Posted in from the viewing room, life, music, personal growth, video on August 26, 2012| 1 Comment »
Emeli Sandé sang a beautiful version of Read All About It, Part III at the closing of the London Olympics, and the line “we’re all wonderful, wonderful people so when did we all get so fearful?” has been running through my brain ever since.
(I’ve embedded the video link here, but you’ll see the Olympic Committee insist you go watch it on youtube….go on, click the link…it’s worth it!! The lyric in question comes in at the 2 minute mark….)
Posted in from the living room, life on August 25, 2012| Leave a Comment »
What if you knew today is a once in a lifetime opportunity?
What if you knew the food you eat today you will never eat again?
What if you knew the food you eat today you will never have eaten before?
What if you knew you could tell one person today that you love them?
What if you knew you could be kind to someone today?
What if you knew you could be kind to yourself today?
What if you knew you could listen to your favourite song or tune in your music collection today?
What if you knew you could read one poem today?
What if you knew you could smile today, even if just for a few moments?
What if you knew you could live today as if this day had never existed before?
What if you knew you could live today as if this day will never come back again?
What if you knew today was a once in a lifetime opportunity to live today?
What would you do?
Posted in from the reading room, neuroscience, psychology, science on August 20, 2012| 18 Comments »
Iain McGilchrist has released a short Kindle book entitled The Divided Brain and The Search for Meaning [ASIN:B008JE7I2M]. In it he presents an excellent precis of the ideas and findings he presents so brilliantly in his somewhat massive The Emperor and His Emissary.
The key to his thesis is that it is odd that our brains are divided into two asymmetric halves. Why is that? Why didn’t we just develop a single, unified cortex? There’s probably some big advantage in having two brains, but only if the two halves let us do different things. This is NOT an argument that the left does this and the right does that. It is NOT a claim that left-brained people deal with facts, and right-brained people are artistic. He dismisses such ideas as simplistic and erroneous. As he puts it –
Instead of asking, as of a machine, what it does – does it ‘do’ reason, emotion, language, imagery? – we should have asked – as of a person – what’s he or she like?
In other words, what are the different ways each hemisphere approaches the world?
He says that the right hemisphere primarily lets us be aware of the world, and looks for the connections, or the “between-ness” everywhere, whereas the left allows us to grasp, and, hence, manipulate the world.
The right hemisphere underwrites sustained attention and vigilance for whatever may be, without preconception. Its attention is not in the service of manipulation, but in the service of connection, exploration and relation…….One way of looking at the difference would be to say that while the left hemisphere’s raison d’être is to narrow things down to a certainty, the right hemisphere’s is to open them up into possibility.
These differences are profound and we need them both. the one helps us to pin things down, and the other opens us up to seeing change and possibilities.
Another way of thinking of the difference between the hemispheres is to see the left hemisphere’s world as tending towards fixity, whereas that of the right tends towards flow.
In his thesis, he claims that the left hemisphere way of engaging with the world has become unhealthily dominant and we’ve become stuck on its way of representing reality to us.
the purpose of the left hemisphere is to allow us to manipulate the world, not to understand it.
I highly recommend you get this book. You can easily read it through at a single sitting, then you’ll want to go right back to the start and read it again. If you haven’t read The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain will whet your appetite but it will also let you easily understand the basic premise.
The right hemisphere seems to be involved more with new experience, new events, things, ideas, words, skills or music, or whatever it may be, while they are still fresh, original and unique, and so to speak present, to the mind.
The left hemisphere abstracts and generalises, where the right hemisphere’s world remains truer to each embodied instance, and appreciates the unique.
Just stop and think for a moment what that means, and why we should want to re-balance our society by shifting the balance to the right hemispheric way of approaching the world…..
Posted in from the reading room, life, perception, personal growth, psychology on August 10, 2012| 1 Comment »
Einstein said that an important question to ask ourselves is “Is the universe friendly?”
It’s an interesting question because the answer you give influences how you experience Life.
If you think it is unfriendly, you are likely to see danger all around and to expect hostility. You are likely to respond by trying to control and conquer in order to be safe. If you think it is neither friendly, nor unfriendly, then you probably experience Life as random, brief and pointless. However, if you think it is friendly, you are more disposed to engage with an open-hearted curiosity, seeking to understand more and more.
This question which he posed is often considered in relation to thinking about the emergence of consciousness in the constantly evolving universe.
An article in this month’s Psychology Today refers to the question in this context. It’s worth a read, and concludes
Any inventory of the cosmos that omits us is like a survey of the body that overlooks the brain. In evolving the human mind, the universe has fashioned an instrument capable of understanding itself and empathizing with others. We are that instrument, and since we are part of the cosmos, we err if we judge it to lack kindness, love, and compassion. If I believe the universe is heartless, it’s because I myself do not love
Posted in from the dark room, life, photography on August 8, 2012| 3 Comments »
These are unusual nests, aren’t they? Like low hanging fruit from the trees, or lanterns shining on the lake.
