spring, Holosync and LifeFlow.  However, I realized that this should come first.

As I said already when I was reading up on Holosync, before buying the first (and for me, last) module: Personal growth and transformation will come in some form to virtually anyone who sets aside an hour a day for a monotonous task with a noble purpose. Or to put it more bluntly:  Sit down and shut up, and you will become a better person.

I do not know if it has always been like this. Probably, for in ages past, the day often went with simply working and caring for the most immediate needs. Only a few had the leisure to choose between wisdom and debauchery. But today, the whip we crack to keep us running is inside us rather than outside. The ever running, hectic mind will not be quiet. We work only half as much as our ancestors, and still we have barely time to sleep.

If you have been running around like that, not able to sit still for more than five minutes at best, doing “nothing” for an hour (or even a half!) can be a harrowing experience.  Bill Harris of Centerpointe and Michael Mackensie of Project Meditation both speak of “resistance” as being common, and even “upheaval” being possible, and they give much similar advice on how to deal with it.  Many of these things will happen even if you just sit there, say I.  Memories you had forgotten return out of the blue. Feelings you cannot explain suddenly arise, whether happy or sad.  You become aware of many bodily sensations that you did not notice before.  You suddenly think of a lot of things you should have done. You suddenly miss an old friend or relative that you could phone, or you realize that the house badly needs cleaning.

(Actually, unlike some respectable sages, I think the cleaning urge can be a good sign.  Sitting exercise increase the order within you, so the disorder around you become more obvious and contrary to you. I have good experience with doing some modest amount of cleaning and then returning to my position. But it is also possible that it can serve merely as a distraction, if the need is not real.)

More obvious hindrances are the intense feeling of boredom and urge to be entertained.  Normally people who have nothing else to do will sit down with the TV.  Failing that, a computer will do. It has endless entertainment and distraction.  (I feel the urge to open City of Heroes even now – I guess Goodwin is right that blogging can also be a form of spiritual exercise, “blogio divina” I think he calls it, although Google seems to not recognize that phrase.)

Failing any of these outlet, the human mind will throw itself into remembering (and often rewriting) the past, planning for the future, and constructing elaborate daydreams.  This is what I have written about so often lately, the “default network” of the brain.  (Google will offer to drown you in information about this if you don’t remember my earlier rants.) Everything to make sure we are not actually present in the moment.

Holosync, Hemisync, LifeFlow and many others may have other virtues as well, but arguably their main effect is that they keep people from escaping (or fleeing in horror) from the very act of quietude. Meditation and prayer do this as well, in addition to their own specific effects. Even listening to classic music (I recommend Back on principle) or watching art could have some effect.  And of course watching paint dry.

Before you go into any act of quietude with the sincere intention to make it part of your life, you should be prepared that resistance will appear.  The effect of quietude is growing awareness.  At first this awareness will be dispersed and unfocused, and therefore you will see these effects:  Random memories, feelings, impulses, small pains or itches or strange sensations of your body.  They are the first encounters of your awareness!  The awareness needs to be collected, tamed and trained to go beyond these distractions if you want to grow as a person.  You will meet things you have failed to integrate in the past, or as in my nightmare, thrown down in the basement and locked the door. You will even meet the collective delusions of our culture, and must go beyond these to begin to wake up.

But the first step is to stop stepping, sit down and shut up for a while.

Imagine we were not missed

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di090428

The younger we are, the more we depend on others to verify that we are real and valuable. But even when old and gray, we may not want to be just forgotten. Well, most of us.

“But imagine if we were not missed.” That’s what the little old lady on the bus said to the other little old lady. I don’t have my ears on stalks to eavesdrop on my fellow passengers when I ride the bus to work, but especially with the elderly they often talk loudly enough that I hear them anyway, unless I put headphones on and listen to one of the brainwave entrainment tracks on my PSP.

Anyway, I did not follow the conversation, but this line leaped out at me. I suppose when one grows seriously old, this matter comes closer to one’s mind. Knowing that almost certainly we will be the next to leave, we have not only our own sadness to contend with that we shall leave behind all that we loved. After all, whether you believe you go to a better place or simply disappear, it seems unlikely that this sadness will continue after our transition. But there is also the thought that we will leave an emptiness in their lives, and from experience you know that this will last for a long time and never completely disappear. Just kind of fade to a scar.

