This time, I want to share a video that delves into what people are saying about their progress of evolving by meditations – it ought probably give us a sense that meditation is a system, sure; beneficial too, yes; but also that meditating is very personally experienced.
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Meditation and the Power of the Mind – YouTube Published on May 2, 2012 A documentary that explores the practice of meditation and it’s effect on the mind and body.
So, I want to recall the most important contribution that I think I found about the truth. Meditation promotes well-being by reducing stress, depression, anxiety, blood pressure, addiction, by boosting immune systems and by improving our memory.
Forty years ago,Matthieu Ricard, a French genetic scientist left an intellectual life, moved to India and took up a study of Buddhism. He is now a western scholar of religion and he was recently claimed by brain research scientists to be the happiest man on the planet.
His daily routine of meditation made possible amazing brain scans demonstrate that if he is meditating on compassion, Ricard’s brain produces a level of gamma waves never before reported within neuroscience literature.
While his is the pinnacle of measures, you to may change your brain. You have the capacity to heal including all of your emotional confusions. If you set out to accomplish this, you can gradually increase your awareness and your inner peace by mindfulness. You can transform your brain, create new neural circuits and change the way your brain neurons more efficiently will communicate with each other.
Program Description
If happiness is an inner state, influenced by external conditions but not dependent on them, how can we achieve it? Matthieu Ricard presents factors that generally may increase or decrease well-being, happiness, authenticity, compassion, peace, and joy.
Happiness and joy may stimulate compassion and compassion may stimulate happiness and joy. This is ideal. This may then be noticed to be increasing positive energy, empathy, pro-social behavior, and the change within may serve as the kernel of an evolving moral-ethical framework.
Matthieu Ricard is a scientist turned Buddhist monk and a best selling author, translator, and photographer. He has lived and studied in the Himalayas for more than 35 years.
This recording is from Google Tech Talks in March of 2007
60 minutes Youtube watch?v=L_30JzRGDHI
A wellness approach in learning: act as though we don’t yet know anything more important — eliminate the inner ego voice from learning.
I pray to be released from any responsibility for making judgments and to learn as though this is all new to me. Later, I’ll review the important lesson again. Always when material is important in my life, I review the material many times.
Starting off into a new day, there is something to learn and something to share — what that is comes to me with my morning meditation — I don’t really even think about it until it comes — I remind myself, “This is my wonderful journey of self discovery. Love envelopes me and the gentle waves of peaceful waters and the light shine from my mind into the world around me.” As I face myself in honesty, open to guiding spirit, I turn my life over to God and I ask Him to allow me to do whatever I may to do His will — Thy Will, not mine be done.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama says “in today’s secular world, religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics… any religion-based answer to the problem of our neglect of inner values can never be universal, and so will be inadequate.” My religion practice is rooted in utmost fondness and enthusiasm in me. I love Jesus and being Christian. I also love all others as best I am able and this is certainly a growing condition in me, prompted by my love of Jesus’s words that make clear that we are to love God with all of our being and also love others as we would be loved. I realize that my world around me is a secular world where my religion is separate from societal norms and therefore that I must involve myself with others in ways that make me attractive; not by promoting my religion. I am to be a channel for love.
I hope that this lesson is helpful for you in your life of spiritual enlightenment — awakening the skill to foster well-being and for freedom, mastery of living in moments of serenity, inner peacefulness, joyfulness, and of course for sharing happiness.
Bloggers, readers, meditation and mindful practice is AMAZING! Astounding!
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According to Ricard …
“In the Western world, meditation means sitting under a mango tree in a blissed out state. The prevailing idea is that you have to sit down and empty your mind. It’s not that at all. You have to clean up a bit. We have so many wandering and intrusive thoughts. So you have to be in control of your own mind. Meditation means inner freedom. Inner freedom doesn’t mean following every chain of thought. It’s like a sailor who takes the helm and decides where to sail instead of drifting with the current. If you want to generate particular state of mind, you do what it takes.”
“There was a lot of activity in his left prefrontal cortex which indicates a huge capacity for happiness; this man is very unlikely to be making negative choices about his experiences,” says Neuroscientist Richard Davidson
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“Meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain.”
The French genetic scientist left an intellectual life 40 years ago and moved to India to study Buddhism. He is now a western scholar of religion.
His daily routine of meditation made possible amazing brain scans that demonstrate that if he is meditating on compassion, Ricard’s brain produces a level of gamma waves never before reported within neuroscience literature.
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NOW, here begins the really amazing part Gamma brain wave production is associated with consciousness, attention, learning and memory. We want to train our brains to increase peace and serenity and this changes the brain — It’s like we come into unifying Loving Light… after time… the brain changes (maintenance required).
