Medley

Leo Babauta – USA 

Creativity and practicing deep focus

 “In order to be open to creativity, one must have

the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must

overcome the fear of being alone.”

by Rollo May (photo)  

Creativity is a fragile, elusive thing. If you don’t practice, it become rusty, blunted, something you fear from intimidation. If you let yourself get too distracted, other demands on your attention will make creating difficult. If you put too much pressure on yourself, creativity becomes shy, hides in the awnings as you sit there, stuck. 

And creating, as I envision it, is a broad activity that encompasses many things – writing and drawing and designing and painting and making music and taking photographs, sure, but much more. Creating can be almost anything: coming up with a fun lesson for students, finding ways to keep your kids from getting bored, coming up with new ideas for your small business, thinking of a crafted message that will help you reach new customers, hand-stitching the perfect suit, perfecting a pitch to a new client, preparing a presentation for a small audience, and much more.

Creativity killers  

So how do we nourish this creativity that most of us need on a daily level? It’s important to remember what kills creativity, first:

Distractions. The many things that pull on our attention that we’ve discussed in this book. Each distraction pulls us away from creating, and as we switch between creating and consuming information, and creating and communicating with others, we fragment our focus, we fragment creation itself.

Intimidation. When a task seems to large, daunting, we will shy away from it. It’s difficult to sit down and create when we dread a task. If we think we’re not good at it, we become intimidated as well

and often won’t even start.

Pressure. While you’ll often hear creative professionals say they create best under deadline pressure, the truth is most people have difficulty creating under pressure. Try creating when someone is watching over your shoulder – your mind has a hard time focusing, because you’re thinking of the person watching you. The same is true of other types of pressure – it distracts you, makes it hard to focus. There are a few exceptional people might be good at creating under pressure, but only because they’ve learned to focus despite these pressures. Mostly the pressure becomes motivation for them. For the rest of us, the less pressure, the better, because it allows us to relax and focus.

Lack of use. When we don’t create on a regular basis, it becomes intimidating. When we put off creating, and put it off, we lose some of the key habits (see below) that allow us to create. T

These creativity killers come in many forms, but forming the key creativity habits below will help us to deal with these problems.

John White – USA

[A Practical Guide to Death and Dying was originally published by QUEST books in 1980. This particular version was previously published in the Theosophical Digest, y1992 v4 i2-p90.] 

Meditation –The World’s Best Fear Remover.

Death has been of central consideration in all the, world’s major religious and spiritual paths, and each has worked out a variety of ways with which to eliminate fear of dying. Meditation is the principal method they use. It has been called “the craft of dying.”

Meditation is a means of personal and transpersonal growth. It is a time-honored technique – probably humanity’s oldest spiritual discipline – for helping people release their potential for expanded con­sciousness and fuller living. Also a technique for assisting in the en­lightenment process of directly knowing God or ultimate reality, meditation appears in some form in nearly every major religious tradition. The entranced yogi in a lotus posture, the Zen Buddhist sitting in zazen, the Christian con­templative kneeling in adoration of Jesus, the Sufi dervish whirling in an ecstasy-inducing state – all can be properly described as practicing meditation. Although the cultural or religious trappings may vary, meditation’s core experience is an altered state of consciousness in which your ordinary sense of “I” –  the ego – is diminished, while a larger sense of self-existence- merged-with-the-cosmos comes into awareness.

When your self-centered consciousness is dissolved, your true identity shines through. This is en­lightenment, cosmic consciousness, union with God. The experience is transforming. Your life changes because you realize the essential truth of what spiritual teachers, sages, and saints have said: Death as nonexistence is an illusion, there is nothing to fear, and it is only your petty little ego that generates the fear, along with the sorrow, greed, jealousy, pride, lust, and all the other sins, vices, and unfulfilling desires that make life miserable for you and for others.

Remember what Freud said: In the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of our immortality. Spiritual traditions reply to Freud: We are unconsciously convinced because, in truth, we really are deathless. The true self cannot die, being one with God, Brahman, the Tao, the all-creative Void. The true self is universal, cosmically conscious. There are no limits to it except the illusory one we create, called ego the false idea, which we nevertheless believe, that a separate, independent self is the essential “me” and “you.” Thatself – the ego – is indeed mortal because it has identified with a perishable body.

Meditation is a powerful means of exploring mind and spirit – the most powerful, in fact. The aim of meditation is clarity of consciousness.It helps you to be aware of reality fullyso that your thoughts, feelings, and behavior are free and appropriate, not programmed by anxiety, desire, hatred, prejudice, social conventions and so forth. It does this by deautomatizing and deconditioning you.

How does meditation do this? It creates a sort of mental distance between you and your mind’s activity in which you can observe it with detachment. Meditation also extends your awareness so that you can actually begin to see thoughts and feelings come into existence. It shows you deeper aspects of mind than you are ordinarily aware of. Thus, the experience of meditation allows you to disidentify with your thoughts and feelings. You havethem, but you are notthem, just as you have a car but are not your car.

Artificial intelligencecan help us to better understand the causes of religious violence and to potentially control it, according to a new Oxford University collaboration. The study is one of the first to be published that uses psychologically realistic AI – as opposed to machine learning.

The study published in The Journal for Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, combined computer modelling and cognitive psychology to create an AI system able to mimic human religiosity, allowing them to better understand the conditions, triggers and patterns for religious violence.

The study is built around the question of whether people are naturally violent, or if factors such as religion can cause xenophobic tension and anxiety between different groups, that may or may not lead to violence?

The findings reveal that people are a peaceful species by nature. However, in a wide range of contexts they are willing to endorse violence – particularly when others go against the core beliefs which define their identity.

