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Archive for the ‘from the living room’ Category

Where’s everybody going?

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography on May 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »

photo

Tokyo Station by night.

I’m amazed to watch the constant snaking in and out of the station of the long, long trains they have here in Japan. From the 32nd floor here it looks like a giant train set (if only I had a bank of remote controls!)
But as I gaze down on all this activity I wonder, not just at the mind boggling complexity of making it all run so smoothly, but I wonder where everyone is going?
We’re a busy species, aren’t we?
Weird, therefore, to sit in the hermetic almost-silence of a high rise hotel room, watching, but not hearing anything other than the raindrops hitting the glass, and the muffled murmurings of the trains like waves breaking on the shore, or a distant creature breathing…..

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Plane view

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography on May 1, 2012| Leave a Comment »

plane view

When I turned fifty I celebrated with a flight in a hot air balloon.
Standing in that small basket, the intermittent roar and heat of a burner over my head, peering over the edge of the woven cane, entranced by the red earth of the Atlas mountains receding beneath my feet, was the strangest feeling.

Standing still as the world fell silently and effortlessly away below me.

That day changed my relationship with the planet.

Somehow, since then, I can be amazed by how still I can stand as the Earth spins and hurls through the seemingly almost empty solar system.

I remember that now as I squint out of the window of a plane to see only intense, bright, white light, which almost imperceptibly begins to sink away beneath me, revealing a blue sky above which deepens as it soars towards the heavens.
How do I feel so still, so whole, when below me is only white cloud which swirls, and thins, and disappears, revealing glimpses of the spinning Earth, and above me just the vast, deep, yet mostly empty sky?

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A miraculous life

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, philosophy on April 19, 2012| 3 Comments »

When I read this passage from Marilynne Robinson’s new book, I immediately recalled Robert Solomon’s “Joy of Philosophy” (which I reviewed and reflected on here)

There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival and procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. But all we really know about what we are is what we do. There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell. The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself—forget definition, forget assumption, watch. We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small. No physicist would dispute this, though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the old language and call reality miraculous

I do think reducing a human being, in whatever way, takes us into acting at a subhuman level. It’s this reduction of the miraculous, amazing, special individual to a data set of measurable parameters which lies at the core of a lot of our problems these days. (This is why I argue for a SEA CHANGE in our values).

Robert Solomon’s book is subtitled “Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life” and in that, he nails it.

A data led, reduced, materialism is a poor, thin, inadequate way to live. What I argue for is a rich, passionate life of wonder and amazement – a miraculous life.

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View from Sirius

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, movies, personal growth, philosophy on April 15, 2012| 4 Comments »

The view from Sirius……I was exploring the origins of this idea today (it’s actually a French phrase “point de vue de sirius”), and found that someone had helpfully linked it to this clip from the great Dead Poets’ Society (haven’t seen that film in YEARS!)

I like it. In French, this idea relates to the idea of the “vue en haut” – the perspective from on high. Voltaire’s 1752 tale, Micromegas, is often cited as the origin of the Sirius reference. In this amazing, centuries ahead of itself tale, a person from Sirius, Micromegas, visits the Earth. The idea of “le point de vue de Sirius”, refers to both that ability to stand back and take an overview, something we all need to do from time to time (and which I’ve been doing on my week’s break from work these last 7 days), and, also, that ability to experience the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Years ago I chanced across a little paperback in a secondhand book shop – the poet Stephen Spender’s “Life and the Poet” where I read his idea of the poet getting into the mindset of a traveler from Earth visiting the Moon for the first time. The view from Sirius idea encompasses that idea.
However, it’s Pierre Hadot, the French philosopher, I have to thank for explaining it in his brilliant “N’oublie pas de vivre” (“Don’t forget to live”).

Whatever its origins, I think it’s a great concept – so why not try to adopt the “view from Sirius” today, and see how things look now?

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To know someone

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life on April 13, 2012| 2 Comments »

Stumbled across a fabulous extract from Marilynne Robinson’s new book. Here’s just one of the paragraphs which hooked me –

There is a great difference, in fiction and in life, between knowing someone and knowing aboutsomeone. When a writer knows about his character, he is writing for plot. When he knows his character, he is writing to explore, to feel reality on a set of nerves somehow not quite his own. Words like “sympathy,” “empathy,” and “compassion” are overworked and overcharged—there is no word for the experience of seeing an embrace at a subway stop or hearing an argument at the next table in a restaurant. Every such instant has its own emotional coloration, which memory retains or heightens, and so the most sidelong, unintended moment becomes a part of what we have seen of the world. Then, I suppose, these moments, as they have seemed to us, constellate themselves into something a little like a spirit, a little like a human presence in its mystery and distinctiveness.

