TED.com for Guidance

Watching or reading anything more than once is rare for me and that is another reason these two videos are linked. If you missed TED.COM, take a closer look, it is clearly a different species than YouTube. I have both of these presentations on my desktop and have distributed and shouwn them more than anything else, ever.

Jill Bolte Taylor's powerful talk about her stroke became a phenomena and led to book, NPR, and a curious sort of fame. I believe it touches the spiritual in a powerful way:



It is possible to download TED MP4 videos, I like that.

I learned of Dean Ornish and his heart diet from an engineer I worked with 15 years ago. Recent health issues led me back and I'm a bigtime supporter:



There are two other talks from Ornish on TED, If you are interested, search them out.

Exposing Our Roots

In "Time After Time", Oren Harman, the author of The Man Who Invented the Chromosome (Harvard University Press) and the co-editor of Rebels, Mavericks and Heretics in Biology (Yale University Press), describes the deep connections, old as the sun and moon, to our natural history.

The essay concludes:
"We live in a maniacally fast and busy world, in which television and radio update our every minute and working hours and travel are increasingly heedless of the cadences of our planet. Evolution and chronobiology teach us that our inner and outer worlds are fundamentally connected. But finally how we view time is intimately connected to our dreams and aspirations--the way we would like to see the poem of our lives, and of our world, written. Will we wish to continue our growing detachment from the cycles of the sun and moon and tide and planets, or will nature more powerfully, or rudely, return us to its order? In the end, it may be up to us."

Full of facts:
"....We live in a "24/7" world, and have cleverly invented the modern means--electricity, alarms, heating, pharmaceuticals--to overcome our ancient evolutionary rhythms. No longer bound to the cadences of nature, we need not shiver in winter and rise early in the summer months--or so most of us believe.

But it turns out that we are wrong. Just like all the living things around us, we are constitutionally defined by our internal rhythms, and it takes more than a few thousand years of culture to override a few billion years of evolution. Heart attacks and births, Foster and Kreitzman report, occur most often between four o'clock and six o'clock in the morning. Toothaches are calmest after lunch, urine is produced fastest in the evening, and you are most likely to develop an allergic reaction an hour before midnight. Body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure are all lower at night and higher during the day, and dance to a regular daily meter. Even cognitive ability varies throughout the day: take an exam at eight in the morning and your score is likely to be different from the result you would obtain on a test taken in the afternoon. In nature, there are intertidal, lunar, annual, and circadian ("about a day") rhythms, along with the lesser-known infradian (longer than a day) and ultradian (shorter than a day) cadences.

It stands to reason that such rhythms should have been etched into living beings over evolutionary time, for although the week and hour and minute are human inventions, the Earth will rotate on its axis about every twenty-four hours for at least the next five billion years, and the moon will wax and wane every 29.5 days, and the tide will roll over the waves twice a day, and Sirius the Dog Star will rise with the sun every 365 of them. For humans, it is primarily the circadian rhythms that govern much of our behavior (though female readers will rightly protest that I have never experienced certain rattling lunar effects). Whether you shake a hand firmly depends on the time of day, and may not seem all that important; but consider that there is a favored hour of lovemaking for married and non-married, child-rearing and childless, working and unemployed people, and your ear for chronobiology (named for Cronus, the Greek harvest deity) may suddenly perk up. There is a relationship, in sum, between our internal clocks and the outside world, and figuring out how that works has been one of the more exciting rides in modern biology."

But the paragraph that gave me a better perspective of entrainment (basis for binaural beats and blinking lights influencing brain waves) focused on linkage:
"So how is the inner clock made to synchronize with the environment? How, in the end, does an organism's "free rhythm" match itself to the demands of the outside world? Here is an example from another organism. In Drosophila flies, the FREQUENCY and WC-1 equivalents are called PER and TIM. When light reaches TIM through the optic nerve of the fly, it degrades it in a regular, predictable fashion. In this way, with the help of a few other proteins, the PER/TIM feedback loop is aligned to the light/dark cycle, providing the crucial link between inner and outer worlds. This process is called "entrainment," and while cues such as temperature, food availability, humidity, and even social contact can act as triggers, light is nature's greatest entrainer of all."

Religion As A Path to Spirituality

This video presentation on spirituality helped me. Ken Wiblber describes a framework for spirituality in religious practice that stretched my ability to integrate and better accept beliefs held by others. The metaphor of spirituality as a conveyor belt which moves accross history, individual undertanding and belief, and religious practice is very powerful.