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FINDINGSHis skull was wired up with 256 sensors at the University of Wisconsin and its all been recorded — he’s got a happy and joyous mind — no doubt. Scans found excess activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, giving Ricard an abnormally large capacity for happiness.
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FINDINGSA larger volume of a specific brain structure generally increases the abilities to carry out specific functions associated with that structure. This is widely accepted based on the assumption that greater numbers of neurons will produce larger outputs and therefore may be more influential than smaller numbers of neurons.
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FINDINGS Researchers in neuroscience demonstrate that the prefrontal cortex plays a responsible role in forming of expectations based on actions and social control, predicting of outcomes, future consequences of activities, working toward goals, development of abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, abilities to determine same and different and better and best. Abilities to suppress urges that may lead to socially unacceptable outcomes are developed by this area of the brain. Meditation boosts learning ability, improves brain functioning, and reduces stress!
Even people meditating for the first time will register a decrease in beta waves, a sign that the cortex is not processing information as actively as usual. After 20 minutes there is a huge decrease in beta activity — these brains are learning to be highly focused.
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Matthieu Ricard: “Compassion is not just some high-minded flaky concept that Buddhist monks and New Age hippies bandy about, it’s a very practical way to operate in a world that is incredibly stressful for just about everyone.”
FINDINGSMindfulness meditation, one type of meditation technique, has been shown to enhance emotional awareness and psychological flexibility as well as induce well-being and emotional balance. Scientists have also begun to examine how meditation may influence brain functions. This talk will examine the effect of mindfulness meditation practice on the brain systems in which psychological functions such as attention, emotional re-activity, emotion regulation, and self-view are instantiated. We will also discuss how different forms of meditation practices are being studied using neuroscientific technologies and are being integrated into clinical practice to address symptoms of anxiety, depression, and stress..
Share this one around… its time to change this world, one brain at a time… each to their own.
Let’s rid the world of social anxiety:
NOTE: Social anxiety is linked to anxiety, panic attacks, depression, psychosis (not otherwise specified), drug use, alcohol use, spontaneous violence, outbursts, character flaws, behavior problems, anger and rage; to name just a few dis-eases.
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Let’s work on it together… mindfulness is a tool for awakening mental health.
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FINDINGS Related to anxiety… this is empirical evidence… about Meditation benefits. These are FACTS: .
Personally, I am sure that practicing mindfulness meditation with some expert therapeutic guidance can speed healing of PTSD and possibly DID; maybe even NPD, BPD, and possibly even schizophrenia.
Meditation can speed recovery from grief.
It will probably heal some Anxiety NOS and episodic Depression.
Mindfulness can greatly decrease panic episodes… maybe cure it.
It can reduce Bipolar and Uni-polar disorder symptoms.
The two video programs that I’ve selected are simplified of course, but I think that most of you will be satisfied with these as an introduction to how physics fails to fully describe how our universe is constructed.
You’ll see how physics is working toward proof of how the universe works — but that at least two problems prevent this. You may remember from my last article (Religion vs. Science) that physics appears in the science column. So, physics seeks scientific solutions that hold up under intense scrutiny and peer (scientific) review.
Science seeks finite solutions. My first video presentation demonstrates that “infinite sequences of infinities” is a huge physics problem. In a physics theory of everything, mathematical sequences of infinities amount to scientific nonsense (failure). However, we see here, in my updated video selection, infinity is necessary.
Watch this:
Science failure! (11 minutes):
With the problem of the infinities holding up a physics of everything, some philosophers began to weigh in, looking into new methods to describe how the universe works. One of them was Michael Talbot. His approach to how the universe works was surprising. According to Talbot,“We are not born into the world. We are born into something that we make into the world.”
Nearly twenty-five years later, his book, “The Holographic Universe” is still astounding and baffling. Unfortunately Talbot died in 1992, shortly after his book release. Other work is more recent. Lynne McTaggart is author of “The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe” and “The Bond: How to Fix Your Falling-Down World” where McTaggart explains her view:“What matters is not the isolated entity, but the space between things, the relationship of things.“These three books (classified as New Age) are good reading even for non-science folk with some curious interest in physics and philosophy.
The second video begins with the Big Bang that is supposed to be the source of our universe. However, the second approach is radically different from the first. This, it turns out, is because of another scientific problem.
We’ll see what happens when new physics addresses what is known as “the measurement problem.”