She’s writing about writing fiction of course, but the insight is applicable to life too, don’t you think? I recall Dan Siegel’s great line about the importance of “feeling felt”. I think that, as a doctor, it’s these little moments which are all around us every day, if we can only be sufficiently present and aware to notice them, which embed their constellations of human emotion into our psyches. I do believe, it’s these, and all the others I encounter in the everyday clinic, which create the conditions for understanding – for my understanding of those who come to me to be heard and to be felt.

This is the essence of “healing”.

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The magic of being human

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, psychology on April 12, 2012| 5 Comments »

There’s been quite a drive to reduce human beings to purposeless, temporary clusters of molecules. I don’t buy into it. For me, to understand what it is to be human involves taking on board consciousness, an inescapable subjective experience of a self, the interconnectedness of a person with others and with the rest of the universe in which we exist, and, not least, through the development of symbol manipulation and language development, a constant bent towards storytelling and seeking meaning in every day existence. (Cripes! That was quite a sentence, and, believe me, I had to stop myself there…..I could see that sentence spilling over into an entire page…)

The NY Times recently published a piece, “In Defense of Superstition“, about Matthew Hutson’s “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking”. This is one of those things which makes you wonder about the nature of reality. I don’t think reality can be reduced to its physical, material elements. There’s a lot about reality which emerges from the fact we live as conscious beings in an inextricably interconnected universe. From this perspective, what are we to make of magic, and magical thinking?

The article cites research showing that golfers told the golf ball they are to play with is a lucky ball are 35% more likely to sink the putt, and that people can improve their memory performance when in possession of a lucky charm. This doesn’t surprise me. What you believe, and what you experience emotionally and subconsciously significantly influences your behaviour and your performance.

Do you remember a movie entitle, “The Cooler“? I think it was William H Macy as an unlucky charm, employed by a casino boss to stand next to people on a winning streak, so they’d start to lose. When he falls in love, his ability to transmit bad luck disappears….fascinating movie.

We co-create our reality with the world we live in, and most of that creation doesn’t come from the “thinking” part of our brain!

The article sums up

But without it, the existential angst of realizing we’re just impermanent clusters of molecules with no ultimate purpose would overwhelm us. So to believe in magic — as, on some deep level, we all do — does not make you stupid, ignorant or crazy. It makes you human

I agree with the last two sentences, but I don’t agree with the assumption that we are “just impermanent clusters of molecules with no ultimate purpose”. Do you?

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There, there, where’s the matter?

Posted in books, from the living room, science, tagged on March 19, 2012| 1 Comment »

I don’t get the obsession with the physical which underpins materialism. The idea that “truth” is only found in what can be measured, weighed, or touched, seems, inherently to deny the reality of our irreducible subjectivity. Can love be measured? Can passion, beauty, joy?

I think it’s some desire for certainty, coupled with a drive for power. Materialistic, physicalist scientism places a high value on certainty and a need for prediction to deliver power over “outcomes”.

I do understand that. But, I don’t sign up to it.

This pre-eminence of matter is being undermined by our exploration of sub-atomic reality. As Lynne McTaggart describes in “The Bond”

matter is nothing but a relationship; x + y, in a sense, stands for an impenetrable bond between two indeterminate things that do not exist on their own

Think about that for a moment….what we perceive as matter does not in fact exist as other than a relationship between things which don’t exist on their own…..

The universe contains an indeterminate number of vibrating packets of energy that constantly pass energy back and forth as if in an endless game of basketball with a quantum sea of light. Indeed they aren’t even there all the time, but are constantly popping in and out of existence, making a brief appearance before disappearing back into the underlying energy field.

Beautiful.

The surface of the sea is rarely still. In fact, it is never still at the edges. Have you ever been to a beach where there are no waves breaking on the shore, where there is no tide?Some days, however, as you cast your eyes out further to sea, the surface may appear flat and calm, but it rarely stays that way for long. The wind blows, the currents flow, and the surface breaks into a myriad of waves. Every one of us is like one of these waves. We appear, as if we are separate and distinct entities, but only for a brief time, then we are gone again. This is no illusion. Like the waves, we do indeed appear as distinct, discernible entities. But only for a short period of time. Just as the waves emerge out of the ocean, without breaking away from the ocean, so we emerge from the universe, from Life, from the non-dual nature of reality. And just as the waves dissolve back into the great sea again, so do we, after a brief life, return to the universe, to whatever it is that we emerge from.  [Bob Leckridge. Be The Flow]

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Interesting numbers

Posted in from the living room, movies on March 12, 2012| 2 Comments »

Is it just boys who are fascinated by numbers? Remember this scene from that great Scottish movie, Gregory’s Girl?

Well, you tell me….but here are some numbers I find completely fascinating.

