Church of the Churchless

Learning new skills is key to improving both mind and body

Like most people, I'm a big believer in improving my skills. This is such an obvious thing to do, it hardly bears mentioning. But I feel like I need to stress the obvious, because some visitors to this blog seem to view spirituality as a "one and done" sort of thing. 

Meaning, you find a religion, meditation technique, mystical path, or whatever that suits you, and you stick with that approach with no modifications for the rest of your life. Yeah, I realize this sounds ridiculous, and it is. Yet I've encountered people who actually seem to believe it's the way to go.

Which goes against how we deal with just about every other activity of mind or body. 

I started playing tennis at a young age, twelve or so. I played competitively into my 30s. I never stopped trying to improve my game: taking lessons, trying new racquets, stringing racquets at various tensions, hitting balls against a backboard.

I began learning Tai Chi in 2005. Nineteen years later, I'm way past being a beginner. My Tai Chi instructor, even more so. Yet my instructor is continually teaching new techniques. Naturally they become subtler since almost everyone in our classes is well versed in the basics of Tai Chi. There's always something more to learn about Tai Chi, though.

When it comes to meditation, I've meditated daily for about 55 years. Just as with tennis and Tai Chi, I'm always open to fresh ideas about how to make my meditation more pleasant and fulfilling. That's why I like to read new books about meditation and mindfulness, along with re-reading old books -- since I've found that as I change over the years, how I look upon a meditation/mindfulness book will change also.

Teachers are helpful in improving skills, whether they be an actual person or a virtual person (book, video, web site, etc.). I've never agreed 100% with any teacher I've had. All I look for in a teacher is the ability to help me learn something new. They always will look upon some things differently than I do, so I pick and choose what I accept from a teacher and what I reject.

For example, I'm enjoying James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. However, some of what he says doesn't resonate with me, either because Doty is wrong, or he's right and I don't understand what he's getting at.

Doty speaks about synchronicity being a way for us to manifest what we desire through unexpected connections that arise in our life.

Okay, we've all experienced amazing coincidences that can seem as if the universe is sending a message to us. That's possible, though unlikely. Given how many happenings there are every day in everybody's life, coincidences and synchronicity are going to occur once in a while just by chance, like rolling a pair of dice and getting two sixes five times in a row.

Yesterday I stopped by our bank to deposit a check. I wanted to get that errand done as quickly as possible, since I needed to go grocery shopping afterwards and then walk our dog before it got dark, which happens pretty early this time of the year in Oregon.

I had to wait a while before a teller was free. I got a woman who I'd noticed had spent quite a bit of time with a previous customer. That transaction required the assistance of a supervisor. When I was called to her station, I was mildly irked at having to wait so long. I handed her a deposit slip and a check, but she asked, "What do you need to do?"

"A deposit," I said, "I just gave it to you." "Anything else?" "No." She then fiddled with her terminal before asking me for my I.D. I dug out my drivers license, gave it to her, and said, "Why do you need I.D.? I've been banking here for a long time." "Because I'm new and don't know you."

That changed everything. Now I knew why she was taking so long to help customers. She needed assistance from a supervisor to do my transaction, but that didn't bother me after I realized she was learning on the job. 

After going grocery shopping at a couple of stores, I decided to get a grande decaf nonfat vanilla latte at the Starbucks within the south Salem Fred Meyer store. The barista, an older man, needed me to repeat my order several times before he got it right on the terminal. Eventually he had to call another barista over to show him where "vanilla" was on the screen.

This was fine with me, as I'd noticed that he had to use a "cheat sheet" of how to make Starbucks drinks with the customer ahead of me. Meaning, he also was learning his job. This is rare for me, encountering someone who is new at their job. Yet it happened twice in the space of an hour or so.

Doty might say that was synchronicity, that I needed to learn something about patience and compassion for slow employees. However, I just see it as a coincidence. Regardless, I learned something about myself. Next time I won't be so quick to get irritated at an employee who takes extra time to do something for me.

That's all we can hope for from life. Learning. Becoming more skilled. Having more compassion and love. As my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Marshall, was fond of saying, "Do your best. Angels can do no better." 

Mindfulness is focused attention plus peripheral awareness

In December 2018, six years ago, I wrote what seems to be my first (and only) post about a book I'd just started reading, The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness.

A few days ago something spurred me to pluck the book from a bookshelf where it had been languishing after I'd read about half of the 415 pages, then put it aside.

I decided to re-read it, since the book methodically describes ten stages of Buddhist meditation and I wanted to start at the beginning rather than jump right into Stage Six, where is where I left off. 

I liked the book before, and I'm liking it now. The author, John Yates, who also goes by Culadasa, is deeply versed in what meditation is all about, and has a knack for describing meditation in a manner that is clear, creative, and compelling. 

In my 2018 post, I noted how the book's discussion of attention and awareness makes a lot of sense. Both are necessary in both everyday life and meditation. (RSSB refers to the India-based religious organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.)

In my reading this morning I was struck by the wisdom of clearly distinguishing attention from awareness. A Glossary in the back of the book defines these terms.

Attention: The cognitive ability to select and analyze specific information and ignore other information arising from a vast field of internal and external stimuli. Attention is one of two forms of conscious awareness. Peripheral awareness is the second: we pay attention to some things, while simultaneously being aware of, but not attending to, others. 

Awareness: As used in this book, awareness always has the same meaning as peripheral awareness. It never means attention, nor does it refer to covert or non-conscious awareness. 

