Category Archives: lifestyle

Sleep! Or not.

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When I was little, I once dreamed that everyone else was eating cake and I didn’t get any of it.  I was grumpy for hours after I woke up.  As an adult, you can probably have all the cake you want, but perhaps you no longer can have all the sleep you want.  And grumpiness is the least of the consequences.

Sleep disorders are not just a “nightmare” for those who suffer from them. They also cost society much in lost workdays.  And not only those days when you are too tired to work, having tossed and turned all night and finally falling asleep when you were about to go to work. I have been there and you have my sympathy, but unfortunately your boss may be less sympathetic. It is common to come up with some more dignified excuse, which already distorts the numbers. And yet even this is only the top of the iceberg.

Lack of sleep, especially deep sleep, opens the body to a host of adverse effects further down the road.  Slow-wave sleep strengthens the immune system and helps rebuild muscles.  So a great number of sick days could have been avoided if you met the environment with a well-rested body.  And yet even this may not be the worst part.  Most of us don’t get sick every day or even every week, so a few days off is just part of what life throws our way.  But an increasing number of people are unable to keep a full job at all, or even a job at all, even though they want to.  And the truth is that mental problems is by far the fastest growing category here. Today’s information age has no room for those who barely can keep their mind together on an ordinary day, much less fill it with complex models of abstract information. Without sufficient sleep (and of sufficient quality) it is hard to remain alert and clearheaded enough for the workplace of tomorrow.

Indeed, sleep disturbances are among the first signs of major mental illnesses.  But they may be more than mere symptoms:  There are studies where healthy volunteers have been kept from dreaming for several days.  They reacted with loss of concentration, then changes in behavior  and attitude, and eventually hallucinations.  In these otherwise healthy people, a good night’s sleep restored their mental health.  But not all people get a good night’s sleep.

But knowing all this will probably cause you to worry even more, and so sleep even less!  Have I come to torment you before the time?  Hardly!  There are some good news, except they are not really new at all. On the contrary, some of them are approximately as old as civilization. Although some progress has also been made in recent years. Perk up your ears, you can sleep later!

“Meditation is not medication.”  This simple fact seems lost on some of those who arrive at places like the Project Meditation Forum. It is common these days to want a quick fix, and seek it out only when things don’t work anymore the old way.  Unfortunately, this is likely to cause disappointment and more frustration.  The effect of meditation is far more subtle, but it is still a solution in the long run.

A number of people find that their sleep becomes healthier after they have taken up the practice of meditation.  Stilling the waves of the mind, the carousel of thoughts and feelings no longer whirl through their heads when that head hits the pillow.  More prosaically, those whirling thoughts will show up when you try to meditate as well.  You will learn to watch them with detachment rather than hate them, fear them or repress them.  You will find that in the eye of the storm there is a calm center, and although it may take time to get settled there, you will find it gradually easier as time passes.  Unfortunately, by “time passes” we are talking months and years rather than this weekend.  Still, if you don’t have some terminal disease now, you will probably want next year to have done the right thing this year!  It is not like you do this for a stranger, but for your future self.

There are ways to speed up the process of meditation, or rather parts of it, with modern technology.  But first let us have a look at traditional meditation and how it interacts with sleep.

As I mentioned, many people will sleep better as soon as the turmoil inside starts to calm down.  But even if your sleep disturbances are physical and incurable, all is not lost!  People who meditate need less sleep too. In the beginning they may be able to get up half an hour earlier and meditate for half an hour, which seems a pretty tame exchange. But gurus and sages who have meditated for decades, can go with extremely little sleep and suffer no ill effects.  This does not happen overnight either:  The longer you keep at it, the greater the benefit.  There are very good reasons for this.

During sleep we use a different set of brainwaves from those we use when awake.  In everyday life, we mostly use beta waves, which are small and irregular but well suited for the constantly shifting attention of everyday life.  When we calm down and relax, we shift to alpha waves, which are slower but more regular.  On the road to falling asleep, these waves replace the beta waves, and eventually get mixed with the even slower theta waves. These take up by far most of our sleep time, especially as we grow older.  In the beginning of the night we also spend some time in delta (or slow-wave) sleep, which has even far larger and slower brain waves.  It is during this sleep phase that the body releases human growth hormone.  In adults this hormone mostly just repairs the body you already have (although nose, ears and sometimes hands and feet very slowly continue to grow even in adult life. It is worth it though.)  During the last part of the night, we instead spend more and more time in REM sleep, with intense dreams. The brainwaves here are much like in waking life. This sleep phase is essential to the mind but somewhat exhausting to the body.

As  we grow older, the pattern changes.  Deep, dreamless sleep is the first to fade. In many elderly several night can pass without any slow-wave sleep whatsoever. This is not only bad news for the immune system and muscles, but also seems to have a negative impact on learning.  Theta sleep expands to take the place of delta, but also dreamsleep suffers: In many cases, when the beta waves begin, instead of dreaming the elderly will simply wake up. They are not at all finished with their sleep for the night, but what are they to do?  The body reacts to REM (dreamsleep) by increasing heart rate and blood pressure.  If you wake up at this time, chances are that you don’t feel much like going back to sleep for a while, even if you are tired.

