Category Archives: science

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.”

Closing the barn door…

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Norway has ordered two shots of Mexican “swine” flu vaccine for each citizen.  The vaccine is expected to arrive in November.  The flu is expected to be endemic in Norway in September.

It is important to be seen doing something, even if “something” is  wasting the tax money.

Heat wave

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di090704

Even the characters in the anime “Lucky Star” talk about global warming when the weather is hot.

These have been two hot weeks, despite a couple days with at least some hours of overcast. The heat just seems to build up, and by now I am reduced to wringing a thin shirt in lukewarm water and wear it. That way the water that evaporates does not come from my own body, at least.  Earlier years I have had bad leg cramps in the summer, which one doctor believed came from not drinking enough water. I am not sure about that, it seems I eat very few things that contain less than 90% water: Yogurt, yogurt ice cream, juice mixed with water, soda mixed with water.  Well, a couple bananas this weekend.  But mostly very watery stuff.

I can certainly imagine elderly, severely disabled people dying from this heat.  Although in Norway, it is mostly the winter who culls the elderly population.  As long as they stay indoors and keep the heating on and dress in warm clothes, they are fine, but of course at some point they venture outside and their hearts go poof.  In comparison, the summer is a minor problem, at least for now, and in most of the country.  But heat waves like these certainly do push the border.

An online friend rages today because most people don’t know the difference between weather and climate.  “It’s so hot, it must be the global warming!”  “No, there is no global warming, for it was so cold this winter.”  I kind of feel her pain.  But in America it is even worse, because not just opinions but even factual climate data depend on what party you vote for, and this again depends on your opinion of abortion and your grandmother.  I joke that if this continues, eventually one day they will wake up and find that everyone from the other party is just gone, kinda like the Rapture.  Because their two worlds will have moved so far apart that they can no longer see each other.  Wouldn’t that make an awesome SF story at least?  Perhaps there is a transition phase in which Democrats appear ghostlike and foggy to Republicans, and the other way around, and most people don’t notice because they habitually avoid them anyway.  And then they’re just gone. Woo!

What do you mean, heat gone to my head?  The voices in my head say they are just fine.

Happy 4th of July, by the way! I hope the terrain is less tinder-like than here if you’re having fireworks.

Finished ripping CDs

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di090703

Two bags with my favorite CDs, which I once assumed I would leave behind when I died, hopefully far into the future. Now in the trash they go.

Finished at last! Every CD I could find is ripped to the hard disk, and a backup is made to an external disk.  The CDs from USA and Europe are stuffed in bags to throw in the trash, those that are not there already.  I keep the Japanese ones, for now. I originally planned to keep the CDs from my favorite artists:  Enya, Leonard Cohen, Chris de Burgh.  They are all awesome, compared to pretty much anyone else, in that the consistently make good songs and perform them themselves with great enthusiasm.  And they fill up all or much of the CD with good songs instead of spacing it out with one good song and 9 boring on each CD. So I was really planning to keep them, until the Jammie Thomas judgment. Now I am not planning to have an American or European CD in the house ever again.  Nor do I intend to buy any from online shops like iTunes etc.  They had their chance, and they blew it.  This means war.

I have decided on Sound Converter, a Linux program, to make all the tracks into MP3 files for easy streaming.  The Opera Unite music streaming program only handles that format.  Unfortunately it also panics at the sight of non-ASCII characters.  Perhaps it thinks they are malicious code?  I am still not sure what to do with my Japanese music in that regard, I have found English translations for one (DearS) but may have to either translate or transliterate the others manually, a Herculean task, although not Sisyphean.  As it is, just converting the hundreds of non-Japanese CDs will likely take weeks, as my Linux CD at home is so old, it is slow even with Xubuntu.

Once the tracks are converted, I intend to use Opera Unite to stream them so my friends around the world can listen to them.  That’s illegal, of course: According to the recent Norwegian law about intellectual property, it is illegal to play music for your family. You can only perform copyrighted works at home if you do so “without the help of strangers”. Since your stereo is almost certainly made by strangers, using it to play for your spouse and kids could get you arrested.