Any meditation approach that doesn't combine the benefits of attention and awareness is like a bird trying to fly with one wing. Both are needed. When we drive a car, we can't focus all of our attention on staying in our lane and keeping a safe distance from the car ahead of us. 

We've got to have peripheral awareness also. What if a car unexpectedly runs a stop light at an intersection? What if a child chasing a ball runs into the road? There are so many things we need to be aware of, other than what our primary focus is.

This is why mantra meditation, where a word or words is repeated (usually soundlessly) as a focus of attention, is very limited. Repeating a mantra was emphasized by the RSSB teachings that I followed for so many years. And not only during the time of meditation, but as much as possible throughout the rest of the day.

I eventually realized that this had some major drawbacks.

I found that when I put too much attention on the mantra, I distanced myself from the reality of what was around me. Like, the person I was talking with, or nature, if I was out on a walk. I also observed that many RSSB devotees acted a lot like robots, lacking spontaneity, naturalness, social awareness. 

They were so focused on keeping their attention from scattering out into the world, they were clueless about what was happening in the world -- the exact opposite of mindfulness, which requires a wise balancing of attention and awareness. There's a time to be focused on one thing, and there's a time to be aware of the entirety of what surrounds us.

Since recently I've been reading and writing about a couple of books aimed at making the reader better able to manifest their goals, with each book emphasizing the importance of positivity in our affirmations, visualizations, and such, I was struck by how The Mind Illuminated echoes that advice in a chapter I re-read today. 

Here Yates is discussing the process of (1) forgetting the meditation goal of focusing attention on the breath at the nose, (2) engaging in some mind-wandering, and (3) waking up again to the goal of focusing attention on the breath at the nose.

Awakening to the present is an important opportunity to understand and appreciate how your mind works. You've just had a minor epiphany, an "aha!" moment of realizing there's a disconnect between what you're doing (thinking about something else) and what you intended to do (watch the breath).

But this wasn't something you did. Nor can you voluntarily make it happen. The process that discovered this disconnect isn't under your conscious control. It happens unconsciously, but when the "findings" become conscious, you have an "aha!" moment of introspective awareness.

The way to overcome mind-wandering is by training this unconscious process to make the discovery and bring it into consciousness sooner and more often. Yet, how do you train something that happens unconsciously?

Simply take a moment to enjoy and appreciate "waking up" from mind-wandering. Savor the sense of being more fully conscious and present. Cherish your epiphany and encourage yourself to have more of them. 

Conscious intention and affirmation powerfully influence our unconscious processes. By valuing this moment, you're training the mind through positive reinforcement to wake you up more quickly in the future.

Also, avoid becoming annoyed or self-critical about mind-wandering. It doesn't matter that your mind wandered. What's important is that you realized it. To become annoyed or self-critical in the "aha!" moment will slow down your progress.

You can't scold the mind into changing, especially when dealing with entrenched mental patterns like forgetting and mind-wandering. It's like telling your unconscious you don't want to have the mind-wandering interrupted. If negative emotions do arise, simply notice them and let them come, let them be, and let them go. 

It's like training a pet. Consistent, immediate positive reinforcement of behaviors we want will be far more effective than punishing behaviors we don't. 

My fear of death is less now. But is there anything to fear, really?

I used to have a strong fear of death. So much so, as I described in a 2004 HinesSight post ("Give me liberty or give me gerbil"), I made an attorney say gerbil rather than death whenever she needed to refer to my eventual demise. 

Kathleen Evans, the attorney, did a masterful job at a whiteboard injecting into our legal-impaired brains the gist (but not the details, blessedly) of why what we did in 1993 still made sense in 2004, even with arcane changes in some estate and tax laws whose sole purpose seemed to be to make things so complicated that you had to hire a lawyer to explain them to you. Isn’t that the reason behind most laws?

When we first sat down in Kathleen’s office, I reminisced that in 1993 we did our talking at a table by her Court Street window. That was where I made Kathleen substitute the word “gerbil” for “death” when she was referring to my eventual, um, gerbiling. It just was too uncomfortable for me back then to hear, “So, after Brian’s death, Laurel will need to….”

I’m not sure if “So, after Brian’s gerbil” was much better, but it added a certain levity to what otherwise was a not-so-pleasant discussion. Laurel has no trouble talking about her own death. I admire her. Death scares me shitless, though the older I get, I suppose enough shit has been scared out of me already to make what remains less noticeable.

Early on yesterday I noticed that Kathleen wasn’t saying “death” when she spoke to me. She wasn’t saying “gerbil” either, but was substituting the usual sorts of euphemisms: “gone,” “no longer with us,” and such. I told her, “It’s OK to say ‘Brian’s death’ now. I’ve gotten past the whole gerbil thing.”

It's interesting that I was so afraid of death in 1993, as that was when I still believed in the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization led by a guru considered to be God in Human Form who supposedly would guide his disciples after their death -- either to heavenly realms beyond the physical, or, if your karmas were in bad shape, into a new human form through reincarnation.

Yet it was during my true-believing days that my fear of death was greatest. By 2004, when I wrote the gerbil post, I had started to distance myself from the RSSB teachings, which coincided with an increased willingness to speak directly about my eventual death. 

Now I'm even more accepting of death. Sure, that may be partly due to my age, 76, since the older I get, the more I feel like I've enjoyed a decently long life. Plus, with age comes increasing aches and pains, along with other health problems, so it becomes easier to visualize a time when life becomes so difficult, death will seem like a relief.

However, it seems to me that the main reason why death doesn't seem so scary is that I no longer feel like I'm a special spiritual person, a disciple of a Perfect Living Master whose destiny is to be united with the highest manifestation of God, far above the limited godliness that members of ordinary religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam will attain.