When you learn to meditate, at first you will spend the time in alpha waves.  That is actually a best-case scenario, because beginners are interrupted by beta a lot.  But time helps with this. Being able to enter alpha waves at will, you can fall asleep more easily.  But of course meditation time is not meant to be spent sleeping.  Rather, meditation causes an expansion of awareness.  With years of practice, you will be able to reach theta waves when you meditate. These deeper, slower waves are normally only active during sleep, but the guru or sage or advanced monk can enter them at will.

Now we remember that theta waves is where we spend most of our sleep, and particularly as adults and beyond.  So having spent hours in this state while conscious, there is no reason why these people should do it all over again while asleep.  Meditation itself is a rather pleasurable activity (although not at all exciting) so it is only natural that for those skilled enough, meditation gradually eats up sleep time.  Although there will always be some left. Probably. But we’re talking a couple hours here for old gurus.   That should make up for pretty much any sleep problems you may have.

Unfortunately, you are probably not a guru.  Well, there are some of them out there, but they probably don’t read this.  So what about the rest?  Well, we could get started with meditation without waiting overlong.  Also, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we could speed up reaching the deeper brainwaves. This is easily done through brainwave entrainment, which I have written about occasionally in the past. Like last week.

You can buy elaborate soundtracks with lots of explanation and support.  I’m a bit of a fan of LifeFlow, from Project Meditation.  This system is meant to work with meditation, and gradually introduces deeper and slower brain waves over a period of 10 months. That’s a lot of time (and some money) but it still beats decades.

I have also used Holosync, from Centerpointe Research Institute.  To be honest, I think they have researched marketing more than brainwave entrainment for the last pretty many years, but they do have a tried and true formula which thousands of people have been willing to pay a substantial amount to continue using for several years.  So it may be worth looking into. In any case, they have a free sample CD.  It is mostly sales pitch, but there is about 10 minutes of pretty good delta entrainment in the middle (at the end of the first track).  That may not sound like much, especially when it takes a few minutes to get the brain entrained (especially the first times).  But remember that there are elderly people who go several nights in a row without delta at all.  So it may be worth the time. Not to mention the price, since it is a free demo.

Or you could download free software and make your own. Some research required. Gnaural is available for several platforms, including Windows and Linux. Certified geeky.

Anyway, to sum it up:  Meditation can replace sleep to a great extent and is generally a pleasant activity (or rather passivity) once you get the hang of it.  If there is just no way you can sleep without eating toxic stuff, you may give it a try.  It will take time, but you are just tossing and turning anyway, so why not use that time?  Works for me.

Holosync out, LifeFlow still in

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I even have a pair of good headphones I bring with me on the commute and wherever I want to listen to brainwave entrainment tracks on the move. It is a pretty good use of such time, don’t you think?

Looking at my tags, it seems I have not written about my brainwave entrainment since last summer. I know I have meant to write about it later, but I may have done so only in my head, or only a draft that I did not upload. Time to fix that. I think some people may benefit from knowing. There is still a good deal of searches for Holosync on my statistics. And reasonably so, for it is a pretty expensive program by the standards of most of the world, especially with the current economy. It is not like everyone lives in Norway where there is no recession and even an underpaid office worker in a part-time job can afford to try out stuff like this and shrug off the bill almost without noticing.

(You know envy will land you in Hell, right? And that’s even before you’re dead. Envy is bad for your spirit, soul and body. Repent, repent!)

Anyway, Holosync. I guess a part of that steep price goes into their enormous marketing budget. Or you may call it “outreach”. If not for them, hundreds of thousands of people would never have heard of brainwave entrainment. That would have been a loss, for it is quite an interesting technology.

Basically, you use sound (or in some other products light pulses) to set up a standing wave in your brain. Unless you put some effort into making other brain waves, this wave will spread from the deeper parts of the brain where it is created, and engulf both hemispheres. This is thought to improve communication between the various parts of the brain, although I am not sure this follows logically. After all, your brain has whole-brain waves each night during dreamless sleep. This happens several times a night, especially early in the night. (Dream sleep makes up an increasing portion of sleep as morning approaches. Brain waves during dream sleep is similar to waking life, only more excited.)

Of course, during sleep you are not conscious, so that may make a difference. In any case, it is definitely a different experience. And as I have said repeatedly, sitting down and shutting up for half an hour or a whole hour each day with a noble intention will surely cause personal growth. This is proven by thousands of years of monks, nuns, sages, gurus etc, whose quiet life actually used to be a backbone of civilization. Whether civilization today has a backbone I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

I’ve stopped using Holosync, though, because I am more impressed with LifeFlow from Project Meditation (warning: sound!). While still a little heavy on the hype, they are more realistic, encouraging a combination of entrainment and meditation, and also not flooding their customers with constant mail (both electronic and paper) promoting largely unrelated new-age and general quackery products like Bill Harris / Centerpointe does. More importantly, I think their product is better (eventually) and I agree with their approach.