You can browse the YouTube related video window and make your own choices about what you read and view, but you might like this cut from the same presentation featuring Fr. Thomas Ketting:

Skeptics Bet

Tim Minchin sets the skeptic's bet to music in this short and entertaining YouTube video:

Maintaining the Temple

Keeping body, mind and spirit tips from http://mindapples.org/:

First, the short list:

Thanks to Simeon Brody of communitycare.co.uk for sharing his five-a-day:

For what it’s worth, here are my five a day

- Have a project or try to learn something new
- Regular exercise
- Don’t take things too seriously
- Try to let worries go
- Try to be sociable

Not that I do them every day of course, but I try.

We’re all trying Simeon - good luck with them! And nice to see sociability on the list, I couldn’t agree more.

Posted by Andy Gibson

Dr Liz Miller writes wonderfully about self-management of mental wellbeing, and also practises what she preaches to manage her own mental health. You can read more about her in this great interview with her in the Guardian. A quote: “In medicine we live on this myth that illness is for other people.”

Liz's top ten tips for managing your health. Enjoy!

1. Eat healthy food
Start the day with a fresh fruit smoothie. Even easier, a glass of tap water, rehydrates ready for the new day. Eating a healthy diet is about eating natural food. If it was not around 10,000 years ago, then it is probably not good for you and you should not eat it. The best food is organic from your own garden or local farmer. You can have a box of organic goodies delivered to your door. A natural diet and daily exercise keeps the blood sugar steady and that helps keep your energy up, and helps concentration.

2. Avoid junk food
Treat your stomach with respect. Always read the label. Factories turn food into junk. The purpose of a biscuit is to sell another biscuit. Did you ever see a Kit Kat tree? A packet of crisps can be stored for 2 or even three years, and the crisps are still crunchy, there is nothing alive in that bag. “You are what you eat” and do you want to end as a MacDonald and fries or a Pizza express? A modern milking cow produces up 20 litres of milk a day, ten times as much as a natural cow. Modern milking cows produce high concentrations of hormones, most of which go into the milk. Dairy products do more for supermarkets selling yoghurt and semi-skimmed milk than for anyone else in the food chain. The stomach is one of the most complex and interesting organs in the body. It even has its own nervous system or mini brain. It sorts out, digests and absorbs the complete range of diets the different people eat from across the world eat. On the other hand, putting something like Coca-Cola into this delicate and refined organ is like pouring battery acid into your PC. It is hardly surprising people get indigestion.

3. Omega-3 Supplements
The easiest and quickest way to improve your health is through Omega –3 supplements. Omega 3 essential fatty acids help a wide range of medical conditions from heart disease, mental health to better joints. Shop on-line at www.mindfirst.co.uk. or at any health food store, on-line or in the High Street. It takes a couple months for their full benefit to be clear. Choose one without vitamin A or vitamin D. If you are a vegetarian and do not want to take fish oils, then Udo’s Oil, Hemp Seed Oil, or VegEPA are fish free alternatives. The next step is a multimineral, multivitamin supplement and if you can choose natural vitamins in preference to synthetic ones. Once upon a time, a balanced diet gave you the minerals and vitamins you needed but fifty years ago, fruit and vegetables contain five times the vitamins and minerals as they do today. Over-intensive farming, long periods of storage in warehouses, refrigeration, picking unripe fruit and vegetables mean food quality is getting worse.

4. Exercise daily:
Exercise needs to be daily, varied and fun; like dancing, football, running, walking the dog, taking the stairs rather than the lift and running up the down escalator. The gym is fine, but variety is the spice of life and the key to being fit. There are three types of exercise:

1. Those that concentrate on posture such as Yoga, Pilates, Alexander technique, postural alignment and martial arts training. These exercises concentrate on balance, so a person gets their ears above their shoulders, above their hips, above their knees, above their ankles.
2. Those that concentrate on building strength for short bursts of exercise, such as weightlifting, shot putt and gym machines. These exercises build muscle. Core strength is more important than bulging pecs. Regardless of how you look on the beach, if you have strong arms, strong legs and a weak back, you will develop back trouble. Rather than developing specific muscles, all round strength is important.
3. Exercises for stamina, such as running, swimming, football, dancing, skipping, cycling and fast walking.