Instead, now I have rejoined the ranks of ordinary human beings. And that feels extraordinary. 

Occasionally a sense of "one day I'll die and be nonexistent forever!" will wash over me. I'll be in awe of the amazing preciousness of whatever I'm doing when that realization strikes my mind like a bolt of reality lightning. This usually-taken-for-granted activity -- doing Tai Chi, washing the dishes, walking the dog, whatever -- suddenly seems infinitely valuable, since after I die, there won't be any moments of living at all.

But here's the thing: if I reflect upon that sense of leaving life behind forever, I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing than whatever I'm doing right now. I'm not big on "bucket lists," those activities people come up with that they're determined to engage in before they kick the bucket. (Meaning, die.)

I don't feel that taking a trip to Europe would make death more acceptable than staying at home. I don't feel that writing another book would make death more acceptable than composing a blog post every night. I don't feel that meditating twice as long in the morning would make death more acceptable than how I currently meditate. I don't feel that contemplating nature would make death more acceptable than watching a football game. 

Since I'm back to looking upon myself as an ordinary human being, which is how I saw myself before I joined RSSB, I'm comfortable with the fact that death comes to everybody. I had no control over being born. I have no control over being dead. Both are inescapable aspects of life.

This is a big relief for me. When I was religiously-minded, I'd feel like I had to make every moment count, since I'd been taught that this physical plane of existence wasn't my real home, that my destiny lay elsewhere. 

Now, I don't see myself as a spiritual being experiencing physical existence, but simply as a physical being experiencing physical existence -- along with everybody else in the world. One day my experiencing will end, as will that of everybody else. And that's just the way things are. Which is fine by me.

Understanding how our mind works requires going back to prehistory

Before I share more about what I'm learning in James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, here's a revelation that I found germane to Doty's message.

In a recent issue of New Scientist, there was an article about what happened to the Neanderthals. You know, our prehistoric relations who aren't around any longer but live on in the fact that most humans of non-African ancestry have a genetic makeup that's about 1-4 % Neanderthal, which shows that us Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred.

The article said that recent archaeological discoveries, notably from a cave in France, indicate that the last Neanderthal died about 42,000 to 45,000 years ago. Prior to that, Neanderthals and early humans took turns living in the cave over a lengthy span of time, many thousands of years.

This brought home to me an important fact: the brain and body of us modern humans are essentially unchanged from that of our ancestors who lived in the French cave along with Neanderthals. What's changed is human culture, technology, and such, not how our brain and body function. 

As noted in a post on my HinesSight blog, Doty points out that the sympathetic nervous system evolved to aid prehistoric humans in dealing with the many threats that endangered them long ago. Speaking of the autonomic nervous system, he says:

This part of the nervous system developed early in our evolution as a species and has two divisions. The first to evolve was the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), whose job it is to ensure our physical survival and the survival of our genes, and whose primary activity is to engage the fight, flight, or freeze response. 

...Because it evolved to act in life-or-death situations, it moves along very short neurons and therefore has the power to completely commandeer our physical and emotional resources in a split second, filling our body with stress hormones like cortisol and tensing our muscles for action.

Later, the human nervous system evolved further with the addition of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), also known as the rest-and-digest response, whose job is to return the body to a peaceful resting state, a process known as homeostasis. 

The switch to rest-and-digest is accompanied by a wide variety of physiological changes to promote balance and harmony: our muscles relax, our heart rate and blood pressure decrease, and we produce more saliva for digestion.

We still have a bias toward negativity, in line with the fact that fight, flight, or freeze responses were an earlier evolutionary adaptation than rest-and-digest responses.

This helps explain why voters appeared to be so swayed by Donald Trump's appeals to fear and anxiety: Migrants are streaming across the border raping and killing Americans! (ignoring the fact that migrants have lower crime rates than other people); Your child can go to school as a boy and come back as a girl! (ignoring the fact that parents have to give approval for transgender operations and these are very rare in childhood).

So it takes more effort to overcome that negativity bias than to give in to it. This applies to our negativity toward ourselves, as when we want to improve our life in some way and come up short. If our weight loss program doesn't work, we blame our lack of willpower. Ditto for exercising more, being less stressed at work, or other goals we might have.

That's why Doty, along with other neuroscientists, is big on positive affirmations and visualizations. These send a signal to our mind about what is important in our life. I like his analogy about the filing clerk and the bloodhound.

We teach our subconscious what is important through repetition and and positive emotion. As we repeat our rituals and visualizations, we enter a state of flow, or complete absorption in our inner activity. Deep experiences of positive emotion, whether from real or imagined experiences, teach our subconscious to associate the goals we wish to pursue with the biological reward systems of our bodies.

In this state, our sense of self-consciousness is dialed down and we transcend the limiting beliefs of our mental habits and invite guidance from our deeper resources, such as our capacity for compassion or the creations of our imagination. Absorption in our inner vision is the state that connects us to creativity and clarifies our intention in our subconscious.

The magic is that, as we go about our daily lives, while we may not be directly thinking about our inner intention with our conscious mind, the subconscious goes on processing it and attuning toward it.

We might think of the subconscious as comprised of a filing clerk and a bloodhound. The filing clerk oversees a limited filing cabinet governed by the brain's conservation of energy and the needs we've placed on it. Once the filing clerk places a file in the cabinet, the bloodhound gets the scent and relentlessly scans our environment for the slightest whiff of it.