That is not very likely though, because the police is locked up in a long struggle with the government.  They are refusing to work overtime – crimes should please be committed during office hours until further notice.   Things have been going sour over a very long time:  The Norwegian police was reorganized, as are pretty much every tentacle of government, including the one in which I worked.  And like that one, the police also found themselves doing more work for the same pay, and less meaningful work as well. As far as I know this has been the outcome of every “reorganization” in public sector in Norway, as it probably is everywhere else.  Anyway, after years of this they have had enough.  So they are doing only what they absolutely have to do.  And this means as long as we have crazy people running around doing actual crimes, there won’t be police left over to make sure I don’t let my best friends listen to my favorite music.

Trade Day again

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di090702

Unfortunately, the rest of you is gradually going to get bigger and bigger too, until you’re just a quivering mound of fat.  Luckily it takes decades to run its course.

I had forgotten that the first Thursday of July is Trade Day (or Day of Commerce) in Kristiansand, year after year.  It seems to usually take me by surprise.  Not so the people of the surrounding countryside.  I did notice on the commute bus that it was fuller than usual.  In fact, there was hardly a free seat by the time we came to the city.  Still it was not until I saw the crates on the pavement that I remembered.

Extremely regular readers may remember that I have reported from Trade Day almost yearly. In particular the sight of an unusual number of chubby housewives, or something like that, invading the city for the occasion.  My primary theory is that they come from the surrounding countryside, but I have no explanation why women outside the city would be visibly fatter than those in it.  So I have also speculated that maybe these come from the same area as their slightly slimmer sisters, but that they stay out of sight except in dire emergencies, such as half price on frying pans.

In any case, they are back, and they are fatter than ever.  In fact, I think this is getting too far. Perhaps I should say, even I think so.  I find chubby women decorative, but this goes beyond merely chubby.

I’ll briefly repeat my observation of body mass and femininity.  Skinny women, with some few exceptions, tend toward the boyish, or “unisex” perhaps more correctly.  When they fatten up, they normally become more womanly:  Their cheeks grow rounder, their breasts grow larger and heavier, their hips and buttocks grow larger and rounder, and their thighs softer.  But at some point – which varies from family to family, it seems – this process stops.  Perhaps all the feminine fat cells are filled to the max. Whatever the reason, further weight gain seems to just settle wherever there is free space on the body, gradually transforming their feminine curves to a quivering mound of fat.  And once again, they become near indistinguishable from their equally fat brethren. Unisex again.

There is also the detail that it looks unhealthy.  At some point you know that these people will have a problem walking up stairs or a hillside, in extreme cases perhaps even on flat ground, though there are still few of those around here.  But we are starting to see more and more American conditions.  And we know that Americans spend a lot of money on their health and get rather less health for it.  Some claim that this is because socialized medicine is inherently superior in some way.  I think it can all be explained by the fact that most Americans are fat and lazy.  And now we’re getting there too, even the women.  It reminds me of a comment I once saw to the effect that America is a shining lighthouse, and the purpose of a lighthouse is so other people can steer clear of it, not straight at it!

Apart from that, the day was hot but despite the blue sky there was a fairly strong breeze that kept the city from overheating completely.  There was much less wind in the valley where I live, however, so I did not get the house cooled down until right now, around midnight.  Even then it is barely bearable.  Sleep quality (and even quantity) suffers from the heat.  Ironically the basement is downright chilly.  I should have rented that instead, I sometimes think.

I can’t imagine how people can stand being fat in this weather.  Fat is a good insulator, to the point where whales and seals use it to survive the cold of the arctic waters. And unlike clothes, you can never take it off. Wouldn’t it be nice if humans put on weight in the autumn and lost it again in spring? In Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia trilogy there is such a mechanism, but then again the seasons there last for centuries.  I suppose “bone fever” is not really an alternative here on Earth. Although I do expect to lose a few pounds during the Mexican flu, if I survive it.  And it seems all but a few people do.  But that is a concern for another time, if ever.