I assume the other little old lady must have made some reference to this, but I did not hear that. Only this line: “But imagine if we were not missed.” And I thought, or rather knew without needing to think, that this is indeed the case with me. Well, almost. We are few enough people at work that I would probably be a little bit missed there. And one or two readers would miss my journal, I guess. But that is a rather small and abstract degree of missing. Like the bonsai of missing.

Some years ago, this would have seemed to me a bad thing. I might even have been upset, thinking about it. It is a human trait, to want to be important to others, or at the very least to one other human. Possibly even a cat or dog, or so it sometimes seems. I think it is related to our need to feel validated, that is to say, to get feedback telling us that we are real. That we are a valid human, at the very least. I have long thought that this is a major reason for the practice of dating (which is evidently a kind of ritual in the United States, while around here it is so informal that I did not really know it existed for most of my life.) From the descriptions I have seen of it, certainly it seems that a big part of it is having a mirror to verify one’s own existence in. I date, therefore I am.

I know I needed more validation before. More reassurance that I was real and someone knew it. There may still be some, I don’t know – even my near “hermit” life has some of it, after all. I have to work most days of the year, and there are humans. (Much as I prefer to just work with the computers, when possible.) Even when I have some weeks off work, I will still go to the supermarket and buy food. The people at the check-out certainly seem to believe that I am real, since they take my money and even give me change back. So really, I don’t know how I would feel if I were completely without human company for a long time. Probably not very different though. There seriously isn’t much affirmation you can wring out of a stressed cashier, although I occasionally see people try.

I would like to credit my religion here, and I think it must surely be involved, deeply involved. But it cannot be only that. I was quite more fervent in my religious practice when I was younger, as in praying more on my knees and reading the Bible and tracts that exhorted to piety, not to mention regular meetings where both God and fellow believers were present. Of course God is always present, or if not one would definitely notice it, in a hair-raising way to say the least. But anyway, my religion is rather low-key now, although it is never far from my mind. (Perhaps it has sunk deeper in, what there is left of it?) Anyway, long time has passed, and the certainty that I exist (if only as a created being) is pretty much permanent. If I am ignored, or what is more, forgotten, I do not doubt that I am or what I am.

It would still be kind of sad to know that my life has been lived in vain on this planet, true. (If I had only God to worry about, being incarnate would not really be necessary.) But then again, that is why I write here, and there, and around the web. Just the other day I got a comment on a LiveJournal entry written explicitly for the purpose of explaining how to solve a problem with the music player Amarok which failed to recognize .oga sound files. (I had to rename them to .ogg for Amarok to recognize them and the entire directory structure in which they were placed.) So, my life was not completely wasted. ^_^

The Internet is not a very stable place, but then again neither are most of the people who use it. I realize that after my passing, gradually my tracks here will be washed away. But it will take some time now, as I have uploaded my thoughts and my life so thoroughly to the Net, over so many years, and there are various archive systems in place now, especially Google. So there seems to be a good chance that something similar will happen to what Leonard Cohen says near the end of his “Tower of Song“:

Now I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back
They’re moving us tomorrow to the tower down the track,
But you’ll be hearing from me, baby, long after I’m gone:
I’ll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song.

That’s how I hope my footprints in this world will fade, gently, in the light rain of time. When I am gone, should anyone miss me, they can go online – if nothing else, using Google cache or the Wayback Machine – and I will be there, no more and no less than I was when I enjoyed my bodily existence.

The awakening society

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di090418

I think it’s really cool when people try their best to help others. (Instead of, say, watching anime all evening…)

Awakening, Enlightenment, Higher Consciousness – we tend to associate this with hermits, Zen monks and New Agers going “ooommm”. Awakening to higher states of consciousness is indeed a very private, personal thing. But consistently living at a higher level of consciousness has consequences for those around us, as has living at a low level. What would happen if the average citizen put a little more “ooommm” in their life?

