Church of the Churchless

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. 

Mind Magic is a science-based book about manifesting what you want

If I hadn't read a review in New Scientist of James Doty's new book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, the title and subtitle would have turned me off, since "manifestation" sounds New Age'y, and "how it changes everything" sounds over-the-top.

But the review stressed the neuroscience part, which I liked. And after the book arrived via Amazon a few days ago, I really liked the first sentence of the introduction, along with the entire first few paragraphs.

THE UNIVERSE DOESN'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU.

It may not sound like it, but this is good news. The universe doesn't give a fuck about you, not because you are not worthy or are out of alignment with the cosmos or have been put under a curse for ten generations. No, the universe doesn't give a fuck about you because it has no fucks to give.

Many of us are taught to spend our lives hoping for something outside of ourselves to fix our problems and make us whole: a winning lottery ticket, a wise guide who knows all the answers, a guru, a guardian angel, or some magical being, force, energy, or genie sitting out there in the universe who will make everything work out for us. For years I longed to believe this, too.

I thought there was a stern cosmic parent tracking all our actions and deciding if we were worthy to receive our dream house or to meet our soulmate or to be cured of cancer. As a neuroscientist and physician, I know today that we have no proof of such a force or being but we have a great deal of scientific evidence of the power of our own minds to produce changes in our lives that may at first appear impossible. This is the practice of manifestation. 

There is much confusion about manifestation in popular culture, so before I go any further, here is what I mean by the term: manifesting is defining an intention such that it gets embedded into our subconscious, which functions below the level of consciousness. By doing so, we activate brain networks associated with goal orientation that make an intention important, salient, or noteworthy.

In practice, this means that regardless of whether or not that intention is present on a conscious level, brain mechanisms that remain focused on the goal are activated around the clock. Our inner intention now guides our life. By using our inner power to tap the vast resources of our own brain, we gradually decrease the impact of our external environment and begin living from our deepest intentions.

In fact, the first step in successfully manifesting is to separate yourself from the belief that there is an external source for solving your problems and that this external source is what is manifesting in your life. If you want to live a rich, meaningful, and prosperous life, you do not have to appease any power beyond yourself.

You simply must believe that the source of your well-being and success is nothing other than the power of your own mind. The reality is that the same mind that creates the obstacles in the life you want is also the source of the intention that will make the life you want real. This is the real secret.

The fuck you give must be your own. This is the real magic.

I say this to you as a neurosurgeon who has studied and operated on the brain and as a neuroscientist who has spent decades investigating the human mind and brain, as a practitioner of spiritual techniques who has collaborated with the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders to teach compassion to thousands of people, and as a human being who has learned it all the hard way.

I'm looking forward to reading Mind Magic. I've only read the first two chapters and am liking the book so far. Doty has various exercises that he invites the reader to do. I'm usually not big on doing exercises, but Doty says that if someone already is meditating, like me, some of the exercises can be integrated into their meditation.

I suspect that Mind Magic refashions fairly familiar neuroscientific findings into a different sort of package. That's fine, though I'll admit that browsing Doty's web site, I found it a bit, well, over-the-top, like the subtitle of his book. But since this isn't a scholarly book, but a popular self-improvement book, I guess that's to be expected. 

What's said on the home page of his web site resonates with me. I'll write more about Doty's book as I get deeper into it.

For decades the practice of manifestation has been widely dismissed as self-involved, materialistic pseudoscience. But as neuroscientist and recognized compassion leader Dr. James Doty reveals, manifestation introduces us to different possibilities, and it lays the groundwork for a kinder, better world.

Doty grounds us in the practices that change our brain structures: attention, meditation, visualization, and compassion. This mind magic allows us to move through the world in ways that help us see clearly—reclaiming our agency, realizing our dreams, and reaching out to help others along the path.

Where previous works about manifestation have focused narrowly on outward success and individual benefit, Mind Magic delivers an openhearted call to make manifestation part of a deeper contribution to healing the problems we face today.

Is meditation about feeling better or about knowing what's true?

I just came across a piece of paper where I'd jotted down some thoughts about meditation that could serve as the basis for a churchless blog post. 

I have no idea how long ago those thoughts came to mind. Must have been a while, since I have no recollection of doing this. No matter. I'll make use of them regardless.

My first thought was, "Is meditation like learning to play music, where you practice and get better and better, or is it openness where beliefs about how things are is let go in favor of how things actually are?"