Pick your disaster please

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di090701

Or perhaps it already is the year 2100 and we are characters in The Sims XXIV. Because if I narrowly study “The Sims” games and carefully project the future development from currently existing data, today’s reality is around the level of detail I would expect by then. If so, I really hope there is a backup of our world.

This week’s New Scientist has another article on global warming: “Sea level rise: It’s worse than we thought“. It focuses mostly on the melting of glacier. It is the same old death warmed over and elicits the same mocking and denial from the people who don’t believe humans can change the climate.

I was tempted to write a comment myself, but I restrained myself primarily because I no am no longer a subscriber. The reason why not is, ironically, that they have not introduced an option for web-only subscription, but insist on sending me dead trees every week as long as I subscribed. And by air freight, it seems, given how rapidly they arrived. I can see the positive aspect of that, but it ought to be entirely optional, as it is with The Economist and lately even EnlightenNext (formerly What is Enlightenment). But enough about that. What was my reaction?

“2100 – that’s several decades after the Singularity. It won’t be a problem for humans anymore, even should there still be humans around.”

What? Why should climatologists need to worry about something squarely in the field of the computer scientists? As if they don’t have enough to keep track of already! The only thing they need from the tech nerds is a new supply of even faster computers every couple years, to run the newest, improved climate models. Ironically, it is exactly this trend toward faster and faster computers that may render their entire career absolutely worthless, because the things they study literally happen at glacial speed, while the changes brought about by the information revolution happen over the course of a few years.

This is not the only case. It is a general trait of science. It is a long time now since anyone could be an expert on science – these days, we all know more and more about less and less. This renders most science without predictive power, because the real world is almost never limited to one science. Well, we can (for the time being) still predict solar and lunar eclipses with great accuracy. But when we get down to earth, nothing stands still – or moves in the same direction – long enough to make a good prediction.

Peak oil, anyone? Remember a year ago, when the oil price was so disastrously high that students started to enroll in online courses even though they lived only an hour’s drive from the college? And since agriculture was based heavily on gas- and diesel driven tractors and lorries, food prices went up as well, even more than they already did from the brainless decision to invest tax money in growing corn for fuel, outcompeting human food. So, last year, the end of the oil age was near. Oh noes! We are all going to walk or ride. The cities will be left deserted. The military and police will collapse. We are going back to the dark ages if not worse! Well, that situation is bound to repeat itself if the world somehow gets out of the current economic slump. But you know what? This directly influences the CO2 content in the atmosphere, and thus the greenhouse effect. Unless you are reasonably well informed about fossil fuel extraction (and, it later turned out, economics) your climate predictions will be only marginally better than tea leaves. Generally you can say “it will become warmer” since there is already CO2 out there enough to change the climate for a long, long time. But any details beyond that are doomed.

But that is not all. Oh no. Let us talk virus. After the SARS outbreak that mysteriously died out, the world became aware that pandemics were a real threat. And as good luck would have it, a few innocent people died of bird flu before we had time to forget the whole incident. Sucks to be them, but for the rest of us this was like a gift from on high. Or at least could have been. The world’s governments – at least the parts of the world that people are not fleeing from at the risk of their very lives – started to plan, and even cooperate. Roche built factories to churn out the miracle flu medicine, Tamiflu, and governments started stockpiling. Many other plans were laid as well, to stop a pandemic before it could stop us.

Remember what happened? The Mexican flu sneaked up on us, and is currently spreading rapidly, especially in the southern hemisphere where it is winter now. If this had been the bird flu, with 60% mortality, instead of the much less murderous swine flu, civilization as we know it would have been doomed. On a timescale of approximately a year. That is to say, in 2011 there would be no Internet, no nations, no banks, and very few places with both electricity and running water. I am not kidding about this, and neither should you kid yourself. We studied for this test for five years, and we flunked utterly, completely.

I could go on and on, in fact I have several long paragraphs in my brain cache ready to write down. But would that even do any good? What we need to know is that urgency has priority over severity. This understanding is passed down by the survivors from every battlefield, literal or figurative, and most people have a vague idea that it must be so. Which is why you need so long an education to obsess over something you not only don’t know, but CAN’T know.