Here’s one in the making….
You can see why the bird who makes this kind of nest is called a weaver bird.
Here’s something else unusual about these little homes…
The entrance is underneath!
Every single one of these nests is unique, because every single one is woven by the bird who is going to live in it. But they don’t want to be completely alone, so several of them build their nests in the same tree. It’s a little village. A small community. Every one of these communities is unique too, each one being in a different tree, each community created by a different group of individual birds.
The Universe has a creative flow.
Everywhere you look you can see differentiation and diversity, and the building of more complex phenomena from simpler parts.
Take a look around you today. Where do you see this creative flow in action? Where do you see diversity, uniqueness and the creation of links and connections?
Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography on August 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »
This is a shaded garden with a couple of gardeners working away. Can you see them?
I love the complex interplay between the canes, the slatted roof, and the way the shadows interweave.
Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography on August 6, 2012| 2 Comments »
Every day there’s something amazing to see…..if you look, but look at THIS! Exceptional!
Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, perception, Uncategorized on July 25, 2012| 1 Comment »
Ever since I was a little boy I’ve loved to look up at the sky on a clear night and lose myself in the wonder of the fact that the light from every single star has taken years and years to reach the Earth. How incredible that the tiny spots of light landing on the backs of my eyes left those stars millions of years ago!
Its astonishing to think that as you look up at the night sky you are looking at the past, the distant past. And how astonishing to realise now that our latest astronomical instruments let us see back billions of years, almost to the Big Bang itself. But not quite.
I recently came across the phrase “Cosmic Horizon”. The Cosmic Horizon is the furthest visible point in the Universe. In every direction as we scan the skies, we can detect signals from far away stars right up to a point of darkness which is so far away, so far distant in the past, that we can’t see anything any longer. This is the horizon. It’s like the horizon we see where the sky meets the earth or the sea, but much, much further away.
In the book, “The View from The Centre of The Universe”, Joel Primak and Nancy Abrams, building on this idea that the Cosmic Horizon is a limit in the timescale we can know, propose that we, the human race, need to develop our “Responsibility Horizon”.
This is a fascinating idea. Think about it. How far does you current “Responsibility Horizon” extend? One generation, maybe two? When you make decisions, do you consider the impact of those decisions on the lives of your children, or your grandchildren? You might. If you have children or grandchildren you might be concerned about the kind of world we are creating now for them to inhabit in the years ahead. But let’s stretch that beyond two generations. How far ahead do you want your Resonsibility Horizon to reach? And if it’s three or four, or more, generations, how will that influence the choices you make today?
Posted in from the consulting room, health on July 18, 2012| 1 Comment »
What We Do
At the NHS Centre for Integrative Care in Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital this is what we do…..
The NHS Centre for Integrative Care provides a range of services for patients with Long Term Conditions. At the first consultation patients receive an integrative, holistic assessment which has three goals. 1. A comprehensive, biopsychosocial understanding of the person and their illness; 2. An orientation of care towards supporting vitality and resilience achieved through individual empowerment and skills required to maximise self-healing and self-management; 3. The creation of an individualised therapeutic plan. Therapeutic plans can involve a number of elements delivered one-to-one or in groups, in ambulatory outpatient, day case, or inpatient environments, as appropriate.
Care is delivered by multidisciplinary teams of generalist medical doctors, nurses and Associated Healthcare Professionals.
Interventions include patient education programmes, relaxation, meditation and cognitive behavioural classes, Tai Chi, Yoga, massage, Art Therapy, Counselling, Acupuncture and Homeopathy. All interventions are drug-free and intended to improve well-being and reduce the long term need for medication and surgery.
The Centre is particularly able to help patients with “Medically Unexplained Symptoms”, multiple co-morbidities and those who have exhausted other possible solutions to their problems.
Posted in from the living room, life on July 17, 2012| Leave a Comment »
From the Big Bang, to the first stars; from the stars to galaxies and superclusters; from stars to planets, to Earth; from Hydrogen and Helium to all the elements of the Periodic Table; from single cell life forms to plants, to animals, to human beings……….there are a couple of themes which run through the whole story.
Differentiation and diversity. It’s a story of increasing difference, of more and more unique and different elements.
Integration. Integration is the building of mutually beneficial relationships between differentiated parts.
Complexity. As different elements, or parts, build more and more mutually beneficial links, greater complexity emerges.
And here we are now. Human beings. With the most complex systems known in the Universe – our bodies, our brains, our consciousness.
Wow! It’s really pretty breath-taking.
Heroes Not Zombies 