The bloodhound will then be on the trail at the subconscious level, attending to manifesting our intention around the clock, employing whatever powers, focus, or opportunities it can find. This is the experience of synchronicity, when seemingly unexpected connections begin to appear in service of a particular desire. This is a fundamental component of manifesting.

As we can see, the real estate of the subconscious is precious and has the power to shape our destiny. What the subconscious seeks, the conscious mind finds. So, if we feel threatened and believe on a subconscious level that we live in a threatening world that is out to harm us, our bloodhound will scan for threats and we will find ourselves discovering more and more threatening elements in our outer environment. 

If we have taught our subconscious mind to seek connection, joy, fulfillment, and thriving, we will naturally find ourselves discovering more and more opportunities to experience those positive emotions in reality. 

...The important thing to understand about the subconscious is that it responds to repetition. The more we focus on a particular outcome, visualize it, imaginatively experience it with our five senses, and repeat the desire to ourselves and to the world, the more the filing clerk will catch on to the salience of our desire and the more our bloodhound will get to work to have our mind manifest our intention.

...As long as the SNS [sympathetic nervous system] is curating the subconscious, the filing cabinet will be filled with fears, phobias, insecurities, and habitual beliefs that will be skewing our experience of life to the negative, the frightening, and the limited. Before we bring the light of awareness to our subconscious, we must see that it is really the domain of our survival fears and desires, the legacy of our evolutionary inheritance.

And so the first step in harnessing the power of our subconscious is to sublimate all the whims and wants of the SNS. In practice, this means recognizing that our tendencies to be stressed and anxious derive from the experiences of evolutionary predecessors that have been embedded in the subconscious and become the default software. 

As we learn how the subconscious works, this gives us the power to get information into the system. We begin to put the information we choose into the subconscious and thereby replace the information it is getting by default from the SNS. We are manifesting our own agency.

What we are doing is using the cortex, the higher level control system in the brain, and changing how the vagus nerve responds to our intentions on a conscious level. By doing so we are creating a direct neural route to influencing the subconscious. 

When we consciously practice repetitive visualization techniques and rituals to conjure powerful positive emotions around our desired outcomes, we are increasing the power of the PNS [parasympathetic nervous system] and diminishing that of the SNS.

The subconscious has both expansive and contractive sides. In other words, the SNS has the power to subconsciously influence the subconscious, while the cortex has the power to consciously influence the subconscious. 

As we access this power, we begin to break up the SNS's unholy monopoly on our subconscious, freeing ourselves from the grip of survival fears that we find hard to ignore and that distract us from our deepest intentions. Using practices of suggestibility and conscious repetition, we limit the SNS's own direct path to the subconscious and gain the power to positively choose its contents.

Tiny Habits is a good way to change our behavior for the better

As I was making my way through James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, I came across an intriguing mention of another book: Tiny Habits, by B.J. Fogg. 

After perusing the Amazon listing, and seeing how well liked the book was by thousands of readers, I decided it was worth $11.67 to click on "Buy Now." I've only read the first 40 pages, but I'm liking what Fogg has to say. 

Sure, it appears that Tiny Habits has become a sort of cottage industry since it was published in January 2020. The Tiny Habits web site is testimony to that. However, I suspect that the appeal of the Tiny Habits approach to behavior change isn't so much due to clever marketing, but to the simplicity of the basic notions.

The Introduction describes what they are.

Over the last twenty years, I've found that most everyone wants to make some sort of change: eat healthier, lose weight, exercise more, reduce stress, get better sleep.

...When our results fall short of our expectations, the inner critic finds an opening and steps on stage. Many of us believe that if we fail to be more productive, lose weight, or exercise regularly then something must be wrong with us.

If only we were better people, we wouldn't have failed. If only we had followed that program to the letter or kept those promises to ourselves, we would have succeeded. We just need to get our act together and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and do better. Right?

Nope. Sorry. Not right.

We are not the problem.

Our approach to change is. It's a design flaw, not a personal flaw. 

Building habits and creating positive change can be easy -- if you have the right approach. A system based on how human psychology really works. A process that makes change easier. Tools that don't rely on guesswork or faulty principles.

Popular thinking about habit formation and change feeds into our impulse to set unrealistic expectations. We know habits matter; we just need more good habits and fewer bad ones. But here we are, still struggling to change. Still thinking it's our fault.

All my research and hands-on experience tell me that this is exactly the wrong mindset. In order to design successful habits and change your behaviors, you should do three things:

-- Stop judging yourself.
-- Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors.
-- Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.

I've been trying out the first two exercises in the book. I usually never do exercises in books, because they're too damn hard, like those in Doty's Mind Magic book. He'll say to do a progressive relaxation exercise for 10 minutes or so, then engage in visualizations of some sort, like what's most important for the reader to achieve in this life, then spend five minutes writing down those insights, and so on.

By contrast, Fogg says: 

I won't prescribe exact habits in this book. I'm sharing a method for wiring in any habit you want. You pick the habits. But right here, right now, I'm making an exception. I invite you to start practicing a new habit each and every morning. It's simple. And it takes about three seconds. I call it the Maui Habit.

After you put your feet on the floor in the morning, immediately say this phrase, "It's going to be a great day." As you say these seven words, try to feel optimistic and positive. The recipe in Tiny Habits format looks like this.

I've been doing this for a few mornings. It really does make me feel better when I say, "It's going to be a great day." Or "I'm going to have a great day." I liked that Fogg said that if saying this feels phony to him, he modifies it to "It's going to be a great day -- somehow."

A basic notion of the Tiny Habits approach is that to be successful with a new habit, it has to be easy to do and pleasurable. 

