The Spiritual Experience Explained… sort of

This article makes sens if you look at things from a scientific viewpoint. However, the scientific viewpoint doesn’t account for how awareness, consciousness, and the penetrating force of LIfe impacts the brain. If you don’t include consciousness as one of the parameters that you are observing you will miss the cause and believe erroneous conclusions.

Selflessness, Core Of All Major World Religions, Has Neuropsychological Connection

ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2008) — All spiritual experiences are based in the brain. That statement is truer than ever before, according to a University of Missouri neuropsychologist. An MU study has data to support a neuropsychological model that proposes spiritual experiences associated with selflessness are related to decreased activity in the right parietal lobe of the brain.

The study is one of the first to use individuals with traumatic brain injury to determine this connection. Researchers say the implication of this connection means people in many disciplines, including peace studies, health care or religion can learn different ways to attain selflessness, to experience transcendence, and to help themselves and others.

The rest of the article is at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217124156.htm

This is like claiming that leaves create chlorophyll by ignoring the role of sunlight. But understandable because these scientists haven’t yet figured out how to measure consciousness, and those other elements that affect matter. But that’s not surprising when you consider that as far as they are concerned, those things don’t exist. It’s kind of a Catch-22 where they will never see the impact from something because they have already concluded it isn’t there. It is quite difficult to find something when you assume it doesn’t exist.

Lesson to be applied here: Don’t Make Assumptions

For an intro on how you can affect your brain by focusing your attention start with this article from the Wall Street Journal.

http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/web/News/wsj_1-19-07_begley.html

Do Better Next Time

“I’ll do better next time.” It’s an optimistic thought. However, without a good dose of healthy self reflection on what happened last time, we are likely to repeat the same mistake.

Doing better next time takes more than just a commitment to the idea and goal. Without awareness of the lessons learned about the past, there is little chance that we will break free of these patterns. Surprisingly most self help courses or advice doesn’t provide any tools, systems, or techniques for reviewing past patterns, learning from them, or making changes in our self based on what we find. Most just rely on the hollow, but well intentioned, commitment.

Without awareness of the things you overlooked in your past choices and patterns of the past, you will miss those same things next time. A committment, no matter how well intentioned probably won’t take you as far in doing better as awareness.

Do better next time,,, reflect on past patterns and choices until you see where you went wrong. Then reflect on your self until you can see why you missed those critical observations in those moments. That will be a start. What assumptions did you make, why and how did you make them? When you can see how your mind projects assumptions in the moment and you can suspend your belief in them, that is awareness. And that is when you will have an opportunity to make a better choice next time.

Leadership and Integrity

It is the season of politics and people are campaigning for your attention. The news casters and pundits grasp for it too as they tell you their story of a story. They sit in their arm chairs and rate the candidates speeches and delivery looking for signs of leadership. Yet they are somehow oblivious to the fact that it is not the great speaker that makes for a wise leader but rather the quiet listener.

Suggested reading: Good to Great by Jim Collins

The Jim Collins website

Spiritual Warrior

I use to be in awe of my fellow spiritual warriors. I had the utmost respect for them. There are very few people who have the courage to challenge their fears, judgments, and inner demons.

Spiritual Warriors still have my utmost respect.

However I am no longer hold them in awe.

I have come to realize that all those inner demons, fears, and that great big inner judge are not real. They do exist, but they are not real. They are creations of your imagination and only exist in the abstract. The only power they have is from the faith you put in them. They have no sustaining power of their own, or are any more real than a dream you had last night. They exist only in the abstract imagination of the mind.

What you are really facing are projections of your imagination. When put in that perspective, you realize that your inner demons are illusions. Then it doesn’t take as much courage as I first assumed.

I still have the utmost respect for spiritual warriors that challenge the fears, judgments, and illusions in their mind. However I no longer see it as taking extraordinary courage. It’s really just a matter of common sense to rid your mind of these emotional drama making illusions.

Free Will: The Choice to be Happy

Free Will:

If you are not choosing your emotions, then what is?

Free Will and the Personal Power to Choose
Is there such a thing as freewill? Do each of us have freewill? First, let’s clarify it. Free will: the ability to consciously choose. Just for fun, let’s conduct a quick inventory and see what happens. Did you choose to have breakfast? Did you choose to take a shower this morning? Or, did this stuff just kind of happen automatically, and later in the morning you found yourself at work? Ever done that, get to work and didn’t really remember driving there? Did you consciously choose the way to work or did you take the same route you always take? Do you remember consciously choosing every lane change?

If you exercised choice in even just some of these then you must have it. If you didn’t, maybe you have it, but just aren’t using it.

Now it gets a little tougher. How do you feel about your day? Has something got you upset or stressed? Are you joyful and grateful all the time? Take a quick inventory of the emotional states you have gone through today, or even this week. Did you consciously choose any of them? Did you choose all of them? Be ruthlessly honest with yourself here. If you were cut off on the freeway by one of those unconscious drivers, how did you react? Did you choose your reaction? Could you have chosen or was your reaction already there before there was a chance to choose? There are a lot of questions, but take your time.

Now lets try something different. Think about what you are most grateful for in your life. Think about it long and hard. Now, how does it make you feel? Allow yourself to focus on this and as you do let the gratitude grow in your body. Settle on this for a few minutes and you may find yourself in a place of great gratitude, a wonderful emotion.

If you did the exercise you found that you have conscious choice over your emotions. So you do have free will with your emotions. Now the really tough questions. How often do you consciously choose how you feel? Do remember to choose when someone is pushing your buttons? Do you choose while driving your car, at the grocery store, with your family? If you did the exercise you know an emotional state is just a choice.