Try a different exercise, each day of the week

5. Get outside and feel the rays
Sunshine is an instant pickmeup. Just half an hour in the midday sun, especially in winter makes a big difference to theday. Sunshine makes us feel better; so just getting out of the office for a quick wander, even in the rain there is more light outside than there is inside. If you find the winter depressing, think about buying a light box, or a light visor from www.outsidein.co.uk Put it on full blast while you clean your teeth and make your breakfast to stop the winter blues.

6. Avoid alcohol and other poisons
Alcohol reaches those parts that other poisons don’t. It damages the brain, the liver, and the pancreas. Few organs escape its effects. Nothing reduces a person’s energy, damages their lungs, narrows their blood-vessels, gives people wrinkles and increases their risk of cancer quicker than cigarettes. In the right environment, the body can recover from almost anything. Drinking and smoking stop the body healing.

7. Breath from your belly
Most people pant! They take far too many short breaths using only the top part of their lungs. Longer deeper breaths increase the oxygen in the blood without over breathing. Real breathing comes from the belly and it has become counterintuitive. When you breathe in, the belly comes out as the diaphragm pushes down to allow the bottom of the lungs to fill. As you breathe out, the belly comes back in and pushes the air out, like a piston moving up and down. Belly breathing needs the shoulders to be relaxed down and back. Babies and small children naturally breathe from their belly. The first time you start to control your breathing it may feel as though you are going to suffocate, no one has yet. Practise breathing from your belly for a few minutes everyday and gradually it will become more of a habit as you develop a more natural way of living. Being able to control your breathing, is the fastest way to control your state of mind. It is impossible to panic if you breathe gently and quietly!

8. Rest and relax
There are many ways to relax and calm the mind, from meditation through breathing, repeating a mantra, or just becoming more aware of what is happening from moment to moment. Other people relax by reading, sewing or through a hobby. Nonetheless everyone needs time just to chill out, rest and recover and let go the worries of the day.

9. Exercise your mind
In some ways this is the opposite of the last tip. Just as the mind needs to relax, so it also needs to work. The most effective way to work is to focus or concentrate on one task at a time. It can take twenty minutes to recover from an interruption. Modern life is full of diversions, e-mail, texts, mobile phones and it is easy to be continually distracted and do nothing all day. Multitasking sounds great but it is not efficient. People work better if they concentrate on one task at a time. The natural rhythm of concentration lasts between forty and fifty minutes. After that time, take a few minutes to recover, with some belly breathing, stilling the mind, and having a drink of water, before starting the next cycle. Focus takes time to develop. Just as it takes time to get the body fit, it takes time to train the mind to focus on one task only. Start by setting a timer, to help you stay concentrated for a few minutes. As you get mentally fitter, your concentration span gets longer, until you can manage to concentrate intensely for up to forty or fifty minutes at a time. A healthy mind is a fit mind. It is a mind that does what you want it to, rather one that is at the mercy of every passing whim and impulse.

10. Learn all you can about health
Although there is more and more health information available, much of it seems contradictory. One person says do this and another person says do that. Nonetheless, every health article usually has one or two good points worth remembering. But there always has to be a balance, for example, exercise is important but not if you have the flu. Activity has to be balanced with rest, concentration with relaxation and living a healthy life with the demands of earning a living. Some people recommend a low-fat diet, others a low sugar diet. You alone are the best person to find out what suits you and helps you feel healthy and energised.

By being interested in health, you learn more about yourself and this will encourage you to live a happier and healthier life.

Read more about Dr Liz Miller, and drop her a line (like I did), at www.drlizmiller.co.uk

Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death

"Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die"

This October 2008 Scientific American article begins with lyrics from Iris Dement:

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

Willing to settle for less than immortal words, author Jesse Bering reviews pertinent psychological studies exploring boundries of human evolution. He concludes:

"The types of cognitive obstacles discussed earlier may be responsible for our innate sense of immortality. But although the simulation-constraint hypothesis helps to explain why so many people believe in something as fantastically illogical as an afterlife, it doesn’t tell us why people see the soul unbuckling itself from the body and floating off like an invisible helium balloon into the realm of eternity. After all, there’s nothing to stop us from having afterlife beliefs that involve the still active mind being entombed in the skull and deliriously happy. Yet almost nobody has such a belief.

"Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn’t cease to exist simply because you couldn’t see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept: “person permanence.” Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. As I’m writing this article in Belfast, for example, my mind’s eye conjures up my friend Ginger in New Orleans walking her poodle or playfully bickering with her husband, things that I know she does routinely.

"As I’ve argued in my 2006 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” human cognition is not equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating a particular person’s sudden inexistence. We can’t simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight.