I am not proposing that you do this instead of caring for your kids or earning your own living. Rather, that one takes some time from watching TV (which is usually actively harming the mind. ) The television keep you in a constant state of moderate stress with its frequently shifting images, while you are helpless to influence what you see. This wears down your body and brain. Meditation is a scientifically proven anti-stress. Or you could choose any other “sitting practice”, such as prayer or lectio divina (holy reading) if you are religious (which is not as bad as it looks – the guys on TV are not representative of real religion). For those fearful of both religion and mysticism, at least set aside some time each day for contemplation of beauty, whether it is a piece of visual art or a timeless musical composition. The scientifically inclined may want to experiment with brainwave entrainment.

Meditation and other “sitting practices” make you more aware. Biologically, they reduce stress and restore natural rhythms to the body. Mentally, they calm the frenzied churning of the mind so you can think and feel more clearly. Subjectively, the constant “now” that we live in seems to expand, infused by eternity. But what about the social dimension?

First off, the growth in awareness is not something new and magical. All of us have grown in awareness through our life. We started as a purely biological parasite with no awareness whatsoever. We gradually became aware of ourselves and the distinction between self and (m)other. Then we grew in awareness through many years of play and learning, a time of great confusion that hopefully lessened as more of the pieces came together. When we grew up, we learned to think beyond the purely selfish and beyond the moment. You can say our circle of awareness expanded in space as well as time. This process continues in some adults, and they become mature. Others don’t.

The acute problems in any society comes from those who are severely lacking maturity. The rank and file criminal falls squarely in this category. Unable to think beyond his selfish wants to empathize with others, unable to see the consequences of his actions in future time, he acts without forethought or afterthought, tossed by the waves of his excitement and the manipulations of others. Their severe lack of maturity is seen in their toddler-like sense of entitlement.

But crime is not the only fruit of low awareness. Unreflected sexual behavior brings broken hearts and unloved children, not to mention the spread of diseases ranging from nuisance to slow, painful death. Impulsive shopping causes shortages further ahead and sells us into varying degrees of slavery. It is also one of the biggest sources of family tension. And it destroys the environment by squandering resources and overflowing the landfills with yesterday’s shiny things.

In our social life, lack of awareness and maturity quickly gets on other people’s nerves. Those who are more mature think we are idiots for being whiny and self-centered for no reason. Those who are not more mature still think we are idiots, but because we hog the spotlight and don’t realize that they are the center of the universe. While having common enemies may still keep us together, deep and lasting friendships are hard to maintain unless we have grown to care about others and give them room to be themselves. Instead we get dysfunctional pairings between the needy and the intrusive, or between the martyr and the persecutor.

These pairing frequently form the basis of family life as well. But while an immature person may be great fun in the bedroom, they are that much more vexing elsewhere. And the worst of the horrors is an immature parent, which brings the madness on to the next generation, distorting their tiny minds and making it hard for them to grow and mature naturally themselves. Luckily some in each generation manage to find other role models, or we would have been doomed to an endless cycle of madness.

Now, it would be cool if we all reached Satori, Nirvana or whatever your name is for the ultimate Enlightenment. But my claim is that just a little more awareness would do a world of good. For the criminals, this would unfortunately have to be enforced from outside. But the rest of us have the choice to set aside a little time on a regular basis to work on our consciousness. And it is the regular practice that does it, even if it is only a little.

What would life be if people were a little more mature? They would be calmer, not showering you with their stress like a wet dog shaking itself before you. They would be happier, more content and grateful; instead of whining so much, they would smile more and be excited about opportunities for themselves and others. They would be less selfish, more willing to share, more trustworthy and more willing to trust others. They would have more friends and fewer rivals. They would be wiser, managing their time and money better. They would show up in time and not having to run off in a hurry; they would live simpler lives and have a little time and money to spare for those who actually need a helping hand. They would not be quick to judge others, but on the other hand they would be able to admit their own mistakes and even apologize and try to make things better.

Life in a more aware society would not be paradise or utopia. While meditation and wisdom may protect against many accident and illnesses, eventually we all sicken and die. Finite resources would still be finite, even if we used them more wisely. There would presumably still be earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis. But everyday life would be a lot better than it is now. And it is pretty good now compared to how it used to be. There is nothing that keeps us from making a better world for ourselves and your children. Nothing but our own excuses.