Here's another exercise that I also like a lot and have been doing regularly.

If there's one concept from my book I hope you embrace, it's this: People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad. For that purpose, I have created this exercise for you.

Step 1. Write this phrase on a small piece of paper: I change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad. 

Step 2. Tape the paper to your bathroom mirror or anywhere you will frequently see it.

Step 3. Read the phrase often.

Step 4. Notice how this insight works in your life (and for the people around you).

I've put this phrase in my iPhone's Reminders app, which I use as my to-do list. It reminds me that my long-standing habit of feeling bad when I make a mistake, screw up, say something that I regret, or otherwise fail to live up to my expectation about myself isn't at all productive. 

It's almost like I've been addicted to beating myself up. I guess that would be fine if this sort of self-inflicted punishment caused me to be a better person, but it doesn't. That's why I've enjoying saying "I change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad," quite a few times a day. It reminds me to be as compassionate toward myself as I seek to be with other people.

There's much more to say about the Tiny Habits book, of course, as I get deeper into it. Here's the basic model of the book's approach. You can probably figure out what it means on your own, but I'll talk about the model, which makes sense to me, in another blog post. B:MAP means "behavior happens when motivation, and ability, and prompt converge at the same moment."

Open Thread 48 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. 

As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way.

So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.

Buddhist meditation and psychology can learn from each other

My undergraduate major in college was psychology. I also started to practice daily meditation while in college. So for me, psychology and meditation always have been linked, though not always as closely as they are now.

I say this, because for thirty-five years my meditation had an otherworldly emphasis. After being initiated by an Indian guru, my goal was to meditate in a fashion that would enable my soul-consciousness to leave this worldly plane of existence behind and travel to higher regions of supernatural reality.

Yeah, right...

All that had very little to do with modern psychology. But for about twenty years, I've been meditating in a Buddhist'y fashion, though I don't consider myself a Buddhist. Following the breath. Mindfulness. Loving kindness. 

Those sorts of things are firmly within the realm of psychology. Which is why I printed out a 2002 talk by psychologist Eleanor Rosch, "What Buddhist Meditation has to Tell Psychology About the Mind." 
Download Buddhist meditation paper

I just came across the talk in a stack of magazines and other material that I hadn't looked at for a long time. Re-reading it this morning, I found interesting what Rosch had to say, even though it didn't really break any new ground for me. I'll share some excerpts, along with my comment on each excerpt in italics.  

One of the best-kept secrets of the last several centuries may be that some of what we classify as religious experience can make a fundamental contribution to scientific psychology. One hundred years ago William James suggested this radical idea in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, yet today mainstream psychology is no closer to considering the idea than it was in 1902.

Surely one root of this recalcitrance is the way in which the categories and imagery of our society envisage an otherworldly religion and a naturalistic psychology which are on different planes of existence altogether and cannot communicate with one another.

I believe that the Eastern traditions now arriving on our shore, particularly Buddhist thought and meditation, can bridge this divide and can reveal a quite new understanding of what the human mind and its knowing capacity actually are.

Agreed, by and large. Genuine Buddhism isn't otherworldly, though many people overlay Buddhist teachings with a heavy dose of religious supernaturalism, such as, for example, making the Buddha into a sort of god rather than an earthly teacher.

We all know the image of a human that is common in present psychology and cognitive science: the mind is seen as something isolated inside the body, peering tentatively out at a piecemeal and initially incomprehensible world, trying so hard to find simple predictive relationships between events so that it can survive. It stores the results of its experience in memory to form a coherent but inherently indirect and abstract representation of the world and of itself.

Ideas, emotions, actions, and consciousness have evolved to fulfill the only originating value which is to survive and reproduce in an evolutionarily successful manner in a world of limited reward and much threat.

Such a portrait is not alien to the Eastern traditions. In Buddhism it is somewhat analogous to samsara, the wheel of existence to which sentient beings are bound by their habits; in Hinduism it might be depicted as lower states of consciousness; and in Taoism it might be portrayed, with a smile, as the activities of the monkey in us.

All three Eastern traditions agree that in this habitual state of mind, we are mistaken about everything important — about who and what we are, what is real, and how to act. But this is not the only possible mode of knowing the world. And here we come to the central topic of this talk. There is an alternative way of knowing. And that alternative is seen as our original, natural, fundamental state, what we are right now, not any particular or special experience.

For simplicity in this talk let us call our more limited habitual mode of knowing consciousness and the alternative more basic, comprehensive, and wiser form of knowing awareness.

Interesting. I've always considered consciousness and awareness to be very similar, if not identical. After all, how could we be aware of something without consciousness? But I'm open to the distinction Rosch is making, as discussed below, even though I don't really comprehend it.

Were awareness available only to a few skilled and practiced religious athletes, it would be of little use either for daily life or for science. But it is said to be widely available, in fact closer to us than our own eyes.

The trick is that consciousness and awareness are not actually two separate things — and this is where talking about such matters becomes elusive — because all experience is actually made out of awareness. This is analogous to Plotinus’ “what sees is not our reason, but something prior and superior to our reason.” And Rumi reminds us: “We seldom hear the inner music / But we’re all dancing to it nevertheless.”

This point might be clarified, hopefully, by a computer analogy. The consciousness mode of knowing the world can be likened to a particular computer program running on a more basic operating system. In daily life and in cognitive science we mistake the limited consciousness program for the whole system.

We keep trying to study how the system works, but all we can see is the functioning of the program in which we are confined. Every attempt to see beyond or get out of the program, either in science or in religious striving, is frustrated because to try to get out, we are only using the operations of the program itself.