"And so person permanence may be the final cognitive hurdle that gets in the way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it’s much more “natural” to imagine them as existing in some vague, unobservable locale, very much living their dead lives."

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=never-say-die

Praying on/in Public

Increasing amounts of attention to religious matters is probably a reaction to the assaults within politics and this isn't the first point to a P. J. O'Rourke piece in this context. But, he has cancer and deep thoughts and whiskey along with his wits. The article promises an expanded piece in Search magazine, that is Science, Religion, and Culture on the masthead, but you are sure to enjoy this Los Angelos Times piece:

Opinion

Give me liberty and give me death

As one's mortality swings into view, be thankful for life -- and whiskey.

By P.J. O'Rourke
September 28, 2008

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-orourke28-2008sep28,0,3317114.story

Hubble Ultra Deep Field Photo

Nothing new - the edge of the universe as it looked in the beginning as captured by the Hubble in 2004 and a recent article offering some interpretation of the image. I looked closer and deeper.

Wikipedia offers a selection of resolutions of the image:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field
Full resolution‎ (6,200 × 6,200 pixels, file size: 19.23 MB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

Interpretative review that reopened my eyes:

http://www.sciencemusings.com/2008/09/saying-yes-to-universe.html

"At the scale of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Photo we can see as many galaxies as there are grains in ten-thousand boxes of salt. And each of those galaxies contains as many stars as there are grains in ten-thousand boxes of salt. And that's just the universe we can see."

Faith in Popular Themes

The increase in faithbased articles, books, and arguments may be out of control.

On God
By P. J. O'Rourke

"In one way, however, faith in science does come easier than faith in God--if fear is any gauge of how real we believe a thing is. To judge by human behavior, people are not trembling before the Almighty much. But many of those same people are scared silly by science. They are frightened by a climate stuck in the microwave of technological advances, frightened by genetic modifications that may--who knows?--cross cabbages with kings and produce a Prince Charles, and naturally they are frightened by the clouds of mushrooms being grown in the science cellars of Iran and North Korea."

Read the whole piece:

http://www.science-spirit.org/newdirections.php?article_id=744

This is the second posting from this site.

The spirit is in you

Turning vegan led to a rare spree of book buying. The library extended loan program didn't satisfy my need to savor this religion related tomb either:

Doubt: a History by Jennifer Michael Hecht (Harper San Francisco, 2003); 515 pages plus notes, bibliography, and index; $27.95 cloth. (Just $4.50 used, but excellent condition on Amazon)

Look up the reviews for yourself, it is a terrific read.

These two spirit linked articles caught my attention:

http://www.science-spirit.org/newdirections.php?article_id=740
"I disavow the idea of a personal God, do not believe in a soul that lives on after death, and think that religion -- defined as a set of cognitive, linguistic beliefs and creeds that are highly culture specific and historically contingent -- is irrelevant to my experience. So if this mindboggling spiritual experience came not from an encounter with God, what could explain it?

Can science help?

I think it can, although the research is in an early stage. A stunning new description of how the human body and brain communicate to produce emotional states -- including our feelings, cravings, and moods -- has all the elements needed to explain how the human brain might give rise to spiritual experiences, without the necessary involvement of a supernatural presence, according to Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California in San Diego who is also a Zen practitioner."

Details on the sensory and neural pathways could be a book. Writers digesting and processing this fast changing field help, but it is a complex evolving story.

This article gives a technically less challenging viewpoint:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/14/religion.anglicanism

"Once, of course, I was a teenage atheist; and it brings me no shame to say that, but it certainly makes me smile. I grew up, and stopped being an atheist, in my 20s, in the 1980s. But it was only when my parents died, within a year of each other at the turn of the century, that I became religious."

Doubt is a far more entertaining and troubling passage for me.

Going for the Dogs

Without recognizing it until recently, dogs are a bigger part of my day than just the minutes of care and devoted walk time. Not quite like the article lead,

There’s a New Yorker cartoon by Bek that features a woman pointing an angry-looking finger at a dog. The caption reads: “Sit. Stay. Make up for everything that’s wrong in my life.”

more in common with,

People like to read about spiritual rebirth. Dog memoirs constitute one of the primary narratives of the drama of spiritual life in the United States today.

The review of dog books doesn't cover my recent favorite,

Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog by Ted Kerasote,

it offers an overview.

Man Writes Dog: Death and Rebirth in the Canine Memoirs

By Terry Caesar