LifeFlow starts with entrainment at 10 Hz, a fairly everyday alpha level which most of us experience when we relax. For each month you subscribe, you get a new track that is 1 Hz lower: 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and finally two bonus tracks with gamma (very high frequencey) for those who dare experiment with that. These frequencies are associated with religious ecstasy but may also trigger a panic attack, so it is probably a good idea to go through a year of familiarizing yourself with brainwave entrainment first. Me, I prefer to get my religious ecstasy from religion, if at all. Anyway, LifeFlow combines the use of binaural beats (which Holosync also uses) with monaural and isochronic tones. It does not use ramping (sliding frequencies) as the brain anyway uses several minutes to entrain to a frequency unless you are deeply familiar with it.

The different frequencies have somewhat different effect on the brain, although not in great detail: They mostly fall into three groups. But all of them induce synchronization of large parts of the brain. Of special interest is the deepest frequencies, which correspond to the waves of delta sleep, or slow wave sleep. Natural delta waves have a frequency ranging from about 0.5 to 2 Hz, or oscillations per second. So this is quite slow indeed.

During deep, dreamless sleep the brain seems to rest more deeply than otherwise, and this is also where growth hormone is released in adult men (the only group of humans where this has been studied in detail as far as I know). In young adults, delta sleep make up a significant part of the first sleep cycle (about 90 minutes), a smaller part of the next, and very little from then on. In the elderly it is quite common to not have slow waves sleep at all most nights. Being able to induce this state in the brain artificially may have substantial health potential. What I can say is that it certainly seems to let me do with less sleep each night and still be less tired than I used to be during the day.

After I got the deepest levels of LifeFlow, I have had no need for Holosync. I have not sent it back for a refund though (they do have a 1 year money back promise if you don’t buy any higher levels). After all, I used it for several months, so I feel I got my money’s worth. I just think LifeFlow is more effective, once you get to the deeper levels. You also have more levels to choose from, for different purposes. That it also happens to be more affordable is just an added bonus. Recommended. (They also have a great forum where meditators with decades of experience will share their wisdom with newcomers. It’s not quite like having your own guru, but probably better than nothing. Plus, you have me! ^_^)

So that’s how it ended, at least so far. I may write more if I find I have left out anything important.

Cellphone diversity

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di0908018

No, really, they can’t see your body language through the telephone, not even when you exaggerate it. All you achieve is to entertain people like me, or Konata here.

Some otherwise well-intending people I know believe that they are not racists (presumably because they are not white), yet they have this concept of “diversity”.  It seems to mean that in any group of more than a couple persons, in order to have the right to an opinion, the group needs to comprise different skin colors.  In other contexts there may also be a need for at least two genders, preferably more, but the color thing is the most obvious and baffling. For skin color to have anything to do with diversity, you almost have to be either a racist or a photographer.  But I am willing to tolerate even that. After all, with the cell phones we have today, almost everyone is a photographer…

If you REALLY want diversity, however, you should categorize people based on how they use their cell phone, and include at least one from each of the main three types.

I see them on the street, I see them on the bus, occasionally even at work.  The age, gender and skin color varies wildly, but they all do the same thing, talk in their cell phones. In this regard, there is no diversity at all.  Even when they speak a language I don’t even recognize, they are all eerily similar.  Surely any one of them, even the one who just came here last year from Africa, is more similar to the rest of them than to me.  I claim minority status dammit! RESPECT ME NOW!

So, the three main breeds of human, as revealed by their cell phones.

Type 1: The talker.  This person, in true reactionary fashion, uses the telephone to talk. As if we weren’t in a new millennium at all.  There’s a lot of these people.  You can usually recognize them as soon as the phone comes out, either because it is already ringing, or because it is small, with a particularly small display and plain, functional number keys filling the rest of the front.

Type 2: The texter. There is an overlap between this group and the first. Some people will talk if reasonably private but text in a more crowded setting, such as the bus. But you will also see them walking down the street, texting and relying on the world to not collide with them.  They also frequently receive text messages, which means they either stick with their own type or have somehow conditioned others to use the same channel to communicate with them.  Their phones are larger, to give room for a high quality display and large keys.  Occasionally the number keys are replaced with a tiny QWERTY keyboard, and inventive ways exist to fold this into the phone when not in use.

Type 3: The surfer.  At first glance this may look like a texter, but the rhythm is different. The surfer will click a few keys, then look at the screen for a while, then click again. Sometimes he (are there even any female surfers?) will type for a while, but there is no finality to it.  The phone is fairly large, but most important, it is almost entirely covered by screen. The surfer will most likely type on the screen with his fingertip, rather than a separate keyboard.

No prizes for guessing which type I am.  I have recently completed my phonification of Twitter, Facebook and Livejournal by installing specific clients for each of them on my Android phone.  (HTC Hero, for those who missed the news.) This way I can check or update my social sites on the bus.  Actually I am not very social at all, as you may have noticed, but so much the better that I can get it done on the bus. Or in bed.  Instant gratification!  Not in the shower though.

