#748 Just How Conscious are We?

     Much of the time, we're in one of two "doing" modes: either "mindless" or more or less "focused." And when we actually experience "non-doing", we may find it baffling & confusing.

      Very common examples of mindless doing (acting on autopilot, with a wandering mind) include arriving somewhere & realizing we have no recollection of the details of actually driving (or walking) there. Conscious awareness was far from the here & now, busy with daydreaming, planning, worrying, regretting etc. 
     A relatively new & increasingly common practice is exercising while simultaneously listening to podcasts. 
     Whether our untrained mind simply gets lost, or we intentionally choose "a divided life" instead of engaging with the present moment, we're undermining both quality of life & effectiveness. A wandering mind = a divided mind = unhappiness & inefficiency. See: Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Science 2010; 330(6006): 932.

     Many times we're more or less "focused" while doing, but we're paying way too much fear-based attention on the doer. The "noisy ego" is kicking up all sorts of friction & noise. Have you ever seen a little kid at his first track & field event, pouring all his energy into showing his parents how hard he's trying to run - grimacing, exaggerated body movements, groaning, gasping - so that minimal actual energy remains for actual running - a great example of ego noise. The extreme opposite is a world-class 100-yard-dash runner whose face & upper body appear silent & still yet she hurtles forward at record-breaking speed. No energy is wasted on (fearfully protecting) "I, me & mine." 
     It's unimaginable what a wonderful world we'd have if we pooled our combined energies & talents and did what's needed, instead of acting out of fearful self-interest.

     "Non-doing" is action marked by effortlessness, silence, stillness, calm, peace, timelessness, very bright & vivid awareness, no egocentricity / "I" am doing this. Action is extremely efficient & feels effortless, even when there's life-threatening danger. This may explain why "heroes" when interviewed afterwards typically downplay the event, & are very reluctant to accept credit for "their" behavior. Other fascinating examples of non-doing is found in the world of creativity among physicists, composers & song-writers. The best of them typically claim that the discovery or music, even entire symphonies for Mozart, came to them all at once, and they just quickly copied it down. Again note the effortlessness, timelessness, vivid awareness, & no sense that "I" did this. The late rock & roll star Tom Petty described his song-writing process using very similar language: "Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers: Running Down A Dream” 2007 Bogdanovich film on Netflix.)

     "Doing" mode is prioritizing our own needs instead of what present circumstances actually require, for our own & others' long-term benefit. To the extent that our past influences (colors, biases, distorts) our perception, our past needs ("must haves" & "must avoids") determine how we act now, regardless of what's most appropriate right here, right now. At some level, we are aware of this inner conflict (friction, noise, cognitive dissonance, "divided-self"). 
     Sadly, fear-based self-interest (which includes tribalism, partisanship etc) is caused by our understandable need for safety, comfort, predictability & control in today's increasingly stressful, unsafe world. YET, our world is becoming increasingly frightening & dangerous BECAUSE of escalating fear-based self-interest (tribalism, partisanship, nationalism, intolerance, hatreds, warmongering ...). See the excellent book review: Julie Wronski. "Intergroup Identities, Moral Foundations, and Their Political Consequences: A Review of Social Psychology of Political Polarization by Piercarlo Valdesolo and Jesse Graham (Eds)." Soc Just Res (2016) 29:345–353.

     Deep self-reflection during meditation practice allows us to become increasingly aware of our own mind's unconscious primitive survival patterns of thinking (& ensuing behavior), some of which is delusional, illusory, and even work against our own & everyone else's best interests. An exceptionally useful book that carefully examines our thinking & behavior from the perspective of evolutionary psychology is: Robert Wright. "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment." Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Katie Hoffman      "Petrichor"      www.katiehoffman.com

#747 Bare Awareness of Difficult Stuff

     “I invite you to sit with the anger and frustration – not in judgment, not with the intent to change or do anything with it, but just with bare awareness of it. Often, that helps reveal a previously undisclosed feeling or issue that is manifesting as anger or frustration. It is a lot easier to address the root issue than its manifestation. Often merely seeing what is underneath the anger and frustration helps dissipate it.”

      Susan J. Stabile, Lion’s Roar, November 2017.

    See also: http://jglovas.wixsite.com/awarenessnow/single-post/2017/09/18/Minding-our-Minds

 

Window, Taos NM

#746 Attention Theft

     Mindfulness is to be practiced continuously, otherwise, in our digital age, we're almost continuously mindless:

     "Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground. The aggressors are the architects of your digital world, and their weapons are the apps, news feeds, and notifications in your field of view every time you look at a screen.