One of my biggest heroes is Nelson Mandela. Why? After decades in prison, when he was released, he embraced his captors. He had compassion for them. His will was so strong that he won over any emotional reaction. When we exercise our freewill we make it strong, just like a muscle. If he can do it after a near life time in prison, for sure, we can do it in our relatively comfortable world.

There is much in the world that we can not change. But we can choose how we feel. If we have difficulty changing our emotional state, it may be we have let the muscles of our freewill grow weak through neglect.

One other question to ponder: If we aren’t choosing how we feel, then whom are we leaving that choice up to?

Be Still in the Moment

Be still and you can perceive the infinite in a moment

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Albert Einstein.

Take a moment for a Thought Experiment: Imagine no Time
Take some time reading through this, and then use your imagination for an exercise.

Imagine that this moment is the only one that exists. After all the future is just an assumption isn’t? The past is nothing more now than assumptions in your mind about what happened. Someone else will have a different set of assumptions about the past according to their point of view. Let all those assumptions go.

Imagining that this is the only moment that exists requires us to remove from our imagination any concept that life is going anywhere. Or, that this moment actually was produced anywhere. To imagine this moment without time requires us to let go of any story of how we got to this point. It is willing ourselves to erase our own personal history, as well as, any that we have placed on the world.

You can imagine yourself being in an experience with no beginning and no end. Let go of any notion of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years or lifetimes past or future.

When you touch this moment without the overlay of future or past projected on it, you find a feeling of being in all eternity. You are in eternity because you are in all time. This is so because you have not spliced yourself into today, and alienated yourself from tomorrow, or your past. We allow them to merge when we remove the artificial dividers that we placed between them with our imagination. In actuality, they have always been merged, but we have not noticed as our attention has been focused on its division through our projection of the concepts of time.

The idea of eternity is a concept also. It doesn’t exist either except in our imagination. If we remove this artificial construct, then we move closer again to what is Real. Each time we remove these concepts of knowledge that trap our attention, we move closer to what is Real. What is real is what exists when we remove the projections of our imagination. What we might call our assumptions.

Time and the words of time, days, lifetimes, minutes are used to describe that which has no name. In a crude way, they are words that describe the flow of the planets through the solar system. The idea of being late, being ahead of our time, behind the times, on time, in a hurry: these are concepts we sometimes live by or have our lives ruled by, but they only exist in imagination. The judge and victim in our mind use these concepts to tell stories about what we should be and when we should be it. In this way “time” becomes a tyrant that rules our mind. But it is not “time” that rules our mind, it is our knowledge and agreements about time that our judge and victim use against our happiness. In this way, we become slaves to knowledge, knowledge of time.

The present moment has no knowledge. Nor does it need any to be experienced. Practice sitting in the stillness of the moment, letting all descriptions go, letting all knowledge go. Even letting go of the trapping idea that it is a silly way to spend your “limited amount of time”. Practice being in stillness, and perhaps, you will find there all the time in the world. If you don’t practice you won’t ever find it.

Finding the stillness in the mind, may take some practice. But practicing once in a while, will make it easier. If you find it difficult, it may be because you have certain limiting beliefs about time. Living in this timeless way, is actually a natural way of living. Watch any young child. You see that they behave quite differently before being domesticated with the beliefs and agreements about time.

Now Imagine being in this moment, focus your attention on what you are experiencing in this moment. Let go of any knowledge you have of the past, or thinking of the future. Be still, and in the stillness, experience that you are.

Temptation and Illusions in the Mind

A subtle shift in point of view and we create suffering

Be watchful of the mind’s changing perspectives

It was a crystal clear night when I crawled into the sweat lodge. The sun had just set and the stars hadn’t yet made themselves known to the darkness. I had sweated before and I was once again among friends. The first few sweats had been the most difficult. Over time they had become easier, even enjoyable at times. I had thought I was just becoming use to them. In fact I was learning to win over the temptation of my own mind.

In the beginning the heat would almost overwhelm me. The steam from the water poured on the hot rocks made breathing difficult. At times the steam filled air had became so hot I could feel my mouth burn, and then my throat, as the air traveled towards my lungs. I immediately stopped inhaling only to realize that my lungs were empty. I learned to inhale ever so slowly so the steam could cool as it traveled. My mind would race with criticisms of the heat, the duration of the round, even why people were taking so long. “Didn’t they realize I was suffering over here!” “Couldn’t they hurry it up!” My thoughts were loud and unhappy.

Often my thoughts would run wild with the voice of a victim. “Why are they putting more water on the rocks?” “What are they trying to do to me.” “I need air, I can’t breath.” Other times I would be filled with happiness. The body would be pouring sweat, the lungs would be breathing softly, and I would be happy. I never knew what my experience would be.

This night in the lodge was different than any had been before. I sat in serenity for a while enjoying the flushing of sweat through all my pores. In a certain moment, the voice of the victim came in and wanted out of the heat. It demanded that people shorten what they said, so we could finish the round. The victim voice demanded that I forget what other people think of me and just exit in the middle of the round to get some cool air. I sat and listened to a voice in my own mind noticing the feeling of peace slipping away as I began to think it was mine.

I stopped listening and shifted my attention back to my lungs. The serenity strengthened. A few moments later the victim began complaining again. This time it was about the discomfort in my feet from the way I was sitting. I listened to it and the feeling began to slip away. As the feeling slipped the voice got stronger. As I listened more closely it took the opportunity to complain about other parts of my body. The feeling faded, and I watched it do so. I thanked the voice for its opinion and focused on my breathing. I was now the one choosing my own thoughts.

This was my bout with the temptation to suffer, to be a victim. The battle was over my own attention. As I shifted my attention, my whole experience shifted.

I crawled outside the sweat lodge and laid in the dirt staring at the night sky. So beautiful was the world, and so filled with possibility with the awareness to choose my point of view.