Although the research focuses on specific historic events, the findings can be applied to any occurrence of religious violence, and used to understand the motivations behind it. Particularly events of radicalized Islam, when people's patriotic identity conflicts with their religions one, e.g. the Boston bombing and’London terror attacks. The team hope that the results can be used to support governments to address and prevent social conflict and terrorism.

Conducted by a cohort of researchers from universities including Oxford, Boston University and the University of Agder, Norway, the paper does not explicitly simulate violence, but, instead focuses on the conditions that enabled two specific periods of xenophobic social anxiety, that then escalated to extreme physical violence.

John White – USA

[A Practical Guide to Death and Dying was originally published by QUESTbooks in 1980. This particular version was previously published in the Theosophical Digest, y1992 v4 i2-p90.] 

How Will You Be Remembered? — Writing Your Own Obituary.

An obituary is an objective statement of fact. It is both a death notice and a summary of the person’s life. You are now going to write your own obituary, stating the facts of your life as they are to date and — using your imagination — as you’d like them to be for the rest of your life or, perhaps, as you’re afraid they’ll be. Obituaries are usually not very long, so this isn’t a major writing assignment. But it is a major assignment in terms of life assessment— your values, your relations with other people, your accomplishments, success as a provider, spouse, parent, friend, and citizen.

Right now is a good time to take stock of your life. Have you been a “friend to man”? How will your spouse remember you? Your neighbors? Your work associates? Who will eulogize you, and what will be said, and will it be sincere? If you have children, what character development and values have they learned from you, consciously through your training or non-consciously through imitating your example? If you are in some kind of supervisory position in business, education, or the military, how will those under you regard your passing? In short, who will miss you and what will be the effect of your life on the world?

If death seems fearful because your life will have been meaningless, whose fault is that? Isn’t it clear that the meaning of your life is entirely in your control? It grows out of your values, your character, your relations with others, your accomplishments, your sacrifices, and your gifts of love, honesty, tolerance, sympathy, understanding, helpfulness, courage, fairness, loyalty, courtesy, cheerfulness. These are not commodities to be bought and sold. They are yours, entirely within your control. They are the basis of meaning in your life. Without them, human existence is cruel and bleak, no matter how wealthy or famous or powerful you might be. Consider this as you write your own obituary. When you have finished, think deeply upon this:

“My death will be reported like this someday. Will my life have been worthwhile?”

If your obituary leaves you feeling unsatisfied, remorseful, angry, disappointed — anything less than serene and tranquil — then think deeply upon this: It is within my power to change it by changing my life.Don’t mistake a change in your outward circumstances, however, for the kind of change I’m talking about here. Perhaps part of your fear of dying involves guilt over a wrong you committed — say, an insult or lie. If so, you should correct it and clear your conscience. This is not only morally right, it is also in your own best interest because it will relieve you of some of the death-fear you harbor. As Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of Love, Medicine and Miracles,says, “Don’t wait until you’re going to die to start living.”

Leo Babauta – USA 

“An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”

– Henry David Thoreau

The simple act of walking can be a tremendous boost to your focus, productivity, clarity of mind, not to mention your health and waistline.

The simple act of WALKING…..

Recently a fellow blogger wrote to me talking about how many pounds she lost on vacation because she walked all day long — something many of us have experienced. She ended by saying, “If only I could find the time to walk 6 hours a day.”

That got me to ask — why not? Why can’t we work out a routine where we walk all day long?

What follows are a couple of radical but incredibly fulfilling and productive changes from most people’s daily routine. I think they’re worthy of consideration if you:

• have any control over your schedule;
• can work from different locations;
• want to get more active and trim your waistline; and
• need to find new ways to focus and get important things done.

I recently tried both these routines and loved them and am working them into my life in different ways.

Study links piano education with better word discrimination by kindergartners

Many studies have shown that musical training can enhance language skills. However, it was unknown whether music lessons improve general cognitive ability, leading to better language proficiency, or if the effect of music is more specific to language processing.

A new study from MIT has found that piano lessons have a very specific effect on kindergartners' ability to distinguish different pitches, which translates into an improvement in discriminating between spoken words. However, the piano lessons did not appear to confer any benefit for overall cognitive ability, as measured by IQ, attention span, and working memory.

“The children didn't differ in the more broad cognitive measures, but they did show some improvements in word discrimination, particularly for consonants. The piano group showed the best improvement there,” says Robert Desimone, director of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the senior author of the paper.

The study, performed in Beijing, suggests that musical training is at least as beneficial in improving language skills, and possibly more beneficial, than offering children extra reading lessons. The school where the study was performed has continued to offer piano lessons to students, and the researchers hope their findings could encourage other schools to keep or enhance their music offerings.

Yun Nan, an associate professor at Beijing Normal University, is the lead author of the study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of June 25.

Other authors include Li Liu, Hua Shu, and Qi Dong, all of Beijing Normal University; Eveline Geiser, a former MIT research scientist; Chen-chen Gong, an MIT research associate; and John Gabrieli, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

The author

 Tim Wyatt – England 

[Introduction:These six ideas dominate our thinking and obsess our lives but our understanding of them all is deeply flawed because we look on them from a purely material rather than a deeper spiritual perspective. When we begin to explore these ideas esoterically from an Ageless Wisdom perspective, we realise that there is much more to them than we may have originally imagined and so we need to radically re-think these notions. God is not a separate and seasoned sadist waiting to punish us. War is cruel, but it has also been a key catalyst for evolution. Work is undergoing its biggest transformation in the history of the human race. Sex is widely misused and misunderstood but will ultimately prove to be redundant. Death is a myth. And because money has been systematically degraded from an energy into a toxic form of control it needs to be re-spiritualised.]