Here, strange subatomic properties become important; these mysterious forces of invisibility influence particles that may occur in an observation when science attempts to measure them in place differently than laws predict their true nature to be in unobserved states. In this second video, theory concludes that collective observations “make sense” of our universe in the midst of nonsense but that all of the other possibilities still may be. In theory, the act of observation creates a possible reality from among all possible realities.
Watch this:
Philosophical fix? (10 minutes):
What may be proved? Well, I’m not being fair if I sum it up as science fiction, but that is how some Christians view the current progress of physics.
To be fair, what we have is more than 100 years of advance work in physics and philosophy; exciting and tedious work. I value people that put in tedious work to prove their ideas. Lets not forget that we are reviewing work that originates from altruistic and honorable men and women that worked hard for the advance of science for our benefit. It seems though that science is unable to complete the work; to put theories into a complete proof of how our universe is constructed. Yet, according to some blogs here, the contrary is the case. Apparently they are wrong. Maybe they are referring to theoretical physics? I don’t know.
So far, we’ve seen that physics cannot explain our universe to scientific satisfaction. How reality is constructed is still a mystery.
Science cannot explain gravity beyond the basics of orbits and the motion of stars and planets. Physics breaks down into nonsense as scientists attempt to put together a theory of everything that includes black holes and subatomic particles. We’ve seen that mathematical solutions led to an “infinite sequence of infinities” (failure).
Next, science tackled the quandary known as “the measurement problem” and again bafflement occurs. We’ve just discovered that science cannot completely describe how physical objects work at a subatomic level. The second video provides the reasons and explores a philosophical fix. The discovery that observation causes elementary particles not to maintain the same state as occur before observation is of course absurd science (a failure for now).
Finally, as yet, physics cannot complete a theory of how gravity works and time/space seems still to be problematic and there actually are other problems that physics must confront including dark matter and additional time/space dimensions (more time/space stuff) and the complete description of how a black hole is constructed.
I read the first cohesive and widely touted book about how the holographic universe is perceived back in 1991. It was hot off the presses. It was appropriately titled “The Holographic Universe” and was written by Michael Talbot.
I was impressed. I loved it. How exciting I thought, “reality is constructed of no physical substance.” My thinking wasn’t entirely accurate, but the book amazed me and it got me thinking outside of the boxes. Thinking about a Holographic Universe isn’t very useful for us though if we’d like to know where we stand in the universe. Still, it was strange and exciting and I became open to learning more.
One day, I came about to see it as a science nightmare too. After some thought, I recognized this is exactly where science stands with regards to describing the workings of our universe. Science cannot describe how the universe is physically constructed. As we review what is known, it turns out that observations of subatomic particles that are the basis for reality are skewing the math. Maybe I even have this backwards (in fact I think it is). We can’t learn the deepest secrets about the universe just yet from physics. I was mildly disappointed. I truly believe that mysteries are mostly unnecessary. So, I investigated my religious thinking just as much.
Now, for religious, lets look at the facts again. Science can’t disprove God is real. Additionally, physics can’t completely prove that the physical world even is physical. Lets not throw out biology, chemistry and medicine or geology and earth science. But what of physics? I’m just not feeling that Christians can be trusting of physics. So far, its let us down. All bets about science coming to the rescue to assist us in our efforts to unite with God are off just now.
For many Christians, that is our only reason for embracing a science of physics. Most devout Christians don’t need a science that describes the universe accurately. We have sources that we trust from what we value as the highest authority. We know that God is. We know that we are fallen from His presence. We know that God provided for us to unite with Him. Still, Christians ought not throw the baby out with the bath water. Physics is a useful science and it contributes to our earthly comforts and physical well being (although physics may also be used against us by terrorists/enemies).
I want to keep this short enough to not deter readers — so, I’ll explore how science needs religions in a later post. The connection is real enough and we’ve seen this too — every particle that came into our material universe is from an energy source that links every particle to every other particle that ever was or ever will be. Particles are real enough. So is the connection that instantly makes information available even across all of infinity.
Reality is so cool. I do hope that some of you may post your thoughts about my article and where you stand in relationship to the universe. What reconciles you with reality?
Make a comment please.
Can science prove anything about our physical universe? Can we trust “laws” regarding the physics of our universe as reliable? I still subscribe to news from the studies of physics. It fascinates me. Does physics and how the universe works fascinate you?
NOTE: This isn’t a scientist blog. I’m just a guy thinking about the universe. If you have any thoughts about it, please, share what you think. Just, be nice. Thanks!
This post is a follow up from my previous post (Religion vs. Science). I have been posting more on physics and spirituality, consciousness, and spirituality in science on Facebook.
Put yourself in a pair of somebody’s boots in Iraq — how does if feel?