I have yet to receive a call on it though, thankfully.  Much less place one.

Girlfriends & the arrow of time

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di090729

“I want a girlfriend, too” says this barely legal teen from the anime Please Teacher. You’d think people would outgrow that want when they grow old enough to marry, but evidently not.

First off, let me preface this by saying that this is not a declaration of hate toward those I write about here.  Some of my best friends have girlfriends.  Well, at least one, but some very likable acquaintances too.  And in so far as I may seem to assert my smug superiority, remember that it is not mine, but belongs to all of humankind, reaching back to the dawn of civilization, and is free to receive by all who wish to be worthy of it, and even me who am not.

Now, as I said above, it is natural for a young boy to want a girlfriend. I don’t think I need to go into much more detail about that, at least today.  What I find disturbing is people aged 25, 30, or even 40, casually talking about their “girlfriend” or “boyfriend”.  And I don’t mean this merely in a linguistic sense, that they should say “womanfriend” or “manfriend” instead.  Although I suppose that would kind of highlight one aspect of this.

Basically what I react to is the lying, which I suppose is really a form of hypocrisy. This  fits with the phrase being quite common in the USA, whereas European languages tend to go for a somewhat more realistic phrase like “lover”, “fiancée” or here in Norway “kjæreste” (“dearest”) which used to be another word for fiancé/e.  Although I have seen the word corresponding to “girlfriend” seeping in here too, to some degree, probably because of the cultural wind from the west. Mostly we Scandinavians use the word “samboer” (cohabitant) however, if actually living together rather than just visiting.

Is the girlfriend just a girl who is also a friend?  Rarely, except sometimes when used by straight women.  Rather, it usually refers to some kind of informal or temporary spouse, or nearly so.  Sometimes an actual fiancée. Sometimes a part-time spouse, though I’d say that is rather uncommon.  Anyway, there is usually sex and some degree of mingled economy.

So why this immature name and, in some cases, immature behavior?  I can see how this took root among people whose main anchor in life was the next fix of their illegal drug. If I remember correctly, it was in this or some related milieu it first started to take off here in Norway.  But when I see it on a forum dedicated to self-improvement and personal growth, I have to wonder how it got this far.  What is wrong with following the simple basic regulations for civilized life that we have had since the Bronze Age at the very least?

I had started thinking about this before I left the city and went home.  I was still thinking about it as I was mowing the lawn (again!), and I asked myself once again: “Why can’t they just marry?”

At that point my mowing had brought me all the way to the hedge that separates me from the neighbors, and without planning to eavesdrop, I could not help hear the woman on the other side of the hedge ask someone: “Why can’t they just marry?”  I mowed on and did not get the full explanation, but evidently it was not quite that simple.

Well, evidently it isn’t quite that simple, and I suppose the childlike name of the relationship gives some clue as to why.   Despite being old enough that biologically they could have grandchildren, people are still “not ready” for the commitment of marriage. They are ready for the sex and the quarreling and frequently for having babies, though. WTF? And I mean that quite literally.

Here in Scandinavia there are certain tax and welfare incentives for single parents to remain single, but since long ago this only applies if they don’t have any children with the person they are currently living with. So there is the perverse situation that if you have a child together, you get richly rewarded for breaking up.  Evidently the mostly socialist governments we have had over the past generation felt that it is important that a child not grow up with both its biological parents. Anyone else, just not the actual parent.  I won’t elaborate on the idiocy of the Left this time, however.  Anyone with an ounce of common sense can see how crazy that policy is.  But even in the face of losing their tax breaks and welfare, there are numerous couples who stay together. But marry? No way.

Note that I am not the biggest ever fan of marriage.  I see duonormativity as way overhyped. You will never find the person who can make you happy, because you ARE the person who can make you happy.  Well, not counting God I suppose, but I think even God would do that mainly by changing you into a person who did happiness-promoting things instead of unhappiness-promoting things.  In fact, pretending to be a Christian or Jew or Hindu or Buddhist (probably moderate Muslim as well) and living according to their tenets would probably make the average person happier even if he did not for a moment believe in the supernatural.

But pretending to be a barely legal teenager when you’re old enough to have grandkids is unlikely to make you happy, nor those around you.

Of course, you may vehemently disagree with most of the above.  That does not really bother me, since my happiness or lack thereof is very much unrelated to your marital status.  I’m not one of the “OMG your gaiety / polygamy / fornication is threatening my marriage GTFO!” types, although who knows how much of that comes from me not being married in the first place. One would assume that we singles threaten people’s marriage a lot more than e.g. gays do, unless one is (or is married to) a very bi-curious person.

But even if you disagree with me (and good luck with that), you have to admit that it is kind of cool to have my neighbor voicing my thoughts without even seeing me. Scratch up one more for time reversal!

Dentistry, summer and fat

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di090622

“Faint praise coming from you” my self-sim seems to think.

