This is Your Mind on Meditation
Cartoon by Richard Kinsey, http://www.richardkinsey.com/
Dear Lorin: I have been attempting to get into a morning meditation practice but my mind is SO NOISY. I just sit there and percolate with thoughts. - Restless in the Rockies
Dear Restless, There needs to be a genre of music called, “What I think about when I meditate,” maybe Snow Patrol could start it off. The structure would be OM for one second, then, “what’s up with my boyfriend/girlfriend, wife/husband,” for a couple of seconds, then on to, “hmmm, soymilk or cream in my coffee?” a mental list of all the things you forgot to do yesterday, then daydreaming about a vacation that you totally need and deserve, then coming back with a start and wondering what time it is.
The basic principle is this: whenever you have a quiet time, your brain and body will start to sort though whatever is unfinished. Your attention will be called to the texture of your relationships, and your to-do list. This is healthy. If you want your mind to be quieter during meditation, then have a separate time when you just sit and make lists and prioritize and sort through your feelings and catch up with yourself.
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This is Your Brain on Meditation
Neuroplasticity and Meditation
The Dalai Lama invited Richard Davidson, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior to his home in Dharamsala, India, in 1992 after learning about Davidson's innovative research into the neuroscience of emotions. Could the simple act of thinking change the brain? Most scientists believed this idea to be false, but they agreed to test the theory. One such experiment involved a group of eight Buddhist monk adepts and ten volunteers who had been trained in meditation for one week in Davidson's lab. All the people tested were told to meditate on compassion and love. Two of the controls, and all of the monks, experienced an increase in the number of gamma waves in their brain during meditation. As soon as they stopped meditating, the volunteers' gamma wave production returned to normal, while the monks, who had meditated on compassion for more than 10,000 hours in order to attain the rank of adept, did not experience a decrease to normal in the gamma wave production after they stopped meditating. The synchronized gamma wave area of the monks' brains during meditation on love and compassion was found to be larger than that corresponding activation of the volunteers' brains. Davidson's results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November, 2004 and TIME recognized Davidson as one of the ten most influential people in 2006 on the basis of his research. Link to Wikipedia.
Fabulous Bollywood Parody Music Video
I have to admit this video has me chuckling. Natalie Portman and her boyfriend, Devendra Banhart appear in this music video which is a takeoff of a Ramayana-type epic. The song is Banhart's single "Carmensita." Natalie Portman appears in the video as a princess who is rescued from an evil king by a prince, played by Banhart.If you click somewhere on the bottom right, you can expand the video to fill the screen, or go to YouTube.
Talk about Fusion! A Hindu epic told in the style of Naturalismo, in Spanish, by a Texas-born guy raised in Venezuela who went to the San Francisco Art Institute. Thank God - or rather, Thank All Gods, that someone is really making sport with the alchemy of East and West. (See also Devendra on Wiki).
Magnetism
Syzygy means, “the union or marriage of opposites” and is from the same root as Yoga. In Syzygy training, we notice the opposites that are at play in our life, and play with them. We dance them, breathe with them, meditate with them. Electricity and magnetism flow between the opposites.Visualizing Magnetism
One of the dynamics we become aware of as we tune our senses by yoga, tantra and meditation is that our bodies are continually generating magnetic fields. So is everyone else. So is the Earth. As we play with the forces of life, the physical body and subtle bodies shimmer with alivenesss and electricity. We are also immersed in oceans of magnetism emanating from the Earth and the interaction of the Sun’s rays with the Earth’s own field.This movie, by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, uses computer animation to create visualizations of electromagnetic signals from the earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere.
Here is the same movie in slightly higher resolution at Vimeo
Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.Bio-Magnetism
I think that electromagnetism and the magnetism living beings generate are separate forces. In other words, our auras are not affected by our iPods. Our magnetic emanations will be modulated with the emotions we feel while listening,The Sacred Art of Alex Grey
For many years, Alex Grey has been painting the human body as the intersection of forces, flesh and divine energy co-mingling.
Here is a preview of a television show about Alex:
Amazon link to books of Alex’s art.