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Program Description
Sam Richards encourages students to engage more fully with the world and to think for themselves — something he claims that he did not do until his third year in college. Because of his passion for challenging students to open their minds, an interviewer recently referred to him as “an alarm clock for eighteen-year-olds.” Every semester, 725 students register for his Race and Ethnic Relations course, one of the most popular classes at Penn State. In this lecture, he challenges students to visualize the world differently — for the perspectives of insurgents living in Iraq. THIS IS NOT ABOUT TAKING SIDES — its a thought experiment.
Program Description
Presented by Richard J. Davidson
In this talk, Richard J. Davidson explores scientific research on the neuroscience of positive human qualities and how they can be cultivated through contemplative practice. Distinctions among different forms of contemplative practices will be introduced and they will be shown to have different neural and behavioral consequences, as well as important consequences for physical health in both long-term and novice practitioners. New research also shows that meditation-based interventions delivered online can produce behavioral and neural changes. Collectively, this body of research indicates that we can cultivate adaptive neural changes and strengthen positive human qualities through systematic mental practice.
If happiness is an inner state, influenced by external conditions but not dependent on them, how can we achieve it? Matthieu Ricard presents factors that generally may increase or decrease well-being, happiness, authenticity, compassion, peace, and joy.
Happiness and joy may stimulate compassion and compassion may stimulate happiness and joy. This is ideal. This may then be noticed to be increasing positive energy, empathy, pro-social behavior, and the change within may serve as the kernel of an evolving moral-ethical framework.
Matthieu Ricard is a scientist turned Buddhist monk and a best selling author, translator, and photographer. He has lived and studied in the Himalayas for more than 35 years.
A wellness approach in learning: act as though we don’t yet know anything more important — eliminate the inner ego voice from learning.
I pray to be released from any responsibility for making judgments and to learn as though this is all new to me. Later, I’ll review the important lesson again. Always when material is important in my life, I review the material many times.
Starting off into a new day, there is something to learn and something to share — what that is comes to me with my morning meditation — I don’t really even think about it until it comes — I remind myself, “This is my wonderful journey of self discovery. Love envelopes me and the gentle waves of peaceful waters and the light shine from my mind into the world around me.” As I face myself in honesty, open to guiding spirit, I turn my life over to God and I ask Him to allow me to do whatever I may to do His will — Thy Will, not mine be done.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama says “in today’s secular world, religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics… any religion-based answer to the problem of our neglect of inner values can never be universal, and so will be inadequate.” My religion practice is rooted in utmost fondness and enthusiasm in me. I love Jesus and being Christian. I also love all others as best I am able and this is certainly a growing condition in me, prompted by my love of Jesus’s words that make clear that we are to love God with all of our being and also love others as we would be loved. I realize that my world around me is a secular world where my religion is separate from societal norms and therefore that I must involve myself with others in ways that make me attractive; not by promoting my religion. I am to be a channel for love.
I hope that this lesson is helpful for you in your life of spiritual enlightenment — awakening the skill to foster well-being and for freedom, mastery of living in moments of serenity, inner peacefulness, joyfulness, and of course for sharing happiness.
Do you want to stay in the moment and discover your reality?
Or would you rather just forget now and then wake up in your
bed tomorrow and believe whatever you choose to believe?
The blue pill — FANTASY — We wish for life to be run according to our private script that we direct; and all of the participants (from our day) are to take our direction. The story that we make up is in our minds. The participants are directed (we direct them to be as we predict is best for the story). Sometimes the story works for us — we don’t think about the actors so much unless they negotiate their parts.
The red pill — REALITY — opens into an inescapable fact that the world is beyond our individual control. The control was an illusion — everyone has a purpose and we are here for each other to discover together our individual purpose that turns out to be an important part of the story of the universe on its way to rejoining its source.
[ The video links to other content — to other content
that is not be part of my intention for this page. ]
Do you remember the Beatles?
This is my all time favorite Beatles song.
I love the song because it reminds me that everything is as it is intended to be. My lesson is to accept what is. My tasks are to be honest, open and willing for God’s direction. My job is to give help. When I find myself in times of trouble, I remember let it be.
Eric
___ Let It Be was the 12th and final studio album
released by the English rock band the Beatles.
Eric
![[IMG]](https://i0.wp.com/s22.postimage.org/bwsq9fbe9/Boris_300.gif){kind=small}
These three books (classified as New Age) are good reading even for non-science folk with some curious interest in physics and philosophy.
![[IMG]](https://i0.wp.com/s22.postimage.org/ffi1rnzht/1171768_boris_and_natasha_1_super.jpg)
Eric
the Hunt for Truth 