I have lost count of how many weeks I have gone with a loose tooth. It was one of the three ceramic teeth and was fastened on the root of the original with a thin metal bar. This is, I believe, the third time it has been broken. Hopefully it will be a while till next time. Perhaps that depends on my computer shopping habits, however.

I have written in the past about this peculiar pattern. At first I thought the rule was “Every time you buy a computer, God kills a tooth.” (Patterned after the infamous “God kills a kitten” meme, which I am sure Google can explain to anyone who may have been spared it until now.) Later experience showed that I could buy desktop computers without breaking teeth, so I amended it to “Every time you buy a laptop, God kills a tooth.” This time, however, the tooth broke while I still considered buying a laptop for a friend. Actually in part I did this to test whether the cosmic law only reacted to buying for myself or whether it was the objective act of buying a laptop that invoked it. Instead I found that it was the decision to buy. Perhaps at some future point, I will break teeth even by looking at a laptop to covet it?

In any case, I got it fixed at a sufferable cost, and in time before the summer vacation. (Not mine, I don’t have vacation in summer, but presumably the dentists have. Summer vacation is almost sacred up here in Norway, where the summer is short but intense, with warm bright nights that don’t invite to get up early next morning for a long day of hard work.) The dentist’s equipment had broken down today but he borrowed that of a colleague; they are a small team of dentists working together and sharing office services. Despite the unfamiliar workplace he seems to have done a good job.

On my way back to work, I noticed how hot the day had become. It was by now rather late in the workday, around 15 (3PM) and the heat in the city felt almost tropical compared to the cool days of the past couple weeks. I have thoroughly enjoyed the cloudy weather with occasional showers, since I am not really made for heat. The newspaper claims that the heat will last for a week or more. I would not be surprised, the south coast of Norway is a naturally sunny place all year long with only scattered rainy days. No wonder people from all over the country come to relax on the beaches here.

One recurring concern when the word “beach” comes up is the extra pounds from the dark season. They just don’t seem willing to leave in order to render you good-looking in swimwear. Of course, this is hardly a concern for me, since I get violently ill if I eat more than a few grams of fat. And even were it not so, I have long since given up on swimwear. Not so much because of the skin disease that makes much of my body look like that of a toad, but mostly because melanoma runs in my family. I can only hope that I realized this soon enough – I have mostly stayed out of the sun since I was around 20 – but I certainly don’t want to run any risks now. Life is short enough as is.

Fat is not known to make life any longer, at least in our time when there is an excess of it. And that was the thing I noticed on my way back from the dentist: Norwegians really are growing fatter. Norwegians and Sims. One of the most eye-catching changes in The Sims 3 compared to the earlier versions is the wider range of body shapes, from fat to skinny to muscular. A goodly number of the inhabitants of the imaginary town are shaped like couch potatoes, and unfortunately so are also those in the real town where I work. It used to be that Norwegians were still lean and active compared to our American cousins. Well, they are still ahead of us in sheer obesity, but not in overweight.

To make this clear, the border between “normal” and overweight is set pretty low. Unnaturally low, I believe, as studies show that mortality is actually slightly lower in the barely overweight group than in the “normal” group, which includes some decidedly skinny people. I am not sure who set up those categories. They should probably have been set a little higher. But in any case, technically obesity is a different group from overweight, and at this point the health cost is obvious. It is hard for the obese to move around efficiently, and their hearts are hard pressed to keep the blood flowing through the bloated body. Hypertension and diabetes are almost unavoidable if enough years pass in such a state.

Norwegians have become overweight to the same degree as Americans – about two in three is now above that artificial line – but we have far less outright obesity. I am afraid this is only a matter of time, though. Looking around today, I saw a lot of fat. There is definitely more of it than there used to be when I was young. Unless someone finds a miracle cure, we will have the same wave of chronic lifestyle diseases as our American cousins, with all the cost and suffering involved.

After work I went home and trotted out the manual lawnmower again. As the voices in my head remarked: “I am become death, the destroyer of grass.” (Thank you, Oppenheimer.) But better it than me. I can do without a tooth for a few weeks, but not a heart.

Sitting down, shutting up

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di090508

I need to calm myself down!  If you sometimes feel like that, you may want to read this. If not, you may NEED to read it…

I was thinking to write about the two brainwave entrainment systems I have tested this spring, Holosync and LifeFlow.  However, I realized that this should come first.

As I said already when I was reading up on Holosync, before buying the first (and for me, last) module: Personal growth and transformation will come in some form to virtually anyone who sets aside an hour a day for a monotonous task with a noble purpose. Or to put it more bluntly:  Sit down and shut up, and you will become a better person.

I do not know if it has always been like this. Probably, for in ages past, the day often went with simply working and caring for the most immediate needs. Only a few had the leisure to choose between wisdom and debauchery. But today, the whip we crack to keep us running is inside us rather than outside. The ever running, hectic mind will not be quiet. We work only half as much as our ancestors, and still we have barely time to sleep.

