Meditation: listening to your heart

Lately I’ve been getting the message that I need do more meditating. Not just sit for twenty minutes and let my mind wander, but really focus on being in the moment. In his book, When Everything Changes, Change Everything, Neal Donald Walsch describes meditation well, “I have to work hard to turn my mind off and just be with the moment and the experience, without judging it, defining it, or trying to make something happen or figure it out or understand it from my logic center. It is rather like making love.”

I am told that if I make the space for more meditation, my life will be transformed. Why do I want my life transformed? Mostly, because I worry a lot -- about making enough money, about paying for my new home, about the increase in the price of food and gas, about aging and the cost of healthcare, about the country, social security and the fat cats who call all the shots at the top, about earthquakes, radiation, and global weather chaos, etc. I am tried of all the worrying, complaining, resisting and blaming. Aren't you?

Meditation stops the voice of worry -- in Arabic, naf or mischievous whisperer. Meditation connects me to SOUL, the spirit inside and then I remember the soul’s viewpoint. The soul, you see, has its own agenda about why I am here in this life and what is suppose to be happening. I trust that agenda when remember it. A friend posted on facebook – “We are SOUL in a body, [this] helps me remember that anything but happiness is my choice.”

To the skeptics who would mock my words, calling me delusional, out of touch, a Pollyanna (and this may be my own personal skeptic) I say, “Why worry?” Worrying accomplishes nothing except to make me feel bad and unhappy. Do what you need to do. Take positive action. But don't worry.

A photographer recently posted a photo blog about the homeless on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. These people have all the problems you’d expect -- drug and alcohol abuse, bad health, mental illness, smelly bodies and no money -- and yet they show more integrity, compassion and love for each other than most of us do for our own families. They even have joy. I am not proposing homelessness as a solution to worrying, although a brief visit might be very mind opening. I mention this because it shows me once again that it is not your circumstances that cause happiness or misery; it is the way you perceive your circumstances.

Mediation teaches us to discipline our thoughts, to control the ego of self-importance and open to the intelligence of the heart. It is the soul-ution to all the problems. ”Wisdom,” says Eckhart Tolle, “is not a product of thought. The deep knowing that is wisdom arises through the simple act of giving someone or something your full attention. Attention is primordial intelligence, consciousness itself. It dissolves the barriers created by conceptual thought, and with this comes the recognition that nothing exits in and by itself. It joins the perceiver and the perceived in a unifying field of awareness. It is the healer of separation.” Meditation teaches us how to pay attention, how to listen, how to be without judgment.

Things are so out of whack in the world, so distorted, violent and hateful, the only place to go is inside, back to the source, to the place of unity. All else is sorrow.

Happiness in the Brain

This is a continuation of my notes from the Happiness Conference at Stanford. This is taken from the presentation by Rick Hansen.

It appears that we have three distinct brains operating in our head: the lizard brain, the mammalian brain and the primate brain. Each brain has its own agenda and influences our responses to the environment accordingly.

The lizard brain, located in the medula olongta or brain stem, is concerned with avoiding harm. It's a genetic holdover from our evolutionary past and very useful in the wilderness or the big city.  From the lizard perspective, the world is a dangerous place full of predators that can gobble it up. The lizard brain is always on the alert for signs of danger.  It's response to danger is to flee and hide. The news media seems to be stimulating this part of our brain with information about the bad economy, the dangerous government, the destruction of the planet. If you react to disturbing news through escapist pursuits like television, computer games, drugs and alcohol, your lizard brain is in charge.

The mammalian brain is interested in rewards and pleasure. Although I don't know where this brain is located because I was busy writing notes when Rick showed it to us on the big TV screen, I am very familiar with it. The primate brain seeks those things that give pleasure and satisfy physical desires e.g. thirst, hunger, sex and warmth. A lot of our advertising targets the mammalian brain with pleasure visuals, especially those relating to sex. I think our food seeking drive may be more motivated by smell than vision. So when they start making "smellevision," watch out!  My spiritual teacher once told me the food vendor's trick of frying onions.  You don't have to sell the onions, just fry them and the people will come and buy whatever food you are selling. So if your response to stress is to eat, you know your mammalian self is on the ball.

The primate brain focuses on social bonding. It feels good to be in association with others. Caring and caregiving is programed into the primate's DNA. We need each other, at least our families and probably our tribe in order to survive in a primate world. Connection to our state or nation is more problematic and not part of the DNA. See Francis Fukuyama's new book The Origins of Political Order for a seminal work on the subject of nation bonding. Nonprofit organizations are stimulating your primate brain when they send you glossy pamphlets with pictures of happy third world people holding baby lambs and smiling.

If you pay attention to how you feel and what you feel like doing, you will know which part of your brain is operating at any tine. When the lizard brain is happy, it is calm and when unhappy, it will avoid. When the mammalian brain is happy, it's physical desires are satisfied.  When it is alarmed or stressed, e.g. hungry -- it will approach.  When the primate brain is happy, it is caring and social.  When alarmed it attacks. This scheme can be summerized:

Brain - happy - unhappy

Lizard - calm - avoid

Mammal - content - approach

Primate - care - attack

So what do you do when you're stressed? Hide? Eat? or Attack? Who is in charge? And then ask yourself who is supplying you with your choices.