The next thought was, "Is the goal of meditation to feel better or to know what's true about reality?"

My last thought was, "Reality can be anything permitted by reality. So, be open. Our reality is here/now."

The way I see it, someone whose goal in meditation is to feel better won't be motivated to know reality as it is, since often reality is painful, disturbing, or otherwise unpleasant. 

On the other hand, someone whose goal in meditation is to be open to however reality presents itself -- which is the essence of mindfulness -- will do their best to embrace ugliness as well as beauty, pain as well as pleasure, disappointment as well as satisfaction, failure as well as success.

And if this person enjoys truth, then knowing how things actually are rather than how they'd like things to be will give them a certain peace of mind.

I'm not saying that I am 100% that sort of person, since while I preach the benefits of mindfulness, often my actual meditation practice is aimed at feeling better about my life, rather than accepting everything that's true about my life, which encompasses some stuff that I'd prefer to be rid of. 

So I guess this isn't an either/or proposition. Most people who meditate probably are like me, seeking both greater pleasure and greater truth. 

However, it makes sense that if we restrict ourselves to being more fully aware of what appeals to us, and ignoring the dark side of both ourselves and reality as a whole, we're going to be unbalanced. 

For reality isn't only beautiful rainbows and bright sunny days. It also is scary storm clouds and dark moonless nights. That's why I believe that openness is more important for me to pursue in my meditation than feeling good, even if I have difficulty doing this. 

But if you have a different view of meditation, I'm not going to try to argue you out of it. As my Tai Chi instructor likes to say, "There's no right/wrong here, no good/bad." Just different ways of seeing things.

Science says religion isn't so much wrong, as it is unnecessary

Thanks to fading highlighting, I've been re-reading theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's book, Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions. 

I bought the book a few years ago and wrote several blog posts about it. (See here, here, here, here, and here.) Then I put the book aside and turned my attention to other books in my morning pre-meditation reading.

When I picked it up again recently, I noticed that I hadn't read a couple of the final chapters. I also saw that my yellow highlighting had faded considerably. To most people, that wouldn't be a big deal. But I'm a habitual highlighter of nonfiction books. It bugged me to have my highlighting of what I considered the most significant passages to be on the verge of disappearing.

So I started to re-highlight my old highlighting, this time with a brighter fluorescent highlighter. But as I did this, I recalled how much I'd enjoyed Hossenfelder's book and decided to re-read the initial chapters. 

That led to some additional highlighting of passages that struck me as more significant and interesting this time around. Now I've re-read almost everything I'd read before, and am glad that I did. I love books about modern science that are not only well-written, but have a certain pleasing edge to them, which this one does.

Hossenfelder frequently refers to something as unscientific or ascientific. These words point to a hypothesis that science has nothing to say about, since it isn't needed to explain anything about our world and the universe at large.

Here's a quote that I shared in one of my previous posts about the book, "Here's what makes something scientific or ascientific."

The distinction between scientific and nonscientific explanations is central to this book, so it deserves a closer look. Science is about finding useful descriptions of the world; by useful I mean they allow us to make predictions for new experiments, or they quantitatively explain already existing observations.

...The belief that an omniscient being called God made the chemical elements is not a good scientific theory. You might say it is in some sense a simple explanation, and maybe you find it compelling. However, the God hypothesis has no quantifiable explanatory power. You can't calculate anything from it. That doesn't make it wrong, but it does make it unscientific.

 

Hossenfelder, not surprisingly, given her background in theoretical physics, is big on quantifiable mathematics. But I think this sentence from the quotation above makes sense even with the "quantifiable" omitted: However, the God hypothesis has no explanatory power.

I say this because I can't think of anything that religions teach, or preach, that makes more sense than non-religious explanations of some subject, such as morality, how life arose, where earth's species came from, and such.

While modern physics obviously doesn't embrace any form of religiosity, Hossenfelder points out that speculative hypotheses put forward by some physicists are, like religious tenets, incapable of being proven right or wrong, because they have nothing to do with the world in which we live. She writes:

The key feature of the many-worlds interpretation is that each time a quantum measurement happens, the universe splits, creating what's commonly called a multiverse. 

...Advocates of the many-worlds interpretation believe that all the other universes -- the ones we don't observe -- are as real as ours. But in what sense are they real? Unobservable universes are by definition unnecessary to describe what we observe. Hence, assuming they are real is also unnecessary.

