Transparent Eye

In California, a Zen Gardener - New York Times

It is a cliché to say that gardening is meditative. But few have meditated as long and as earnestly as Ms. Johnson, who arrived at “the Gulch” with a sweaty Kelty backpack in 1975 after trekking much of the way from Tassajara, a rugged Zen outpost in the Ventana Wilderness. In her new book, “Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World” — part memoir, part Sunset Magazine sitting on the floor mindfully eating a raisin in the zendo — she ponders such questions as whether it’s O.K. for life-embracing Buddhists to crush snails (ask forgiveness first) or to trap gophers (breathe deep, then fence instead).

Philosopher and meditator Ken Wilber nearly died of an epileptic seizure

I did have 12 grand mal seizures in one evening. I was rushed to the E.R. comatose. I was in a coma for four days. During that time, I had electric paddles put on my heart three times. I was on dialysis because my kidneys had failed. I developed pneumonia.

I don’t know his medical history, but it brings to mind the warning in this 2005 paper in Medical Hypotheses that meditation could make people prone to epilepsy

Meditation may predispose to epilepsy: an insight into the alteration in brain environment induced by meditation.Jaseja H.
Physiology Department, G.R. Medical College, 8, 10-C-Block, Near Paliwal Health Club, Harishanker-puram, Lashkar, Gwalior 474009, MP, India.
Stress-induced diseases in modern life are on an alarming rise not only in developed countries but also in developing ones. To alleviate stress, one practice that is being commonly and increasingly adapted to is meditation. Limited studies on meditation have reported occurrence of mental calmness along with apparently favorable changes in certain autonomic functional parameters like heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and skin resistance. Recently, meditation is also being practiced and advised for alleviation of epilepsy; however, very little work is available to comprehend effect and utility of meditation on epilepsy. Neuro-imaging and in-depth studies during the course and attainment of meditational state have revealed alteration in neuro-chemistry and neuro-physiology of brain environment that could favor epileptogenesis. The rise in brain glutamate and serotonin along with development of ‘hypersynchrony’ of EEG activity (which occur during the course and attainment of meditational state) are well documented to form the underlying basis of epilepsy. Each of the above-mentioned factors is individually capable of inducing susceptibility and decreasing threshold to epilepsy. Based on these changes in brain, this paper raises a grave possibility and risk of meditation in developing epilepsy or increasing the severity and frequency of attacks in an already epileptic state, contrary to the popular belief of its remedial role in alleviating epilepsy.

I find meditation valuable, but as in all things, it seems, practice with moderation

Good essay by Richard Carrier distinguishing the meanings of natural, supernatural and paranormal. Thanks to Tom Clark of Memeing Naturalism.

We met at the Harvard Club in Boston. We started off with a discussion of mental health, and the dualistic fallacy indulged in when people claim that a problem is not mental because it is due to a chemical imbalance.

In fact, all things mental correlate to things going on in the brain. So all mental activity, whether we would judge it healthy or otherwise, is due to something physical. That does not say we would deny reduce the mind entirely to the brain. The mind is not identical to the brain, but it is an outcome of the activity of the brain.

We discussed that it feels good to be together and be able to openly express skepticism about religion, which we naturally repress in “polite company” even here in the secular New England states.

We discussed humanism and its relation to atheism (again). Humanism is beyond the atheist vs. believer debate. It’s about trying to figure out how to live, based on what we know to exist. This could include evoking spiritual feelings, since the existence of spiritual feelings is an observable fact, as opposed to the supernatural world, which is not.

Many religionists assume that atheists must be immoral, because the morality they learned comes from a book that god is said to have dictated. Humanism is a moral or ethics system, but makes to claim to certainty. Since we have no holy book, we often disagree about what is ethical (e.g. libertarian vs. left-of-center views of the free market) but we try to base our ethics on reason, observable facts, and some intuitions which seem self-evident.

We talked quite a bit about Buddhism, as some of us have practiced meditation at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. Insight meditation is a somewhat secularized version of Theravadin Buddhism that feels pretty compatible with humanism, though not perfectly so. Even Buddhists who eschew supernaturalism and downplay doctrines like rebirth tend to assume the correctness of Buddhist traditions that are not supernatural (Confucianism too is not supernaturalistic, but its highly traditional, and not evidenced-based in the modern sense).

In humanism, by contrast, everything can be challenged, and must be defended with evidence. We did agree that aspects of Buddhist practice and philosophy that are naturalistic and can be supported by evidence are compatible and welcome in humanism.

We also got into a discussion of categoricalism and consequentialism. While neither is perhaps inherently antithetical to humanism, we all came down on the consequentialist side. Categoricalism holds that certain rules are so important that they should be followed no matter the consequences. But that seemed dogmatic to us, and how can you know if a rule is correct or not unless you analyze the consequences? We agreed that while religion tends to encourage dogmatism, non-religious people can also get dogmatic, especially when they get emotional about a subject

More problems with evangelism in the armed forces

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending. But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

The US now hosts one-quarter of the world’s prisoners

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

The US is also said to consume about one-quarter of the world’s resources. The two factoids are probably mostly unrelated to each other, but I do wonder if our high-consumption society is also a high-greed, high-desire society that leads to criminal behavior and subsequent imprisonment.

If poverty on an absolute level was the root cause of crime, the U.S. would be among the most crime-free of nations. Instead, I think that relative poverty may be the single largest root cause of much crime, seeing wealth around you and feeling humiliated for not having a piece of it yourself. Indeed, I think even domestic violence is often an outcome of financial difficulties among couples. Of course, we imprison too many people for drug offenses, but why do so many Americans indulge in drugs in the first place. It’s a reflection of our high-consumption, high-desire society.

George Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute, which had an interesting focus on how cogntivie issues affect politics, has gone belly up.

A discussion on Beliefnet. I too recommend the body scan method.

The Boston Globe has a piece on Ethical Culture is Boston. The established humanist community in Boston tends to beyond middle age in their demographics.

Most of those at Federman’s talk are middle age or older, and “I would say our demographic is close to . . . 60-plus” years old, Scott said. Woods, 65, teaches adult courses in conjunction with Harvard’s humanist chaplaincy - the most recent have been on “Voluntary Simplicity” and “Compassionate Communication” - and she suggests those offers might be a lure to membership for younger people.

There is certainly new blood moving into humanism, in large part a reaction to the religious wars of the 21st century. But I think the new humanism is going to have to be more spiritually (i.e. emotionally) nourishing than the old humanism in order to create a sustainable community.

Nickie’s Nook is beginning to accept that her chronic pain can be helped through psychological means which she has resisted because it implies there is something wrong with her mentally. In my view, no one is mentally perfect, and all of us (including the president of the United States, I’m sure) have mental disorders of one sort or another.

With regard to pain, there is a misunderstanding that pain signals only flow upward from the periphery to the brain. In fact, there is also an enormous amount of top-down messaging from the brain to the spine which affects how pain is perceived. Pain even in the absence of bodily injury shows up as brain activity in certain portions of the cerebral cortex. No pain is in the mind without also being in the brain. It’s all real.

Hat tip to Psychology of Pain blog.