If you have been running around like that, not able to sit still for more than five minutes at best, doing “nothing” for an hour (or even a half!) can be a harrowing experience.  Bill Harris of Centerpointe and Michael Mackensie of Project Meditation both speak of “resistance” as being common, and even “upheaval” being possible, and they give much similar advice on how to deal with it.  Many of these things will happen even if you just sit there, say I.  Memories you had forgotten return out of the blue. Feelings you cannot explain suddenly arise, whether happy or sad.  You become aware of many bodily sensations that you did not notice before.  You suddenly think of a lot of things you should have done. You suddenly miss an old friend or relative that you could phone, or you realize that the house badly needs cleaning.

(Actually, unlike some respectable sages, I think the cleaning urge can be a good sign.  Sitting exercise increase the order within you, so the disorder around you become more obvious and contrary to you. I have good experience with doing some modest amount of cleaning and then returning to my position. But it is also possible that it can serve merely as a distraction, if the need is not real.)

More obvious hindrances are the intense feeling of boredom and urge to be entertained.  Normally people who have nothing else to do will sit down with the TV.  Failing that, a computer will do. It has endless entertainment and distraction.  (I feel the urge to open City of Heroes even now – I guess Goodwin is right that blogging can also be a form of spiritual exercise, “blogio divina” I think he calls it, although Google seems to not recognize that phrase.)

Failing any of these outlet, the human mind will throw itself into remembering (and often rewriting) the past, planning for the future, and constructing elaborate daydreams.  This is what I have written about so often lately, the “default network” of the brain.  (Google will offer to drown you in information about this if you don’t remember my earlier rants.) Everything to make sure we are not actually present in the moment.

Holosync, Hemisync, LifeFlow and many others may have other virtues as well, but arguably their main effect is that they keep people from escaping (or fleeing in horror) from the very act of quietude. Meditation and prayer do this as well, in addition to their own specific effects. Even listening to classic music (I recommend Back on principle) or watching art could have some effect.  And of course watching paint dry.

Before you go into any act of quietude with the sincere intention to make it part of your life, you should be prepared that resistance will appear.  The effect of quietude is growing awareness.  At first this awareness will be dispersed and unfocused, and therefore you will see these effects:  Random memories, feelings, impulses, small pains or itches or strange sensations of your body.  They are the first encounters of your awareness!  The awareness needs to be collected, tamed and trained to go beyond these distractions if you want to grow as a person.  You will meet things you have failed to integrate in the past, or as in my nightmare, thrown down in the basement and locked the door. You will even meet the collective delusions of our culture, and must go beyond these to begin to wake up.

But the first step is to stop stepping, sit down and shut up for a while.

The awakening society

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di090418

I think it’s really cool when people try their best to help others. (Instead of, say, watching anime all evening…)

Awakening, Enlightenment, Higher Consciousness – we tend to associate this with hermits, Zen monks and New Agers going “ooommm”. Awakening to higher states of consciousness is indeed a very private, personal thing. But consistently living at a higher level of consciousness has consequences for those around us, as has living at a low level. What would happen if the average citizen put a little more “ooommm” in their life?

I am not proposing that you do this instead of caring for your kids or earning your own living. Rather, that one takes some time from watching TV (which is usually actively harming the mind. ) The television keep you in a constant state of moderate stress with its frequently shifting images, while you are helpless to influence what you see. This wears down your body and brain. Meditation is a scientifically proven anti-stress. Or you could choose any other “sitting practice”, such as prayer or lectio divina (holy reading) if you are religious (which is not as bad as it looks – the guys on TV are not representative of real religion). For those fearful of both religion and mysticism, at least set aside some time each day for contemplation of beauty, whether it is a piece of visual art or a timeless musical composition. The scientifically inclined may want to experiment with brainwave entrainment.

Meditation and other “sitting practices” make you more aware. Biologically, they reduce stress and restore natural rhythms to the body. Mentally, they calm the frenzied churning of the mind so you can think and feel more clearly. Subjectively, the constant “now” that we live in seems to expand, infused by eternity. But what about the social dimension?

First off, the growth in awareness is not something new and magical. All of us have grown in awareness through our life. We started as a purely biological parasite with no awareness whatsoever. We gradually became aware of ourselves and the distinction between self and (m)other. Then we grew in awareness through many years of play and learning, a time of great confusion that hopefully lessened as more of the pieces came together. When we grew up, we learned to think beyond the purely selfish and beyond the moment. You can say our circle of awareness expanded in space as well as time. This process continues in some adults, and they become mature. Others don’t.

The acute problems in any society comes from those who are severely lacking maturity. The rank and file criminal falls squarely in this category. Unable to think beyond his selfish wants to empathize with others, unable to see the consequences of his actions in future time, he acts without forethought or afterthought, tossed by the waves of his excitement and the manipulations of others. Their severe lack of maturity is seen in their toddler-like sense of entitlement.