Such a possibility ought to give scientists of the mind some pause because it implies that the very techniques, rules, hypotheses, assumptions, tests, and suspicions designed to make the study of the mind objective are themselves but products of operations of that same program. So how do you ever get out; where’s the exit key?

There are a number of methods common, in varying degrees, to the world religions, but the specialty of Buddhism is to find awareness in the everyday experiences of consciousness itself, including all the senses, by means of cultivating intense mindfulness and intimacy with ongoing experience. That is what makes Buddhist practice particularly valuable as a link to psychology.

Here's why I part company with Rosch somewhat. I don't find her computer analogy persuasive, nor do I find it compatible with my understanding of Buddhist meditation. I don't believe that Buddhism makes a distinction between thoughts and feelings, abstraction and concreteness, or any other division between states of the brain/mind. 

The idea that there's an "exit key" strikes me as an add-on to Buddhist philosophy, which teaches that emptiness is form and form is emptiness. The duality that Rosch speaks of here, where "the program" is distinct from some form of non-programmed awareness, seems at odds not only with modern neuroscience but with ancient Buddhism.

Anyway, in her talk Rosch then discusses "some ways in which the wisdom of awareness shows up in the functioning of our minds in everyday life." She says that "consciousness is really awareness in disguise," a statement that I don't understand.

I invite you to read her entire talk and decide for yourself whether what she says makes sense to you. I don't find anything truly objectionable in what Rosch says. I just have trouble with grasping what she's really getting at, aside from the rather obvious fact that Buddhism and psychology both study the workings of the human mind and have something to learn from each other.

Here's a paragraph from her "Interdependence" section that's an example of how Rosch uses words in a fairly elegant way, but I still find it difficult to fathom her basic point.

An understanding of interdependence has clinical significance. It can provide people who suffer from guilt, depression, or anxiety with a vision of themselves as part of an interdependent network in which they need neither blame themselves nor feel powerless. In fact it may be that it is only when people are able to see the way in which they are not responsible for events that they can find the deeper level at which it is possible to take responsibility beyond concept and (depending upon the terminology of one’s religious affiliation) repent, forgive, relax, or have power over the phenomenal world. 

Thinking positively isn't as important as being emotionally positive

I'm continuing to enjoy James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. As I indicated before, don't be put off by the title, which admittedly sounds a bit New Age'y.

With rare exceptions, and I'm approaching the halfway mark in my reading of Mind Magic, so I'm pretty confident that this is true, Doty stays within the bounds of modern psychology and neuroscience in his book. Which isn't surprising, since he's a neuroscientist and neurosurgeon. 

What's well known is that what we're consciously aware of is a very small fraction of what the brain perceives through the senses, and what the hugely complex brain -- about a hundred billion neurons with trillions of connections -- is doing behind the scenes of our conscious awareness. 

Robert Sapolsky told this story well in his book, Determined.

What we think, do, and feel is determined by causes and effects that extend all the way back to the big bang. If that's too far back for you, Sapolsky says that our recent genetic history, experiences in our life from the prenatal era to a few seconds ago, and societal/cultural influences combine to produce who we are and what we're doing at this very moment.

Where does an intention come from? Where does an emotion come from? Where does a thought come from? If we observe the working of our consciousness through mindfulness, meditation, or some other means, it seems clear that what spurs us to do, feel, or think arises from a hidden source within the brain.

Doty describes various brain mechanisms in his book. There's nothing supernatural or other-worldly about this. It's the current state of psychology and neuroscience, an incomplete and surely sometimes inaccurate guide to the brain/mind that nonetheless is the best knowledge we currently have.

Mind Magic is all about using knowledge concerning how the brain works to increase the chance that the life we want to lead is what we actually experience. Yes, this, like everything else mental or physical, almost certainly is determined, since free will appears to be an illusion.

But as I noted in my previous post about this book, it doesn't really matter if we possess free will.

Doty says that what's important is that we have the sense of free will, since that makes us feel more confident in our ability to chart our desired course in life through intentions that influence our subconscious, leading to a greater likelihood that those intentions will manifest as reality rather than mere imagination.

A friend of mind used to be fond of saying, "We humans are pleasure-seeking missiles." Doty would agree. In these passages from his "Clarify What You Truly Want" chapter, he talks about the necessity of being in an emotionally positive state of mind when we're visualizing intentions that we hope will manifest.

Positive emotions activate the reward systems of brains and therefore keep our inner compass set toward our intention. They also help us to free ourselves from the prison of old patterns created in our environment and past actions. One of the most powerful ways to indicate the value of an intention to our subconscious is through associating it with a strong positive emotion experienced in the present.

The more vividly we visualize our intention, the more emotionally heightened our inner experience will be. The more emotionally heightened the inner experience is, the more it has a chance to capture and hold our attention and alert the brain to give attention to it in the future.

Part of how the brain determines how to classify information is through a process known as value tagging.

Value tagging is part of the salience network and determines the importance of information entering our brain: emotional content concerning our sense of belonging, the strength of our bonds and connections with others, and life meaning, as well as our physiologic functioning and our immediate survival.

A strong positive emotion signals to our subconscious that the intention is highly meaningful and deserves to be cultivated through our behavior. For this reason, when we practice visualization, it is essential that in addition to imagining the physical circumstances of achieving our goal or intention in detail, we tune in to our heart and experience the joy, celebration, contentment, and connection in our bodies in the here and now. 

