Milarepa's Demons

Welcome, Mystery. I invite you to sit down and tell me of you...

Several years back I was going through a hard time with chronic anxiety, and a Zen Buddhist friend sent me the above link. The story, she said, was informative...I'd been trying to oust my anxiety by force, and it was only coming back stronger. By generating loving-kindness and compassion for my anxiety and myself, on the other hand, my anxiety would lessen of its own accord.

Jung said the only way to get out of hell is to accept that you're in hell. Indeed, once I stopped trying so hard to "get better," things actually started to get better by themselves. I learned to turn my anger up to Kali-ma instead of identifying it as "mine." There is a reason for every emotion we feel - and like the little demons in Milarepa's cave, they only want a little attention for the work they are trying to do for you. Anger is hard to feel. Fear is hard to feel. But without either of them, we wouldn't learn how to keep ourselves safe from danger. Honor your emotions and give them a little sacred space in your life, and then see what you can do about interacting with others from a space of your choosing instead of defaulting to your emotions.

And know that you are not a lesser person if you cannot rid yourself of all of these demons. In one version of the Milarepa story, every demon ran away...except for one, the last one, who was too big and strong. In the end, Milarepa and this demon lived in the cave together contentedly ever after as roommates. If you have a big demon who won't leave you alone, then make friends with him!

Life Before Birth

The egg you were developed from was created inside your mother while she was still in her mother's womb. The environment in which your grandmother lived can profoundly affect your health, even though she may be long dead and you may have moved to the other side of the world. The more we understand about the long-term effects of DNA methylation, the more important it appears that we eat well and keep ourselves as healthy and detoxified as possible. Not only our health, but the health of our descendents relies upon it.

Untitled

via radiolab.org

Jungians say that every character you meet in your dreams is an aspect of yourself. This makes the dream bully encountered in this episode even more interesting!

I've been keeping a dream journal on and off for 20 years now. It started as a writing exercise because my dreams were so strange, and I thought it was a good idea to try to capture the creativity for use during waking life. After a little practice I learned the knack of remembering them when I awoke in the morning, so I wasn't always having to scrawl down keywords in the pitch dark at 3:00 a.m. In about the fifth year of keeping my diaries, I started to see some really strange parallels between dream life and waking life. Often I'd get a case of deja vu, and it would turn out that I'd had a dream two weeks before that was the root of the feeling during subsequent waking life. Not only that, but sometimes via the diaries I would uncover chains of dreaming/waking correlations that snaked back through my life over months or years. For a while I became a little obsessed, but eventually I decided that it probably wasn't anything special, and that my attention was better spent on other pursuits.

We work out our knottiest problems at night, while our bodies are resting and our minds are let off the leash to run about and stretch their legs. I'm not a personal fan of pursuing lucid dreaming, although many people have found that practice to be helpful and empowering. My feeling is that I'd rather let my subconscious find its own way at least part of the time without being entrained to my waking ego, but that's not to say that my way is better than anyone else's. Keeping a dream diary has helped me understand all sorts of waking-life stressors. Whatever your preference, it's a practice I would recommend.

Unpicking Consciousness

New studies done on how anesthesia affects the brain are helping us to understand the mystery of human consciousness. We are pretty unique animals, after all - our powers of self-awareness and intellect have allowed us to profoundly change the entire face of the planet, and to pull off audacious feats of engineering such as this.

It appears that there is no real "seat of consciousness" - but that consciousness arises somehow from the interactions among different parts of the brain.

Brown says that some drugs will decrease the frequency of brain waves seen in EEG readings, resulting in slow, regular oscillating waves across large areas of the brain. Other drugs cause certain areas to show fast, regular oscillations. Because anesthesiologists usually give a cocktail of drugs to each patient, these effects can happen simultaneously. The result, says Brown, is like a jammed signal: "Either way, [the different parts of the brain] can't communicate."

A popular sleep aid, Ambien, has also been shown to help some patients locked in a persistent vegetative state back to full consciousness. We don't yet have all the answers, but the parameters of the question are getting more and more interesting.

The Mystery Behind Anesthesia via the MIT Technology Review

Babble, Baby, Babble.

So, the Scientific American reports findings that toddlers don't monitor their own speech, i.e. they don't hear their own mistakes. It takes a few more years before children are able to hear themselves and adjust what they say in response.

Who else do you know who fits this bill? :)

Toddlers Don't Monitor Their Own Speech

A Strong Finnish

Every three years, the OECD countries do a survey to compare reading, math, and science ability among 15 year olds. Finland, suffering poor scores prior to the 1980s, now ranks regularly among the top contenders (the others being Singapore, Shanghai, and South Korea). The USA ranks firmly in the middle of the pack. So what has Finland been doing right?

An article at the Atlantic states it simply. The Finns do not concentrate on educational excellence; they concentrate on educational equality. There are no private schools in Finland. Let me repeat that: There are no private schools in Finland. Even the few independent schools they have there are financed by government money.

Every Finnish person can attend school to whatever level they are able to attain, regardless of how wealthy or poor their family is. I think that's awesome.

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

Deforestation, Derailed.

For once, the news from the Amazon is not entirely awful!

In the decade between 1996 and 2005, 19,500 sq km (7,530 sq miles) of jungle was lost on average every single year. The comparison is overused, but that really is an area about the size of Wales or New Jersey each year. It reached a peak in 2004 when more than 27,000 sq km was lost.

Then, in 2004 Brazil declared war - it said it would cut deforestation by 80% by 2020.

Seven years later and it has almost reached its goal. The latest figures, released just weeks ago, show that 2011 had the lowest rates of deforestation since records began three decades ago - just over 6,200 sq km was cut. That's 78% down on 2004, still a lot of trees - an area the about the size of Devon, or Delaware - but a huge improvement.

It's heartening to see South American governments beginning to protect their environmental legacy. Many problems still remain, but consider the difference in general attitude between now and 30 years ago (if you were alive back then) - progress is slow, but it's there.

Via the BBC:

Saving the Amazon: Winning the war on deforestation

Weird Science

Why are creatives so damn strange? Researchers wanted to know, so they investigated...and what they found was that creative people have fewer automatic filters on their thoughts than "normals" (if anyone can really be said to be normal, that is). There are some parallels between creative thought and schizotypy, but creatives still retain the ability to focus and avoid the ceaseless wandering through dreamland suffered by the mentally ill.

Scientific American reports.

The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People Are Eccentric

Beware of the Asana

Can yoga hurt you? I'm a little annoyed at the tagline from this NYTimes article ("Popped ribs, brain injuries, blinding pain. Are the healing rewards worth the risks?") - but the article does point out something valid. Yes, if you push it too hard, like anything else, you can injure yourself doing yoga.

I wish there had been more of an "all things in moderation" slant to the piece, but then that doesn't make for a good headline. People injure themselves severely running, lifting weights, hiking, swimming, playing basketball...doing pretty much any kind of physical activity, and they do it in great numbers all the time. Yes, moving your body is dangerous, but sitting still is even more dangerous.

The takeaway here is simple: learn your body's language of sensation, and then pay attention to it when it's trying to tell you to back off on something. One yoga teacher in the article had pain in certain positions for 20 years before he wound up needing spinal surgery. He had almost two decades to pay attention to the messages his body was sending, and he consistently ignored them! Don't be that guy.

How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body