But crime is not the only fruit of low awareness. Unreflected sexual behavior brings broken hearts and unloved children, not to mention the spread of diseases ranging from nuisance to slow, painful death. Impulsive shopping causes shortages further ahead and sells us into varying degrees of slavery. It is also one of the biggest sources of family tension. And it destroys the environment by squandering resources and overflowing the landfills with yesterday’s shiny things.

In our social life, lack of awareness and maturity quickly gets on other people’s nerves. Those who are more mature think we are idiots for being whiny and self-centered for no reason. Those who are not more mature still think we are idiots, but because we hog the spotlight and don’t realize that they are the center of the universe. While having common enemies may still keep us together, deep and lasting friendships are hard to maintain unless we have grown to care about others and give them room to be themselves. Instead we get dysfunctional pairings between the needy and the intrusive, or between the martyr and the persecutor.

These pairing frequently form the basis of family life as well. But while an immature person may be great fun in the bedroom, they are that much more vexing elsewhere. And the worst of the horrors is an immature parent, which brings the madness on to the next generation, distorting their tiny minds and making it hard for them to grow and mature naturally themselves. Luckily some in each generation manage to find other role models, or we would have been doomed to an endless cycle of madness.

Now, it would be cool if we all reached Satori, Nirvana or whatever your name is for the ultimate Enlightenment. But my claim is that just a little more awareness would do a world of good. For the criminals, this would unfortunately have to be enforced from outside. But the rest of us have the choice to set aside a little time on a regular basis to work on our consciousness. And it is the regular practice that does it, even if it is only a little.

What would life be if people were a little more mature? They would be calmer, not showering you with their stress like a wet dog shaking itself before you. They would be happier, more content and grateful; instead of whining so much, they would smile more and be excited about opportunities for themselves and others. They would be less selfish, more willing to share, more trustworthy and more willing to trust others. They would have more friends and fewer rivals. They would be wiser, managing their time and money better. They would show up in time and not having to run off in a hurry; they would live simpler lives and have a little time and money to spare for those who actually need a helping hand. They would not be quick to judge others, but on the other hand they would be able to admit their own mistakes and even apologize and try to make things better.

Life in a more aware society would not be paradise or utopia. While meditation and wisdom may protect against many accident and illnesses, eventually we all sicken and die. Finite resources would still be finite, even if we used them more wisely. There would presumably still be earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis. But everyday life would be a lot better than it is now. And it is pretty good now compared to how it used to be. There is nothing that keeps us from making a better world for ourselves and your children. Nothing but our own excuses.

One jar a day

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di090415

You’re next, Mr Paradiso!

Today I took another glass jar to town with me, it fit just snugly in my bag. I put in the glass container on my way to work.  When I came home from work, I took the spent fluorescent tubes to the supermarket.  (Yesterday it was the fluorescent bulbs, known here as saving bulbs since they use much less energy and last longer.  Well, supposedly they last longer. I don’t see much difference myself – I have changed most of them during these three years I’ve lived here, which is perhaps twice the life of ordinary incandescent bulbs.)

My point today – as if I had not made it before – is that I try to do this each workday.  Perhaps not both of them, but at least get something out of the house every day (not counting the ordinary trash).  Hopefully it will become second nature eventually.  My first nature is to drag things to the cave.  Thinking back to the home where I grew up, there is no doubt that I am descended from packrats.  Actually, now that I live in a house that is vaguely similar to the type of house I grew up in (albeit newer), the similarity is striking.  A living room that is halfway presentable, and several other rooms absolutely stacked with all kinds of objects, but mostly those related to learning somehow.  Yes, I have grown up to become my parents, only fewer in number.

More immediately, however, the inspiration for the (work-)daily activity probably comes from the book Integral Life Practice.  It is quite insistent that one practice each of the four core modules every day – even if only for one minute! It actually has various 5-minute and 1-minute exercises scattered throughout.  If you are busy – or, more likely, if you make yourself busy because you really don’t like one of the modules (such as body, in my case) – you can still not with any shred of dignity or integrity claim that you don’t have 1 minute free over the course of 24 hours.

Michael Mackenzie at Project Meditation says much the same thing.  If you can’t meditate more than 5 minutes, then meditate 5 minutes.  It is far better to do so every day than to start skipping days.  And Bill Harris at Centerpointe Research Institute compares using their product (Holosync) to brushing one’s teeth.  (Although I certainly would not brush my teeth continually for half an hour, much less the whole hour recommended for Holosync.  I can see what he means though.)

So that is what I do now to deal with something that is contrary to my nature.  One jar at a time, or a few light bulbs, or an old CD.  It may be only five minutes, pitiful or ridiculous depending on your view.  But if I don’t forget it and don’t fall out of the practice,  sooner or later I should become a changed person.  And even if not, there will be hundreds fewer objects in the house than it would otherwise have been, if I live here another year.

The Pigsty Project

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di090407

New Scientist clutter creep.