This change in the emotional pH of your consciousness, so to speak, is what sends messages to the brain to transform your hardware to prioritize future experiences that give rise to similar positive feelings. Where the emotions come from doesn't really matter as long as you can produce them, recognize their importance, and take the time to savor them.

You are teaching your brain to feel and become familiar with feelings of deep, authentic well-being, and having these feelings is what indicates to the brain to form a new neural circuit. Positive emotions increase the salience around an experience and teach the brain that experiences like these are important and worth pursuing. They then become the compass, or north star, for where to direct your intention.

...As we practice visualizing our desired result over and over again, our intention to experience the fulfillment of our desires is giving our attention (and therefore our subconscious) some velocity to influence the outcome. This is a tried-and-true practice used for years by countless elite athletes, who rehearse successfully executing a skill in their mind's eye before the big game or competition. 

Research has even shown that just thinking about an action such as building muscle can result in a measurable increase in muscle mass, and thinking about rehearsing the piano can measurably improve a musician's performance, whether they have touched a keyboard or not.

The paradox is that, through mental rehearsal and visualization, we are "reminding" ourselves of how the positive outcomes will feel when we experience it in a moment to come. Our minds are literally going back to the future.

Hey, I'm trendy! "Manifest" is the 2024 word of the year.

I was thrilled to see that the subject I've been writing about recently, manifesting, has been named the word of the year for 2024 by the Cambridge Dictionary. (The word was "manifest," to be precise.)

However, I wasn't aware of the manifest craze when I bought James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. And I don't agree with the magical thinking side of manifesting, as mentioned in The Guardian story about the word of the year.

“Manifest”, meaning to dream or will something into existence, has been named the word of 2024 by Cambridge Dictionary, after a surge of celebrity-inspired popularity on social media.

Though far from a new coinage – as an adjective meaning “clear” or “obvious”, the word dates back in English to at least the 1300s – the dictionary’s decision rests on its newest meaning as a verb, which attests to the power of visualisation and positive thinking in making fervently held dreams come to pass.

...Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at Cambridge University, credited social media and the pandemic for popularising the term and practice of manifesting, but cautioned that it had no scientific validity.

“Manifesting is what psychologists call ‘magical thinking’ or the general illusion that specific mental rituals can change the world around us.

“Manifesting gained tremendous popularity during the pandemic on TikTok with billions of views, including the popular 3-6-9 method, which calls for writing down your wishes three times in the morning, six times in the afternoon and nine times before bed.

“This procedure promotes obsessive and compulsive behaviour with no discernible benefits. But can we really blame people for trying it, when prominent celebrities have been openly ‘manifesting’ their success?

“There is good research on the value of positive thinking, self-affirmation, and goal-setting … However, it is crucial to understand the difference between the power of positive thinking and moving reality with your mind – the former is healthy, whereas the latter is pseudoscience.”

Agreed.

That was the point of my previous post, "Manifesting comes in two varieties: scientific and New Age." Doty's book is almost wholly scientific, though sometimes he does express himself in a way that could give a different impression. But I found his chapter, "Step One: Reclaim Your Power to Focus Your Mind," to be in line with modern psychology and neuroscience.

Doty writes:

Within each of us is an incredible inner power that we limit by our own beliefs. It is the power to endure discomfort, to delay gratification, to decide what we let into our minds from our environment and what we don't, to control our response to any given situation, whether real in the moment or replaying in our minds from the past.

This is the power of choice. It is this power that allows us to focus our attention where we choose, no matter how loud or frightening or seductive the external stimuli trying to distract us... This is the power we can call upon ourselves to direct our attention toward inner intentions that produce powerful positive emotions strong enough to break us out of the emotional addictions that have kept us living small. 

...In the end, it's not about the universe: it's about you. We may have come to believe that our inner power is limited by our external circumstances or our past conditioning, but it starts in our own minds.

Now, it sure sounds like Doty is expressing a belief in free will here. But actually what he's talking about is the sense that we are agents with the capacity to control our mind and actions. 

The sense of self-agency is essentially the feeling of being in the driver's seat when it comes to intending, initiating, and carrying out our actions. This gives us the reassuring sense that we can control the outcome of a given situation through our own actions or our will.

...The sense of agency is just that: a sense that is constructed by our brains from a combination of cues in our experience. The brain examines whether our actions appear to be causing the results we intend them to and influencing our environment as we choose, and then uses that data to assess whether we have agency in the situation.

The humbling truth is that our conscious mind does not have access to most of the subconscious processes by which we carry out actions (such as our ability to perform movements), and therefore it can only set an intention, watch its effect, and then interpret them accordingly. In other words, our sense of agency is a story our brain tells us about our experience.

Doty goes on to say that it doesn't matter whether we actually possess free will. What matters is that we have the sense of being an agent who is able to focus the mind, form intentions, and carry out actions that lead to the attainment of meaningful goals. In other words, it's good to feel like we have free will, even if we don't.

The important point here is that the sense of agency is really a perceived subjective experience that can be influenced by our own thought processes. Therefore, the depth and efficacy of our sense of inner power comes down to the story we tell ourselves about our ability to express that power.

As we will explore in future chapters, the feeling of inner power is ultimately the feeling of being able to direct the full capacity of our brain toward an intention we choose, in particular harnessing the power of our subconscious. And the strange thing about the subconscious is that it runs on beliefs. What we subconsciously believe is often what limits the possibilities of a given situation. 