Scientific theories should not contain unnecessary assumptions, for if we allow that, we would also have to allow the assumption that a god made the universe. Such superfluous assumptions aren't wrong. They're just ascientific. The assumption that the additional universes in the many-worlds interpretation are real is one such ascientific assumption.

I must stress that this doesn't mean that the parallel universes of the many-worlds idea are not real. It means that any statement about their reality is ascientific. It is something you can believe or disbelieve, but science tells you nothing -- can tell you nothing -- about what is correct.

I agree with what Hossenfelder says as it pertains to hypotheses such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Those other universes are believed to have no connection with our own, so there's nothing that can be said about them, absent evidence of some connection in which another universe has an observable effect on ours.

However, when it comes to religious belief in God and the supernatural, I think science can assert more boldly about religious belief being wrong. Religions, after all, speak of God not only creating our universe, but remaining an active force within it through prayers being answered, miracles performed, and so on.

Since there is no demonstrable evidence of God and the supernatural having effects in our world, this means that God and the supernatural are unnecessary to explain how the world works. There's no phenomenon that requires a divine explanation.

Thus to me it seems justified to say that religions are wrong. But if we want to stick with how Hossenfelder views things, we can simply say that religious belief is unnecessary to explain our world and the universe as a whole. 

Religiously-minded people can believe whatever they want. They just can't say that their beliefs are necessary to make sense of the world. 

Lessons for meditation based on psychedelic experience research

As a long-time daily meditator -- I've been doing this for 55 years -- I found an article in the October 2024 issue of Scientific American interesting both for what it says about the use of psychedelics like LSD, ketamine, and psilocybin, and meditation that doesn't involve any psychoactive substance. 

The title of the online version of the article by Gary Stix is provocative: "What Makes a Psychedelic Experience? Not Always a Drug, it Turns Out." I'll share a PDF file of the article for non-subscribers.
Download What Makes a Psychedelic Experience? Not Always a Drug It Turns Out | Scientific American

How could that be? Seemingly a psychedelic experience requires a psychedelic drug. Conversely, doesn't taking a psychedelic drug always result in a psychedelic experience?

Well, from my extensive experience with LSD and mescaline during my college days in the 1960s, I can confidently say that the answer to the second question is no.

As I may have related before on this blog, once I took four college friends to Sequoia National Park in California, as I grew up in Three Rivers, a little town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains that is at the gateway to the park.

We hiked five miles or so to a scenic area away from other people. After spending a night in our sleeping bags, each of us took the same dose of mescaline. I wandered off with a guy who I felt close to. We had a great time walking through the woods, climbing to a scenic granite overlook, marveling at a jet that zoomed past high overhead.

Our psychedelic experience was very different from the three people who stayed where we were camping. Asking how they were doing when we got back to them, they complained, "It was a bummer. We never came on." Meaning, they didn't have any psychedelic experience from the same drug that we'd taken.

The article is an interview with an anesthesiologist. Here's how it starts out:

A debate has long percolated among researchers as to what happens after a person takes a psychedelic drug. The experience may stem at least in part from the placebo effect, which is rooted in the belief that taking psilocybin or ketamine will somehow be transformative.

Boris D. Heifets, an associate professor of anesthesiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, has been tackling this question amid his broader laboratory investigations of what exactly happens in mind and brain when someone takes a psychedelic.

How much of their sometimes life-altering experience is chemical or empirical, and how much is mental and subjective? It turns out the effects may consist of a lot more than just a simple biochemical response to a drug activating, say, the brain’s serotonin receptors.

The first question posed to Heifetz was this:

Are we coming any closer to understanding how psychedelics work, including in the context of therapy? Are we closer to using these transfor­mational experiences to treat psychia­tric disorders?

Having been in this field for a while, I still face this inescapable problem of how to study psychedelics. One framework that I find very useful is thinking about it in three categories.

There’s the biochemical drug effect, which involves basic brain biology—chemicals interacting with receptors on cells. That happens whether or not you can “feel” the effect of the drug. Then there is the conscious experience related to changes in sensation and revelatory, hallucinatory and ecstatic feelings. These experiences are closely tied to taking the drug, and usually we think of them as caused by the drug. But it is quite difficult to say whether a lasting change in mood or outlook was a result of the drug—a biochemical effect—or of the trip itself, the experiential effect.