I have been thinking back to how my old apartment looked the last years I lived there. It is not that bad here, but the lack of storage rooms (these are still used by the landlord) made it necessary to crowd a couple rooms (bedroom and home office) with ugly stuff like bags and boxes full of various objects. And then there is the clutter creep of popular science magazines, the occasional new CD from Japan, and a couple new computers each year. As the clutter creep advances, it will become harder to keep things reasonably clean, and eventually to find things.

Thinking about this on my way home from work, I came up with what I call the Pigsty Project. Despite the name, the purpose is to reduce the pigsty rating of my home. It is a very modest approach, because grand plans never even start, when I am involved.

Basically, each workday as I return from work, I will throw something away. (Unless I have already done so in the morning, but that is probably not likely, since I am barely conscious in the morning.) It need not be a big thing. It is the fact that there are 200 workdays a year I plan to capitalize on.

Today, I threw away a stack of New Scientist from last year. As I looked on them, each had at least one really interesting article that I just knew I wanted to read again someday. Unfortunately, I also knew that there are only 7 days in a week, and none of them is named Someday. Decades of observing and journaling my life has taught me that no matter how much I love a scientific article, I am not going to read it again – even over the course of a decade or more – until I have to throw it away.

This is consistent with the behavior I observed for many years in my workplace: When given new written information, filing it in a binder served as an alternative to reading it. When given information over e-mail, the procedure was expanded to printing out the mail and putting it in a binder instead of reading it. The binder was never opened again, except to put in more pages. Then when it was full, it was left to gather dust.

I am sorry, New Scientist. But that’s the way it goes. At least I stopped subscribing after one year, and will probably continue that way until they offer online-only subscriptions like The Economist does, where I can access the archives for an acceptable monthly sum without having trees killed and laid on my doorstep as by a vegetarian cat.

One other thing I did today, to prepare for the future, was make a new folder on my almost empty D: drive, named “My old CDs”. So yeah, one of the alternatives I can do when I come home from work is to rip one of the CDs from the plastic bags that have stood around since I moved, and before that stood around for years in the Chaos Node. Each day, unless I find something else worthy of killing, one of the oldest CDs will be ripped to MP3 or some such (FLAC would probably be overkill) and then the physical CD and cover destroyed.

Actually it would probably make more sense to drop it on a bench in the city (instead of destroying it), but that would be piracy, yes?

Now it just remains to remember it each day. Lacking any other enforcement, I can only trust the Invisible Hand to click on me each day as I return from work and select “Unclutter” from the menu. It seems like something the Invisible Hand would happily do. Perhaps even gleefully…

I did not know

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di090322

By special skills in this case is meant knowing what ingredients go into dinner, and where to buy them at the best value.  There are a lot of special skills like that in a life, and some even less obvious.

I poked around on the Net again, and found a lot of articles on credit cards and such things. There sure is a lot to know about credit. What to do, what not to do, and what happens if you do it anyway. Of course this is not only so for consumer credit, but many other things in life as well. I have picked up some of it over time, but other times I have just been lucky, it seems.

In all fairness, I was what people call a “country bumpkin”. As a young adult, I knew enough about farming that I could probably have taken over a farm and fed a family, if the world ended with me. I knew that much less about all things urban, I guess, despite high school and a couple years of mercantile school. We learned various things from bookkeeping to photocopying (not as easy then as it is now), but we did not learn all that much about everyday economics. Or everyday anything, for that matter.

What I am trying to say is that I was very much mistaken back then, thinking I was an adult. I was old enough to drink or drive, marry or serve my country in unpleasant ways. But I knew very little about life and very little about myself. What a boon it would have been for me then to have my current me around. Even if young me probably would have understood only part of what middle-aged me said, and would not have the wits to even ask the right questions, it would still have been a great help. Or so it seems. Since I did not have such a person, I must assume that in the universal Grand Scheme of Things it was all for the best that I sniffed my way through the world on my own. But in principle, it would have been nifty to have someone around that was not amazingly ignorant about everything from constipation to credit cards.

One thought that struck me was that perhaps young people would be better served to live with their parents for the first 30-40 years and listen and obey them. But that would not have helped in my case. No offense to my parents, both of which were amazing in their own way, but they had lived in a world that was fading. Unfortunately, that is the rule now. If I had children who were young now, much of what I knew would be about a past in which they did not live, nor ought they to. (They would probably think I was living even more in the past than I am, as young people generally think, but there would be something to it. Quite a bit probably, and I am a pretty cutting edge guy compared to most people.)

Things have gone fairly well, given the abyss of ignorance and (particularly) ignorance about the ignorance. I credit my invisible friend, of course. But even so, I can’t help but think there must be something we can do to “hand down” essential life skills more advanced than potty training. (Actually even potty training often seems to go horribly wrong, but let’s leave that off for today.)

This entry is so unfinished, it does not really have a conclusion. I am not really sure what people can do to get life wisdom before they have already made all the mistakes that give people life wisdom. I suppose you could read the rambling journal entries of middle-aged men, but I’d like to think there is some better way somewhere. Perhaps if I could ask my 75 year old self, he could tell me. Of course, there is no certainty there will even be a 75 year old self – especially without his sound advice on how to survive that long…