Apparently there’s a boom in the number of people who meditate, at least in California as reported by the Los Angeles Times: Meditation, primarily a 2,500-year-old form called mindfulness meditation that emphasizes…
Meditation
Jeffrey B. Rubin at Truthout writes: In case we had any doubt after watching Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes,” mindfulness is the new yoga – and we are in the midst of…
A study finds meditating cancer patients are able to affect the makeup of their DNA, reports Scientific American: “I think, therefore I am” is perhaps the most familiar one-liner in western philosophy….
Via Midwest Real “The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings… We are nothing but melodies, we are nothing but cosmic music played out on vibrating strings and membranes.” –Michio Kaku ITUNES …
I could have a job, but am too lazy to choose it; I have got land, but am too lazy to farm it. My house leaks; I am too lazy to mend…
The Daily Beast just ran an awesome interview with David Lynch. I’ve pulled some snippets here, but you should read the whole thing if you’re a Lynch fan! via The Daily Beast:…
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m often uptight and easily stressed. I don’t meditate regularly, but when I do the relief I feel is often surprising. Just taking a few…
How to visit Ancient Sites – Mindfulness & Meditation This is the first in a series of short articles highlighting the approach I use when visiting ancient sites. I regularly organize and…
Via ScienceDaily: Researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Naval Health Research Center have found that mindfulness training — a combination of meditation and body awareness exercises…
Via Nautilus, Rose Eveleth on meditation as an ancient method of harnessing one’s senses to open new doors of perception: After five years of practicing meditation, subject number 99003 began to see…
Jeff Warren explores the promises and pitfalls of vipassana and other mindfulness meditation on Psychology Tomorrow Magazine: Practicing vipassana, you have more space to make appropriate responses, and more space, too, around…
Via ScienceDaily, how changing your mind changes your body: A new study by researchers in Wisconsin, Spain, and France reports the first evidence of specific molecular changes in the body following a…
Via Salon, Suzanne Clores reminisces: In a Greek Orthodox Church annex in suburban New Jersey, I’m about to start my first morning of a four-week mind control summer camp. It is 1980….
A classic Ken Wilber essay, covering what the great traditions have said about the process of death and reincarnation. This information page gives an overview of Kenneth Smith, links to many resources,…
This week on Mindful Cyborgs Chris Dancy and I discussed the relationship between mindfulness and quantified self with biosensor engineer Nancy Dougherty. Nancy talks about how she came to the practice of…
Julian Walker wrote this excellent overview of New Age flakiness, and gives some corrective measures. via Elephant Journal: I am passionate about the relationships between three things: > inquiry-based practices (yoga, meditation,…
Every now and again you have moments in your life where profound realizations sort of creep up on you out of nowhere. I think it was because of a music nerd Facebook…
The title to this piece is something that randomly popped into my head when I was Occult ganj-i-tating a few months back. I wrote it down on my Facebook page (friend me for strangeness) and ultimately just dismissed it as a funny song title idea until the next few weeks found me catching up on Mad Men. Of course! With weed laws loosening and legal weed a reality in my home state of Washington, we’re going to need some slick marketing copy to make this stuff the center of our economy (as it rightfully should be), and who better to do that than a chronically stoned super freak like me? “You’re Not a Monkey When You’re Stoned.” What a great tag line (pot marketing people, call me), but Christ, you really don’t need a hypnotic tag line to sell this stuff. As I’ve found out first hand as a small time dealer, shit basically sells itself.
Here’s why. Life is bullshit, pot can help! Man, that’s another great one. Someone should really hire my ass here because I could just keep going with these. But seriously, chances are, if you’re not among the supremely wealthy minority of privileged fucks running things, you probably have to work a day job that makes you want to blow your brains out a lot of the time. See, life is bullshit. I have no idea what the architects of this reality were thinking with all that, but the good news is that pot can take you far far away from everything, really fucking quick…
Harris O’Malley writes at the Good Men Project: Getting better at dating is hard enough. It gets even harder when it feels like your own mind is fighting back against your attempts…
Dr. Rick Strassman, a psychiatric researcher with a specialization in psychotropic drugs, on the “enlightenment experience” and hallucinogens as a pathway for Westerners into Buddhism and Hinduism:
I went to a Zen temple in my early 20s, and, ever the scientist, every chance I got to speak to a monk one on one, I asked every one of them if they had tripped on psychedelics and how important their trips were in their decision to become a monk. And I’d say 99% of these junior monks in their 20s all got their start on LSD.
Author and psychotherapist Robert Augustus Masters outlines a pervasive phenomenon in contemporary New Age spirituality, spiritual bypassing: Via Reality Sandwich: Spiritual bypassing, a term first coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1984,…
Happiness is a gamma wave. Via Oddity Central: Matthieu Ricard was declared the happiest man on Earth by a group of scientists after it was discovered his brain produces a level of…
Author and personal development coach Steve Barnes begins a series of posts discussing the “Mastermind” concept–a technique of gathering and consolidating resources necessary for attaining goals. He starts off with describing a…
The sound artist Kim Cascone passed along a great link for making DIY Ganzfeld goggles. When I was at the Rhine Research Center we were able to see their Ganzfeld rooms, and I’ve been interested…