Two Worlds Revisited

I went back into this bowl and pushed the illusion more.
I left the earlier one up so both stages are posted.

Meditation Transformation

Even though sometimes it feels like nothing useful at all is going on, the last thirty years of near daily meditation has had a profound effect on not just my capacity for attention, but also my capacity for love. I was thinking about this the last time I pulled off a beautifully puffed up Yorkshire pudding. For years I couldn’t get it to rise into anything more than a soggy mound. So I kept beating it longer and harder, making more bubbles thinking that getting it all full of air would solve the problem. Then someone on a cooking show said how important it was to give the bubbles time to settle out before putting it in the oven so that the heat would create bubbles. I’d been making it worse. There are some things that can’t be done until things are allowed to settle. Like if the surface of the water is agitated there’s no adjustment you can make to settle it that won’t make it worse. And once everything is settled, clear reflection is possible, unclouded by the previous time. Response is not distorted by disturbances in the past. And once the thoughts have settled during meditation there’s just awareness. Those that study the brainwaves of meditators have observed a synchronization of brainwaves in both hemispheres. There are pages and pages of sites with tapes and videos geared to this aspect of meditation. As one of them said, having the sounds, like chanting or drumming, helps you stay with the meditation until the end. Wikipedia uses the term “hemispheric entrainment” and writes,

“A person with similar activity in both hemispheres is alleged to be happier, more optimistic, more emotionally stable and less prone to mental illness. Increased levels of synchronization are found naturally in people who meditate regularly and people who are very content with their lives in general.”

The meditation may actually stimulate that contentment. I’ve watched my own transformation from largely anxious and worried to someone who welcomes experience as it flows around me. Day-to-day conscious awareness is less plagued by my own thoughts, ideas about what isn’t or what should be, what I didn’t do or might have done. As Krishnamurti emphasized in his talks, suffering comes from our own thoughts. Even when physical pain is involved, it’s the thoughts that turn pain into suffering.

Even when it seems like the mind is all over the place, just watching and not getting caught in the threads gives them time to settle down. By building the skill of letting thoughts settle, it’s far easier to let go of troubling mental patterns. Not getting attention, they become more infrequent. When they do come they’re more transparent, obvious transitory phenomenon that don’t change the real issues at hand. When the barriers crumble, the love can flow because attention is an expression of love and when you meditate you have more attention to give. There is nothing more pleasurable in life than beaming your love out to it. How could you not be content?

Node

Deep Attention

Recently I came across a blog called “Brainwaves for Leaders” devoted to making neuroscience useful to people in business, developing their “Neurocapability”. It’s wonderful to see so many sites that apply brain science in practical ways. The site emphasizes the need for focused attention as a way to balance the increasing distractions of attention characteristic of modern life. The goal is to build “Attentional Intelligence.”

"Attentional Intelligence is an intelligence which when highly developed allows you to effortlessly but 'mindfully' notice where your attention is at any moment and to intentionally choose where you want it to be." Linda Ray (2012)

The idea of paying attention to what your paying attention to is classic meditation and has been shown to improve overall intelligence. Sustained attention goes into more aspects of a problem or idea and the site has interesting business oriented ways to cultivate it.

 It’s helpful to devise new words in order to better talk about kinds of attention. I’ve borrowed two from brain wave terminology and distinguish between alpha and beta attention. Like the brain waves alpha attention is slower, calmer, gets inside the immediate, giving the present duration. It’s focused attention, fully on the subject at hand. What we bring into focus is where we are engaged. Attention is a sign of our involvement. Brain chemistry then encourages continued involvement because this is where we extend our capacities.

Beta attention is the everyday monkey-mind attention. Its scope is wider, keeping track of more things but in a more surface way, skimming, scanning, switching around. In a study of college students at Ohio State they found that multitasking was emotionally satisfying but not as productive as focused attention, but it was the emotional satisfaction that made checking devices so addictive. Deeper alpha attention takes more in, digests it more fully and is required for any challenge. Which is why challenge is such a good way to train it. Learning any skill provides challenge and extends capability. This is why studying illusionism can be so satisfying. It makes you pay attention to far more about the details and variation within kinds of objects. It demands full attention so is an outstanding arena for building and strengthening those parts of the brain.

Beauty commands attention. This makes it powerful. People who try to define beauty don’t understand how ephemeral the quality can be, the momentary effect of the light on a flower that transcends definition. The picture you take is only a reminder, can’t hold the moment itself. Beauty encourages alpha attention, to notice and hold in awareness, take it in more deeply. Alpha attention is the deep attention to particulars, where Blake’s “grain of sand” opens worlds. Reflections, qualities and the movement of light and shadows are as important to the feel of the moment as objects. Reflecting on beauty we become aligned with the guidance provided by our attunement to harmonic relations.

Between Layers

Image and Spirit

Incoming classes fill out a sheet of questions that enable me to get to know them better. I got a sadly familiar answer to the question of what they see as most destructive in today’s world. The failure of historic religions shows in the feeling of so many young people that religion is one of the most dangerous forces in the world today. Fundamentalism in any form with its need to enforce it’s own worldview separates groups of people and pushes aside spirituality which connects us all. The focus on rules and codes limits freedom and feels righteous while committing horrors in order to control others. The most visible forms of today’s religion have more to do with politics and obedience than spirit and connectedness. Spirit is less apt to pin things down, write rules of absolute truth and fight to protect them. It’s beyond verbalization. The words and codification bleed the spirit away, so what people really want from religion, the immersion in something larger and more meaningful than themselves is cut away. By dominating the representation of religion in the public mind the impression is largely negative and people can’t benefit from the beauty in spiritual imagery that can attune us with a bigger picture.

There are so many fine images throughout the world’s religions that could help facilitate the sense of connection that comes with mystical vision. It begins with the personal resonance with the insight creating a link with the artist. The right image can help us see in a way that makes sense, how we might be embedded in intelligence that includes but goes beyond our own, cannot be properly communicated in words and dogma. We might be neural nodes of a universal mind, local inputs participating in an overall awareness, threads within a larger tapestry of mind. The Net of Indra is a beautiful image from Buddhism that envisions cosmic unity and our interconnectedness as a net of reflective pearls each of which reflect the whole and are reflected in all the others. There are many wonderful artists’ conceptions of this on the Internet.  The net metaphor pervades the modern world so it feels natural to our realty of being in a web of information. The I Ching looks at the different pairings of elements in nature as dynamic patterns with suggestions regarding the best way to harmonize with them.

The anthropocentric notion that we are the pinnacle of intelligence is losing its hold. If magnetic fields and radiation can penetrate our bodies, then why not more inclusive layers of consciousness? Sri Aurobindo talks about a supraconsciousness that presses in on the personal consciousness like an outer form that shapes our experience and guides us in what we are capable of. As Leonard Shlain pointed out in “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess” the unifying images of older cultures got crushed under the armies of the word. This may now be changing as those seeking deeper meaning reconnect with the power of spiritual vision.

Song

This image was started in the Spring 3013 Illusionism class. Though it was posted over the summer I wanted it here for the beginning of the school year. Begun in pastel. Completed in colored pencil.