The third factor, then, is all those aspects of the overall drug experience that are independent of the drug or trip, the nondrug factors—what psychologist and psychedelics advocate Timothy Leary called the “set and setting.” How much do your state of mind and the setting in which you take a drug influence the outcome?

This category includes expectations about improvement in, say, your depression, expectations about the experience, the stress level in the environment. It would also include integration: making sense of these intense experiences afterward and integrating them into your life. And it’s useful to put each of these things in its own box because I think each of them is somewhat isolated. The goal is to make each box smaller and smaller, to really deconstruct the pieces.

Heifetz found that when ketamine was given to depressed patients under general anesthesia, which they were getting as part of surgery for medical problems unrelated to their depression, so they didn't have any experience of getting ketamine, this group had their depression markedly reduced. But so did a placebo group that didn't get ketamine, yet went through the same pre-operation interviews and such. 

Heifetz observes:

What I take from that is that these nondrug effects, such as expectations of a particular outcome, are almost certainly present in most psychedelic trials and are independently able to drive a big therapeutic effect.

Now, here's how I see this research applying to meditation. Meditation obviously isn't a drug, but it still changes the brain. Every experience changes the brain, of course. Thinking is neurons firing. Not thinking is neurons not firing, or perhaps other non-thought areas of the brain firing. So meditation has physical effects, just as a psychedelic drug does.

It also seems clear that the expectations of meditators also plays a role in the effect meditation has. For example, if a mantra is given to someone by a respected guru or teacher, there may be a strong expectation that repeating the mantra in meditation will lead to positive experiences. 

If these occur, it is very difficult, if not impossible to separate out the different effects of (1) meditation itself, and (2) expectation itself. Just as people who didn't get ketamine during surgery felt less depressed just by the attention they got from someone else, along with an expectation that the study they were a part of could benefit them, likely followers of a guru or other spiritual teacher feel better just by being part of a like-minded community, regardless of whether they meditate as instructed.

Here's another interesting question and answer:

How does giving an actual psychedelic drug to someone in a clinical trial relate to the three categories you mentioned earlier?

Let’s circle back to this idea that psychedelic transformation could rely on the biochemical effect, the experience of the trip itself or nondrug factors. Our study of ketamine during anesthesia really highlighted the role of nondrug factors such as expectation but didn’t really get at the question of “Is it the drug or the trip?”

To answer that, some of my scientist colleagues are testing “nonpsychedelics,” or nonhallucinogenic psychedelic derivatives, to see whether patients with depression, for example, get better after treatment with a drug that can cause some of the same biochemical changes as a classical psychedelic but doesn’t have a “trip” associated with it. That’s “taking the trip out of the drug.”

But what if you could “take the drug out of the trip,” meaning creating an experience that is reproducible across people that checks many of the same boxes as a classic psychedelic-induced trip but doesn’t actually require the use of a psychedelic molecule? So what, in this context, you provide people with is a profound experience that can even be somewhat standardized so you can study it. And it would be powerful and vivid and revelatory, with a long-lasting impact. Do you get the same effects without a psychedelic?

That would not be definitive evidence. But it would strongly suggest that maybe there’s nothing intrinsically special about the activity of a drug that activates a particular receptor that mediates the effects of psychedelics. What that would do is put front and center the role of human experience in psychological transformation.

So maybe a meditator can benefit from their meditation even if they don't have any sort of profound experience. That would be akin to "taking the trip out of the drug."

And it seems obvious that people can achieve the same experiential benefits that meditation provides by doing things that have nothing to do with meditation, like volunteering at a food bank or concentrating on a jigsaw puzzle. That would be akin to "taking the drug out of the trip."

My cosmic conclusions from the 2024 presidential election

For some reason it's usually easier to draw Gigantic Cosmic Conclusions from big events rather than small ones. It doesn't have to be that way, though "gigantic" and "big" do have an affinity with each other. 

Why does death or a disaster move us to ponder the meaning of it all more readily than loading the dishwasher does? If there are grand principles underlying our human experience of reality, why can't we recognize them in the smallest of events as well as the biggest of events?

Don't know.

Maybe because rare big events grab our attention while everyday small events are so familiar, we pass them by. Regardless, my attention certainly was grabbed by the presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump that culminated in Trump's victory last Tuesday.

So here's some Gigantic Cosmic Conclusions that I've drawn from the election. They're rather obvious, which argues for their veracity.