Now, tell me something about the climate in 2030, when I or at least someone I care about may still be around. If you don’t know what will happen in 20 years but can make very accurate predictions a century ahead, excuse me if I attend to my other interests instead.

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.

Jammie Thomas pays my music

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di090619

In the trash they go. There will be no new ones.

Jammie Thomas, one of the most ordinary people in the western world, was just fined nearly 2 million dollars for having made 24 songs available for upload on the file sharing service Kazaa. (The songs became available for upload because she downloaded them – this is the nature of most file sharing systems.)

I get the impression that the court’s decision did not spark much controversy in the USA, and this seems reasonable:  Americans are used to farcical trials, where the best paid lawyers win more or less by default; so much more when the opponent does not belong to the ruling ethnicity. For us Europeans it seems strange, but once you get to know a number of Americans, you realize how little faith they have in the judicial system.  And if neither the particular crime nor punishment has any direct consequence for you, you just ignore it.  Mind your own small business.

The reaction here in Scandinavia is very different.  A wave of hate  and contempt is sweeping Norway (the homeland of “So sue me” DVD-Jon) and neighboring Sweden (harbor of The Pirate Bay). Particularly the younger generation vow to never buy a CD again. I am not sure they will stick to that always, but probably as long as they can effortlessly download the songs from file sharing sites.  Certainly whatever sting their conscience may have offered them before is now gone, nay reversed:  A deep sense of righteous glee filling them each time they get to stick it to the fascist recording industry and the corrupt governments that allow it to run rampant over the back of the poor.

My reactions are more mixed. I developed a pretty large software package for certain businesses a couple decades ago, and I remember the murderous rage I felt at the thought of people stealing it.  I would not particularly mind seeing them in debt for the rest of their life – actually how I felt at the time was that they were not really human and their lives worthless.  Of course, this is true most of the time for most of us, but I was still projecting much of that then, thus the intensity of feeling.  Objects and random strangers cannot incite such intense emotions, they always need to have an anchor inside us.

For the young and angry virtual mob, the anchor is no doubt the reasonable fear because they too have been sharing songs online, and probably more than 24 of them at that. The thought that their entire lives could be ruined any random day and that there is nothing they can do about it would be pretty upsetting.  (This does not in any way change the fact that this was a gross miscarriage of justice and should never have happened.) Personally I have bought and paid for my hundreds of CDs, which I am throwing away, except for the Japanese ones.  I am even more motivated to get rid of them now.  I do not really want to have physical objects in my house associated with the cRIminal Association of America and its lickspit running dogs here in Norway.

Actually downloading music used to be legal here in Norway, until the current mainly Social Democrat government changed it. Their minister of culture is still supporting the record label industry, whereas the state’s less political privacy watchdog is pulling in the opposite direction.  This is no great wonder, for the Social Democrat leadership is strongly in favor of the European Union, from which we got the current law.  This again makes sense since the EU is dominated by Social Democrats. As such it has an extensive bureaucracy with many leading positions that may be available to former politicians who have been good at wagging their tail, and with no more need for elections to maintain your status.

When I was young – in the 1970es – we had cassette recorders, which people used to play music casettes they had bought, but probably more often songs they had recorded from the radio or copied from one another.  This had been going on since the days of the spool tape recorder, about half a century ago.  Kids these days have probably not seen those contraptions, but I have one stashed away in a closet here, as well as a couple tapes with songs copied form Light knows where.  (Although by far most of my tapes are recordings of meetings at conferences in the Christian Church, popularly known as Smith’s Friends. I am keeping these for as long as the tapes may still last, or I do, lest they be lost forever.)

OK, that’s a pretty roundabout entry.  But I am currently working on getting Opera Unite running stably on my machine, so I can stream all those thousands of songs I have bought and paid to friend and family.  (Who else but friends and family would wade through a blog like this?)

I will come back to the actual address of my music streaming server if I get it to work stably. So far it stops working on my home machine with Windows, my old Linux machine is too weak to pull it, and the new Linux machine is only active a few hours a day.  But my intention is good, at least.  ^_^

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.