...One may get confused that self-agency implies free will. The nature of free will is a much deeper discussion that brings into play what we know about brain science, psychology, philosophy, and religion.  Some hold that we lack free will because so much of our behavior is governed by forces and influences not apparent to the conscious mind, while others argue that all actions are predicated on the interaction of molecules, atoms, and particles, and therefore every event is predetermined -- we just ignorantly think we are causing our own actions. 

I am not intending to solve this age-old debate. And happily, for the purposes of our discussion of manifesting, we do not have to solve it. I am simply indicating that we do have choices regarding how we manipulate processes within ourselves to manifest our intentions. It is this cognitive control, rooted in the functioning of the CEN [central executive network], that enables our ability to adjust and direct cognitive resources to complete the goal-directed task of embedding our intention into the subconscious and therefore optimizing our ability to manifest.

...Our power to manifest the things and experiences we desire comes down to our ability to throw off the narrow mental habits that keep our perception shrouded in fog and tell us we are unable to influence a situation or resist a habitual reaction and instead to embrace our sense of inner power. In order to produce the results we want, we must first believe in our innate ability to affect the outcome of situations through our actions and will. This process starts with our attention.

Manifesting comes in two varieties: scientific and New Age

Before I started to write another post (this one) about James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, I Googled "critique of manifestation" to see what critics of this fad were saying about it.

And fad it is, something I hadn't realized. I'd figured that after The Secret had been decried by thoughtful people as a New Age book full of cosmic B.S., where you can get whatever you want by aligning yourself with the esoteric Law of Attraction, people had stopped believing in this crap.

But no, the crap has made a comeback in the form of manifestation. I learned this by quickly looking through a bunch of articles just now, including "The Problem With Manifesting," "Is 'manifesting' dangerous magical thinking or a formula for success?," and "Shut up, I'm manifesting!"

What I learned from this peek into the New Age variety of manifesting is that I'm grateful I bought Doty's book, which is founded in neuroscience rather than woo-woo. Here's part of the New Scientist review by science writer Kayt Sukel that spurred my interest in the  book.

Ever since Rhonda Byrne’s bestselling self-help book The Secret came out nearly 20 years ago, manifestation, or the idea that you can transform desire into reality by thought alone, has gone mainstream.

While many have deemed it nothing more than new-age nonsense, two brain experts – James Doty, a neurosurgeon and founder of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, California, and Sabina Brennan, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland – have written books exploring how to use the brain’s own design to help guide your thoughts and perceptions to better achieve your goals.

In Mind Magic: The neuroscience of manifestation and how it changes everything, Doty kicks off with what he calls the “real” secret: “The universe does not give a fuck about you.” This sets the tone for the book, letting readers know that the following chapters won’t offer any advice on how to make the universe bend to our will.

Instead, Doty offers a unique primer – and a six-week plan – to help us learn how to adjust our thoughts to better activate parts of the brain to cultivate “a fierce belief in possibility”. In doing so, he argues, we can become more resilient, open and intentional.

Doty offers a step-by-step approach to demonstrate that manifesting isn’t magic, per se, but a way of clarifying what you truly want, embedding your intention in your subconscious and then releasing your expectations to allow that intention to take root. Along the way, he explains why introducing positive, goal-directed thoughts can help rewire important brain networks to help us pay better attention to the opportunities that will help us realise our potential.

While a good bit of Doty’s six-week plan reads like a meditation guide, complete with instructions to scan your body and let go of unnecessary attachments, he takes the time to explain why manifesting is really about focus. By directing your attention (as well as your time) to what you want, you can get into the right mindset to achieve the things you want most in life.

In his "Networks and Vibrations" chapter, Doty discusses the physiology of manifesting, which has nothing to do with anything supernatural or outside the realm of science. Yesterday I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog that was inspired by what Doty had to say about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.

I included some quotes from Doty's book in "Constant worrying about Trump is a threat to your health." My basic point was that our brain and body are basically unchanged from prehistoric times when physical dangers such as being attacked by a saber-toothed tiger were what early humans had to worry about.

Now, we're mainly stressed not by life-or-death dangers, but by other sorts of problems, including the result of the recent United States presidential election -- if someone was firmly opposed to Trump winning. 

Doty says that moving from the fight, flight, or freeze response of the sympathetic nervous system, which enables us to quickly respond to both actual and imagined dangers, to the rest-and-digest response of the parasympathetic nervous system...

Brings with it the ability to process our emotions, memories, and plans, which then allow us to be much more thoughtful and discerning in our reactions to our experience. This spacious processing ability is the key to claiming your agency to change how you are going to react to the world itself. When we have choices about how we are going to act, those choices affect our physiology, which then affects how we respond to our environment.

He calls this the Green Zone of well-being, "in which we are calm, focused, in the flow, and able to care responsively for others. The Green Zone is also the state in which our consciousness can be mustered most effectively to visualize and pursue goals."

So one of the first practices Doty recommends is familiar to most meditators -- relaxing the body through a body scan. Breathing deeply. Focusing on different parts of the body and letting tension in them go. Simply being.

Imagine your body in a state of complete relaxation. See if you can bring your awareness to a sense of simply being as you slowly breathe in and out: nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be. Do you feel a sense of warmth or stillness or contentment? You might feel as if you are floating and be overcome with a sense of calmness.

Use your intention to take in the feelings of pleasure and peace and install them in your nervous system so you can recall these feelings in the future. Let your nervous system know that this state of relaxation is possible, desirable, and accessible when you need it.

From what I've read so far, Doty's book is about getting out of our own way when it comes to achieving our goals. Or, to use the trendy language, manifesting our goals. This takes it out of the realm of New Age ridiculousness and into the realm of psychology and neuroscience.