Determinism rules, while unpredictability takes center stage. Prior to the election, people had all kinds of ideas about what would happen. Now there's only one defensible idea: Trump won. There are reasons why this occurred. No one really knows what they are, though theories abound. 

Looking forward, nobody was able to predict in any detail the outcome of the election. Looking backward, after the results were known, lots of people are (retrospective) experts in why Harris lost to Trump. 

So life is uncertain until it isn't. The movement of inanimate entities, like planets orbiting the Sun, can be predicted with great accuracy. How American voters will cast their ballots can be predicted, but not with any sort of guaranteed accuracy.

Thus don't believe anyone who claims to know for sure what will happen next in American politics. The only certainty is that nothing is absolutely certain. When I started loading the dishwasher a little while ago I expected that I'd be able to finish that task.

However, I could have been distracted by a phone call, then forgot to resume what I was doing. Or I could have suffered a heart attack prior to the last glass being placed on the top rack. Life is more predictable than a roulette wheel, but less predictable than an eclipse. 

Ups and downs, actions and reactions, are a basic feature of reality. Constancy isn't part of the cosmic equation. Nothing remains precisely the same for very long. Whether it be the tiniest subatomic phenomenon, the hugest happening in the universe, or everything in between, including presidential elections, change is ubiquitous. 

Consider the results of presidential elections in my lifetime.

In 1948 a Democrat, Truman, was elected. In 1952 and 1956 a Republican, Eisenhower, was elected. In 1960 a Democrat, Kennedy, was elected. In 1964 a Democrat, Johnson, was elected. In 1968 and 1972 a Republican, Nixon, was elected. In 1976 a Democrat, Carter, was elected. In 1980 and 1984 a Republican, Reagan, was elected. In 1988, a Republican, George H.W. Bush, was elected. In 1992 and 1996, a Democrat, Clinton, was elected. In 2ooo and 2004, a Republican, George W. Bush, was elected. In 2008 and 2012 a Democrat, Obama, was elected. In 2016 a Republican, Trump, was elected. In 2020 a Democrat, Biden, was elected. In 2024 a Republican, Trump, was elected. 

American voters bounce back and forth between choosing a Democrat or Republican for president. In the past 76 years, the longest stretch of single party rule was 12 years, 1980-92, when Reagan and the first Bush held the White House as Republicans. And in those 76 years, a Democrat was in the White House for 36 years and a Republican for 40 years. 

Yin and yang. Cause and effect. Action and reaction. Whatever you want to call it, transformations from one state of affairs to another are the normal condition in not only politics, but everything. So if someone isn't happy with how things are now, just wait. They'll change. Eventually. Patience may be required.

(This is the basis of a post I wrote for one of my other blogs, "Fellow Trump opponents, here's what gives me hope.")

We humans don't see reality as it is, but how it appears to us. While I'm a big fan of "objective reality," those words deserve the quotation marks because they're an aspiration, not how things actually are.

This truth is on plain display on a presidential election night, when a split screen will show members of one political party cheering wildly as results favorable to their candidate are announced, while at the same time members of the other political party are dejected at the news that their candidate isn't faring well.

Same numbers. Same results. Very different reactions. This is the mystery, and the glory, of human subjectivity. Even if a group of people are privy to the same information, their personal desires, experiences, wishes, and all that will typically cause them to disagree about what the information means.

I watched Kamala Harris's speeches with admiration, agreeing with almost everything she said. I watched Donald Trump's speeches with disgust, disagreeing with almost everything he said. Others had the opposite reaction, loving Trump and hating Harris.

Each of us is locked into our own way of perceiving reality. Science is a wonderful way that humanity uses to try to break out of that subjective prison, using a variety of methods to arrive at statements about reality that can be agreed upon by most scientists in a particular field.

But even in science, disagreements arise about the same phenomena, the same results, the same observations. Raw sensory data always is interpreted by the human brain. We never see things as they are in themselves, only as our brains lead us to see them.

While diversity of opinions can be annoying when we want other people to agree with us, this is an unavoidable feature of human cognition. And really, who would want it to be any other way? If everybody was just like us, life would be unbelievably boring, a hall of mirrors where our own reflection is the only thing we perceive. 

How am I coping with Trump's victory over Harris? By embracing reality.

Reality is a terrible thing to waste. It's one of our most precious possessions. For when we depart from reality, truth obviously suffers. So does our ability to deal with problems, which to handle appropriately, almost always requires a healthy dose of reality.