     They are all attempting to capture your most scarce resource — your attention — and take it hostage for money. Your captive attention is worth billions to them in advertising and subscription revenue.

     This might sound familiar: In an idle moment you open your phone to check the time. 19 minutes later you regain consciousness in a completely random corner of your digital world: a stranger’s photo stream, a surprising news article, a funny YouTube clip. You didn’t mean to do that. What just happened?

     This is not your fault — it is by design.

     The digital rabbit hole you just tumbled down is funded by advertising, aimed at you. Almost every 'free' app or service you use depends on this surreptitious process of unconsciously turning your eyeballs into dollars, and they have built sophisticated methods of reliably doing it. You don’t pay money for using these platforms, but make no mistake, you are paying for them — with your time, your attention, and your perspective."

       Tobias Rose-Stockwell. "This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit

The story of how one metric has changed the way you see the world." https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511488de

#745 Key Principles & Aspects of MBSR

a     making the experience a challenge rather than a chore and thus turning the observing of one’s own life mindfully into an adventure in living rather than one more thing one ‘has’ to do for oneself to be healthy.

b     an emphasis on the importance of individual effort and motivation and regular disciplined practice of the meditation in its various forms, whether one ‘feels’ like practicing on a particular day or not.

c     the immediate lifestyle change that is required to undertake formal mindfulness practice, since it requires a significant time commitment (in our clinic 45 minutes a day, six days per week minimally).

d     the importance of making each moment count by consciously bringing it into awareness during practice, thus stepping out of clock time into the present moment.

e     an educational rather than a therapeutic orientation, which makes use of relatively large ‘classes’ of participants in a time-limited course structure to provide a community of learning and practice, and a ‘critical mass’ to help in cultivating ongoing motivation, support, and feelings of acceptance and belonging. The social factors of emotional support and caring and not feeling isolated or alone in one’s efforts to cope and adapt and grow are in all likelihood extremely important factors in healing as well as for providing an optimal learning environment for ongoing growth and development in addition to the factors of individual effort and initiative and coping / problem solving.

f     a medically heterogenous environment, in which people with a broad range of medical conditions participate in classes together without segregation by diagnosis or conditions and specialization of the intervention. This approach has the virtue of focusing on what people have in common rather than what is special about their particular disease (what is ‘right’ with them rather than what is ‘wrong’ with them), which is left to the attention of other dimensions of the health care team and to specialized support groups for specific classes of patients, where that is appropriate. It is in part from this orientation, which differs considerably from the traditional medical or psychiatric models, which orient interventions as specifically as possible to particular diagnostic categories, that the generic and universal qualities of mindfulness-based stress reduction stem. Of course, stress, pain, and illness are common experiences within the medical context, but beyond that, and even more fundamentally, the participants share being alive, having a body, breathing, thinking, feeling, perceiving, and incessant flow of mental states, including anxiety and worry, frustration, irritation and anger, depression, sorrow, helplessness, despair, joy and satisfaction, and the capacity to cultivate moment-to-moment awareness by directing attention in particular systematic ways. They also share, in our view, the capacity to access their own inner resources for learning, growing, and healing (as distinguished from curing) within this context of mindfulness practice.

       quoted from: Jon Kabat-Zinn. “Mindfulness Meditation. What Is It, What It Isn’t, and It’s Role in Health Care and Medicine.” in Ishii Y, Suzuki M, & Haruki Y eds. “Comparative and Psychological Study on Meditation.” Eburon, 1996. 

Abbey Bookshop, Paris   https://abbeybookshop.wordpress.com/about/

 

#744 Consciousness - Some Finer Points

     "'There is nothing we know more intimately than consciousness, but there is nothing harder to explain.' 

 

     ... cognitive psychologists tend to define consciousness as the awareness of internal and external events (e.g., mental phenomena and stimuli in the environment, respectively).

     ... common to all definitions of consciousness is the implicit distinction between consciousness and the content of consciousness. 

 
     'When people are conscious, they are always conscious of something. Consciousness always has an object.'