In India, an aeon (a Day of Brahma), is 4,320,000,000 days, is followed by a Night of Brahma, which lasts another 4,320,000,000 days. That’s a total of 8,640,000,000 days.

In Iceland, there are 540 doors in Valhalla. At the end of the world 800 warriors will go through each door. 800 x 540 = 432,000.

In Babylonian mythology, there were 432,000 years between the crowning of the first Sumerian king and the Deluge.

In the Bible, between Adam and Noah’s Flood were 1656 years. The number of 7 day weeks in 1656 years is 86,400. (according to Julius Oppert, the Assyriologist)

Look at your watch. Each hour has 60 minutes, and each minute has 60 seconds. In 24 hours there are 86,400 seconds – 43,200 seconds of day, and 43,200 seconds of night (ok, not exactly, I know, it depends on season and latitude, but you can see what I mean!)

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Learning to trust your feelings

Posted in from the living room, life, psychology, science, tagged on March 4, 2012| 1 Comment »

When you stop to think about it, there’s an awful lot going on inside your brain that’s nothing to do with thinking. Well, when I say nothing to do with thinking, I don’t exactly mean that….after all, everything is connected to everything else in there. What I mean is that conscious thought and reasoning is only a small part of the function of the brain and the mind. Some of that is about sensory and motor function – your brain processes a lot of signals from the sensory nerves and a lot of those signals don’t make it as far as conscious awareness. Your brain also processes a lot of the muscle activity of your body…everything from voluntary movements eg picking up a pencil….to involuntary effects like heart rate and rhythm.

One interesting aspect of what goes on in the mind is emotions – by “mind” I do not mean “brain” – I mean the extended, embodied network of nerves and chemicals which are involved in “mental processes”. Emotions occur below the level of consciousness and some of them we become directly aware of and can think about, but others seem to occur in what Freud and Jung described as the “unconscious”. In fact, “depth psychology” is all about trying to work with all this material which lies either wholly or partly inaccessible to conscious, rational thought.

We have tended to hold rational, cognitive thought, at the highest level. As if it is best to think things through, and not to trust our feelings. But is that the best strategy?

Here’s a fascinating article on this subject from Jonah Lehrer writing in Wired.

…..from the lab of Michael Pham at Columbia Business School. The study involved asking undergraduates to make predictions about eight different outcomes, from the Democratic presidential primary of 2008 to the finalists of American Idol. They forecast the Dow Jones and picked the winner of the BCS championship game. They even made predictions about the weather. Here’s the strange part: although these predictions concerned a vast range of events, the results were consistent across every trial: people who were more likely to trust their feelings were also more likely to accurately predict the outcome. Pham’s catchy name for this phenomenon is the emotional oracle effect. Consider the results from the American Idol quiz: while high-trust-in-feelings subjects correctly predicted the winner 41 percent of the time, those who distrusted their emotions were only right 24 percent of the time. The same lesson applied to the stock market, that classic example of a random walk: those emotional souls made predictions that were 25 percent more accurate than those who aspired to Spock-like cognition.

The explanation given for this is…

Every feeling is like a summary of data, a quick encapsulation of all the information processing that we don’t have access to. (As Pham puts it, emotions are like a “privileged window” into the subterranean mind.) When it comes to making predictions about complex events, this extra information is often essential. It represents the difference between an informed guess and random chance.

One important aspect of this study was that just guessing about a subject you knew nothing about, and cared nothing about, didn’t produce the same results. But if you really care about something, and are knowledgeable about that subject, then learning to be aware of, and trust, your feelings can produce better results than relying on logic and reason.

This reminds me of a Heartmath technique called “Heart mapping” where you make a “mind map” about your project, then, get coherent, then ask your heart what more does this project need, and create a second, complementary map – a “heart map”. Between them, you have a more holistic map of your project – one which captures both practicalities and values.

It’s reassuring to learn that our feelings are actually such potentially powerful and useful tools.

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21 day Meditation Challenge

Posted in from the living room, life on February 22, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Do you have a daily meditation practice?

There’s a 21 day Meditation Challenge going on right now, so if you don’t, why not check this out and join in?

Here’s the introduction from Day 1 –

Only a few decades ago, medical students were taught to view the body as a machine whose parts would inevitably break down until it could no longer be repaired. Today science is arriving at a radically different understanding: While the body appears to be material, it is really a field of energy and intelligence that is inextricably connected to the mind. All of the thoughts, perceptions, memories, emotions, and feelings in our mind influence every cell of our body. When we have a loving thought or focus on a happy memory or feeling, our brain triggers a cascade of molecules that promote wellbeing in our physiology. On the other hand, when we hold onto emotions such as anger, fear, and doubt, this creates stress and damage in the body.

 

 

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