Problem is, and I struggle with this often, as almost everybody does, evolution didn't confer upon us the advantage of knowing the world as it is. Rather, evolution through natural selection promotes reproduction of our genes by living long enough to mate and have offspring. 

Sure, that necessitates an ability to know how the world is, since our distant ancestors needed to distinguish the sign of a dangerous animal hiding in brush from a breeze rustling branches. However, the human brain isn't optimized to know how things truly are, but to know how things seem to be as viewed through the lens of our needs and desires.

Ever since Trump announced he was running for president again in the 2024 election, I've been hoping that the Democratic candidate would defeat him. So after Harris became that candidate following Biden's withdrawal from the race, I've looked for reasons to be optimistic about her chances.

I realized that my desire to have her win was affecting my ability to see the presidential contest objectively. One attempt to counter that bias was following election models that use polls and other data to come up with predictions of who will come out on top on November 5, Trump or Harris. In the end, the models basically predicted a 50-50 tossup, so they weren't very helpful.

Yesterday was election day. It turned out badly for Harris. Well before midnight west coast time, it was clear that Trump almost certainly was going to be victorious. That saddened me, as I wrote in a post for my Salem Political Snark blog last night, "Win or (probably) lose, I'm grateful for how Kamala Harris campaigned." 

I started the post out this way:

It's turning out to be a sad night. I started watching the election returns on MSNBC around 5 pm with a lot of optimism. After all, a couple of days ago I wrote a blog post called "Why I expect Harris will beat Trump fairly easily."

For sure, that's not going to happen. I was wrong.

At the moment the New York Times Live Presidential Forecast gives Trump more than a 95% chance of victory. Harris' only option is to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Currently Trump is leading by 3 points in Pennsylvania, 6 points in Michigan, and 4 points in Wisconsin.

The Blue Wall is crumbling. When I wake up tomorrow, likely it will have fallen, and Trump will have been declared the victor.

Which is so depressing, I had trouble writing that last sentence. My daughter is depressed. Friends are depressed. My wife is watching something on TV that isn't the election results. I read an update from a New York Times reporter that said:

The Harris campaign just shut off the sound on the TVs at her watch party and replaced it with music after a guest on CNN said tonight felt "more like 2016 than 2020."

I feel the same way. Once again, a competent, highly qualified woman is poised to be defeated by one of the worst presidents our country has ever suffered under. And Trump has vowed to make his next term in office even nastier. 

When I woke up this morning to a clear Trump win, I was tempted to take a break from political news. I felt a bit like someone who had gotten a fatal cancer diagnosis and wanted to blunt that awareness by doing something, anything, that would distract from the disturbing knowledge. 

Yet there I was in mid-morning, doing my usual stretching exercises in front of the television, switching between MSNBC and CNN, which not surprisingly were focused on yesterday's election. I simply feel better when I'm being exposed to news, even if the news isn't to my liking. 

I'm not sure why. I suspect part of the reason is that my mind is capable of imagining larger problems than are actually occurring. Dread is an emotion that can be paralyzing, since it is about what might happen. I've found that usually it is easier for me to deal with what actually is happening, reality. 

New Scientist and Scientific American are magazines that I keep in the bathroom I use before heading off to bed at night. Yesterday I was pleased to come across an article in the October issue of Scientific American that helped my mood somewhat, "We Can't Turn Away from Reality." I liked the title, which differs in the online version.
Download We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality | Scientific American

It isn't always easy to embrace reality, which includes both the objective reality that most people agree on, and the subjective reality of how we feel about things. Yet I'm convinced that this is a laudable aspiration -- to know how things truly are, not just how we desire them to be. 

This is how the article ends:

Truth tellers are the Achilles heel of collective denial because they call attention to what’s being ignored. Thus, another playbook tactic is to hush them up, often by painting them as subversives or deviants. And so those who wear masks are ridiculed, scientists reporting on COVID risks are cast as fearmongers, and those with long COVID are dismissed as having anxiety disorders.

Time and again society pressures people not to see, hear or speak about the elephant in the room. To maintain our own peace of mind, we tune out, malign and shoot the messengers because they remind us of what we would rather disregard. Just look at physician Ignaz Semmelweis, environmentalist Rachel Carson, and NFL player and social justice advocate Colin Kaepernick. Indeed, people are regularly punished for being right.