     In contrast, a so-called state of consciousness (SoC) tends to be defined as '[the set] of mental episodes of which one can readily become directly aware'. ... (this) definition represents a theoretical confusion of consciousness and its contents by explicitly stating that a SoC is the content (i.e., mental episodes) available to conscious awareness. That is, when the qualifier 'state' is affixed to consciousness, 'it' [consciousness] is held to be content. Consequently, the term states of consciousness rests on a conflation of consciousness and content whereby consciousness is erroneously categorized in terms of content rendered perceptible, presumably, by itself. Again, we refer to this as the consciousness/content fallacy.
     Implicit in the consciousness/content fallacy is the fallacious notion that during a SoC, consciousness may observe its own qualities.

     (But) consciousness cannot directly experience 'itself' as a perceptible object, for then it would cease to be the subject. ... analogous to a sword that cannot cut itself...  

 

     Definitions of altered states of consciousness (ASCs)... postulate that it is the shifts, deviations, or differences in subjective experience, psychological functioning, or mental functioning that constitute an ASC. 

     If one accepts the definition of consciousness as being conscious of something, then it would seem to follow that during an ASC it is the altered phenomenal properties (e.g., visual mental imagery, body image, time sense) that consciousness may be aware of, rather than the state of consciousness. 

     (The) definition of phenomenal field as 'absolutely anything that is in the total momentary experiencing of a person, including the experience of the self' is adopted and applied to 'phenomenal properties.' It is arguable that if one defines phenomenal properties in this way, then an altered pattern of phenomenal properties encapsulates what has been referred to ... as phenomenal and non-phenomenal objects of conscious awareness, that is, the content that a privileged observer may be aware of during what (has been) referred to as an ASC. One may then recommend that the term altered state of consciousness be supplanted by a new term, 'altered pattern of phenomenal properties.' It would seem that by reconceptualizing the notion of an ASC in this manner, the confusion of consciousness with the content of consciousness is avoided. 

      (In conclusion) when the qualifier 'state' is affixed to consciousness, 'it' [consciousness] is held to be content. This is referred to as the consciousness/content fallacy. It is also contended that the consciousness/content fallacy is avoided if one reconceptualizes an ASC as an altered pattern of phenomenal properties."

        Rock AJ, Krippner S. "Does the concept of 'altered states of consciousness' rest on a mistake?" International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 2007; 26(1): 33–40. http://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/ijts-transpersonalstudies/vol26/iss1/5

 

 

Alpujarra by Alice Mason   https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/AliceMasonArtist?ref=l2-shopheader-name

 

#743 Existential Loneliness

     "Loneliness is one of the most common of all human conditions, but it is largely misunderstood by the general population and clinicians alike. In this article, I draw sharp distinctions between 'pathological loneliness' (what people usually mean when they say they are lonely) and 'existential loneliness,' the central focus of this paper. I briefly review the former in order to differentiate it clearly from the latter, arguing that pathological loneliness derives from the unsuccessful resolution of existential loneliness. The two are fundamentally inseparable, constituting different manifestations of the same human condition. 

     Existential loneliness springs from our very nature as human beings. It speaks to the fundamental emptiness & disconnectedness we feel as we grapple with the profoundest questions of the uncertainty of life and death. I argue that we must come to grips with our existential loneliness if we are to fully embrace our humanity and that love is the only healthy response to our dilemma.

     Finally, I discuss our need to resolve our existential situation by adopting an alternative epistemology - unitary consciousness - an epistemology that understands the fundamental oneness of being." 

       Booth R. “Existential Loneliness: The Other Side of the Void.” International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 1997; 16(1): 23-32. 

La Femme en Bleu by Alice Mason   https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/AliceMasonArtist?ref=l2-shopheader-name

 

#742 Health Care Professionals, Compassion Fatigue & MBSR

     "Health care professionals are particularly vulnerable to stress overload and compassion fatigue due to an emotionally exhausting environment. Compassion fatigue among caregivers in turn has been associated with less effective delivery of care. Having compassion for others entails self-compassion. In Kristin Neff’s research, self-compassion includes self-kindness, a sense of common humanity, and mindfulness. Both mindfulness and self-compassion involve promoting an attitude of curiosity and nonjudgment towards one’s experiences. Research suggests that mindfulness interventions, particularly those with an added lovingkindness component, have the potential to increase self-compassion among health care workers. Enhancing focus on developing self-compassion using MBSR and other mindfulness interventions for health care workers holds promise for reducing perceived stress and increasing effectiveness of clinical care."

        Kelley Raab. "Mindfulness, Self-Compassion, and Empathy Among Health Care Professionals: A Review of the Literature." Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy 2014; 20(3): 95–108.