So what do we do about our “ignore more, care less, everything is fine!” era? We need to stop enabling it. We can start by being more attuned to the everyday ways in which we ignore or otherwise fail to engage with troubling events—like that pinch we feel when we know we should click on a concerning headline but instead scroll past it.

We need to work harder to catch ourselves in the act of staying silent or avoiding uncomfortable information and do more real-time course correcting. We need to guard against lowering our standards for normalcy.

When we mentally and emotionally recalibrate to the new normal, we also disassociate from our own humanity. We need to demand that our leaders give the full truth and hold them to account. We must stand up for the silenced and stand with the silence breakers. To counter the new normal’s assault on normalcy, we must double down on our duty to know, to speak up and to remember.

With the election tomorrow, I'm trying to empathize with Trump supporters

Empathy. It's a fine-sounding word. I aspire to it. But it can be damn hard to do when people act like selfish jerks and I'm supposed to look upon their twisted view of reality with empathy. 

That's how I feel about Trump supporters. They cheer on their chosen candidate, a twice-impeached former president, convicted felon, habitual liar, and instigator of a violent attempt to subvert the result of the 2020 presidential election that was conducted freely and fairly, which Trump lost.

Of course, that only scratches the surface of Trump's negative qualities and wrongdoing. Yet polls show that almost half of American voters will cast their ballot for him. How they can do this mystifies me. 

Trump has openly said that if he wins, he plans to govern as a "dictator on Day 1." His chief of staff says he is a fascist. His reverence for authoritarians indicates that this is his dream job. Yet I find it difficult to believe that so many of my fellow citizens truly want to elect a Hitler-wanna' be.

I'm definitely not a poster child for empathy. However, on the whole me and my fellow Democrats possess much more empathy than the typical Trump supporter. I say this because Trump exhibits essentially zero concern for anybody other than himself. 

His speeches are full of insults, fear mongering, and demonization of anybody who isn't white, heterosexual, and conservative. Trump makes no attempt to reach out to moderate voters who can't buy in to his Make American Great Again bullshit.

But the audiences at his rallies cheer Trump on when he denigrates anyone and everyone who doesn't fit into his Trumpcentric perspective on the world. Which makes me wonder: are Trump supporters actually so uncaring, or are they the victims of forces beyond their control?

Since I don't believe in free will, I consider that both things are true. They are uncaring, and they're victims.

An article in the October 2024 issue of Scientific American, "The Empathy Incentive," gives some clues as to how this comes about. The online title is: "Being Empathetic is Easier When Everyone's Doing It." I'll share a PDF file of the article if the excerpt below makes you want to read the whole thing.
Download Being Empathetic Is Easier when Everyone’s Doing It | Scientific American

“If you’re surrounded by empathic individuals, it really has an influence. It increases how your brain responds to the pain of another person,” Hein says. “The bad news is, it also works the other way around.” In other words, if you’re surrounded by people who are indifferent or hostile, you’re apt to mirror their social example as well. One 2023 study shows that people who identify as politically liberal have stronger empathetic brain activation than conservatives, raising questions about whether social norms within each political group might drive empathy differences between them.

Makes sense.

The speeches of Kamala Harris are filled with talk about how our country has to do more to help struggling people. She wants more affordable housing, better child care, help for families both raising children and caring for aging relatives, and expanded health benefits, to name a few policy goals.

When us liberals hear her speak this way, we're inspired to do more ourselves to aid those less fortunate than we are. Meanwhile, Trump supporters are being fed a steady diet of fear, anger, lies, and revenge from their own presidential candidate.

So it's no wonder that the lack of empathy conservatives manifest naturally, perhaps because of their individualistic worldview, is exacerbated by being surrounded by members of their chosen "tribe" who are spurred toward even less empathy by Trump's communications with them about how it's fine to be uncaring toward anyone who disagrees with you.

Harris says that she wants to listen to those who have views different from hers. Trump says that he wants to lock up his political opponents. 

Since I see Trump as being a clear and present danger to American democracy, I have a lot of difficulty being charitable toward his supporters, given that they're enabling his destructive authoritarianism. My hope is that if Harris wins the election, Trump will fade away and his influence markedly diminish.

Yesterday I wrote a post for my Salem Political Snark blog that predicted a Harris victory. To learn why I feel this way, check out "Why I expect Harris will beat Trump fairly easily." Of course, I recognized I could be wrong, saying:

So here's some other factors that lead me to believe that not only will Harris defeat Trump, she'll do so by winning more than the 270 electoral votes she'd get by holding on to the usually safe blue states, beating Trump in the Blue Wall of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and gaining the single electoral vote in Nebraska's 2nd District.

(I'm expecting that Harris will win all of the above, plus North Carolina and Nevada. If I'm horribly wrong, gleeful Trump supporters can tell me how stupid I was in post-election comments on this post.)

Sam Harris is backing his (unrelated) namesake. He's made his substack post available to everyone. "Literally and Seriously: Why I Support Kamala Harris for President" is a good read.

If consciousness is immaterial, why does ultrasound boost mindfulness?

I realize that those who believe that consciousness is immaterial are pretty much immune to the evidence that it is a physical phenomenon. 

That evidence is ubiquitous, as I've pointed out many times in blog posts. Anesthesia makes us unconscious. So does being hit on the head with a baseball bat. Caffeine makes consciousness more alert. MDMA ("Ecstasy") makes consciousness feel more loving. 

The October 2024 issue of Scientific American has a short article that presents more evidence for the physical nature of consciousness. Being a daily meditator for most of my life -- I started meditating in 1969 -- I know how difficult it can be to keep the unruly mind under a semblance of control.

The article describes how ultrasound stimulation of a certain part of the brain was able to produce a state of heightened mindfulness.

Again, this isn't exactly breaking news, aside from the ultrasound part. I experienced heightened mindfulness when I worked the night shift at a San Jose fruit cannery one summer during my college years. I hated my job of hosing fruit pulp that dropped from overhead conveyor belts into floor drains. It was wet and messy work.

But after "lunch" at midnight, or whenever it was, I'd take a Benzedrine tablet. This amphetamine changed my mood completely. Now I found my job to be highly enjoyable. All that had changed was a chemical that affected my brain by enabling it to focus much better.

Ultrasound can affect the brain also. Here's the article.

Even when you aren’t doing anything, your brain is relentlessly active—daydreaming, ruminating, contemplating the past or future. How this mind wandering functions can significantly shape a person’s internal conscious experience.

In a recent study of 30 participants, researchers applied low-­intens­ity ultrasound waves to a brain region associated with introspection and off-task mind wandering. Participants who underwent five minutes of ultrasound stimulation reported significantly heightened mindfulness—the ability to be fully present in the moment, without judgment toward others or the self. The results were published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

“I haven’t seen ultrasound technology used in this way, but this type of neuromodulation has significant potential to change how we think about and enhance mindfulness,” says University of Wisconsin–Madison social psychologist Hadley Rahrig, who also studies that state of mind.

The researchers targeted the brain’s default mode network (DMN), a constellation of interconnected areas that become particularly active when the mind disengages with the outside world and drifts into activities such as reminiscing or envisioning the future. Abnormal DMN activity and connectivity have been linked to anxious rumination and depressive symptoms. “You get stuck, where your mind just keeps going and you can’t stop it. We hypothesized that we could use ultrasound stimulation to remove some stickiness and let the network cool off,” says the new study’s lead author, Brian Lord, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Arizona.

Since the DMN was described in 2001, scientists have sought to manipulate itthrough broad-brush methods such as meditation and psychedelic drug therapy. But it remained difficult to precisely adjust DMN function because of its deep-brain location.

To overcome this challenge, Lord and his team used transcranial-focused ultrasound, a technique that converts electric current into concentrated and localized acoustic waves. (Half the participants received sham ultrasound as a control.) These waves can penetrate brain regions with millimeter-level precision and with greater depth than other noninvasive stimulation methods, which typically use magnetic fields or scalp-attached electrodes to induce electric currents spread over several centimeters.

Functional MRI scans showed that the researchers successfully inhibited activity in the posterior cingulate cortex, a key area in the DMN linked to emotional regulation and concentration during meditation. Through questionnaires and an interview, participants in the treatment group reported at least 30 minutes of subjective effects akin to entering a deep meditative state: a distorted sense of time, fewer negative thoughts and an improved ability to detach from their feelings. Other scientists at the University of Arizona are testing this technique to treat mood disorders such as depression.

“One of the greatest barriers to meditation and mindfulness is the steep learning curve. Brain stimulation can act like training wheels for the mind, helping people achieve that deep state of consciousness,” Lord says. “That’s our larger goal.”