Mindhacks

DALLAS — Since human misery can’t be measured with an X-ray or blood test, the only true gauge of pain lies inside a person’s own mind. One approach to pain management, experts say, is to transform the brain from a simple messenger for pain into its master.

A generation ago, the American public largely viewed mental methods of pain control with the same seriousness as a Vulcan mind meld. Since then, acceptance of alternative medicine has soared, with pain sufferers leading the way.

The popularity is partly driven by the sheer numbers of desperate people. One 2003 study suggested that 13 percent of the workforce loses productivity from headaches, back pain, arthritis and other common painful conditions.

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Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.

In you, as in each human being, there is a dimension of consciousness far deeper than thought. It is the very essence of who you are. We may call it presence, awareness, the unconditioned consciousness. In the ancient teachings, it is the Christ within, or your Buddha nature.

Finding that dimension frees you and the world from the suffering you inflict on yourself and others when the mind-made "little me" is all you know and runs your life. Love, joy, creative expansion, and lasting inner peace cannot come into your life except through that unconditioned dimension of consciousness.

If you can recognize, even occasionally, the thoughts that go through your mind as simply thoughts, if you can witness your own mental-emotional reactive patterns as they happen, then that dimension is already emerging in you as the awareness in which thoughts and emotions happen — the timeless inner space in which the content of your life unfolds.

The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much.

It wants to draw your attention in completely.

Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don’t take your thoughts too seriously.

Read the article by Eckhart Tolle >>

Know thyself.

These words were inscribed in the vestibule of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

For centuries, petitioners seeking advice from the oracle at Delphi would view the inscription. Philosophers throughout the ages offered this same advice to their students. These words are as valuable today as they were almost three thousand years earlier.

Part of knowing yourself is understanding your beliefs. The difficulty is that most beliefs are subconscious. They have been accepted without ever having been critically examined.

As was described in 3 Steps to Manifesting Your Ideal Life, the Law of Attraction states that you will attract to yourself those experiences that match your beliefs. These beliefs create your experience of reality. What if these beliefs are in opposition to what you’re actually trying to accomplish? What if they no longer serve you? Wouldn’t it be useful to eliminate these limiting beliefs?

There are a number of techniques to identify unconscious beliefs: taking a battery of psychological tests or tapping into your inner wisdom via meditation are two of them.

There is a shortcut that can predict with 99% accuracy what your beliefs are. It is so simple that people usually overlook it. Even when it is clearly stated, they frequently ignore it.

Read the article by Edwin Harkness Spina >>

Last week, the Dalai Lama joined a dozen top brain researchers in Washington, D.C., in a round of talks on the science and clinical application of meditation.
   
Tibet’s spiritual leader has taken it upon
himself to bridge the gap between the
Eastern practice of meditation and
neuroscience. For a decade now,
he has challenged brain scientists to
study Buddhist practices of mindfulness
and meditation to understand how they
change the human brain.

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Wayne Dyer once wrote that Burt Goldman had developed a superb method of reaching alpha, the First Stage Meditation. However it’s not simply reaching alpha that is important. It’s how you use alpha once you are there. Getting to alpha is easy; it’s like getting to a train station, or an airport. You get there, that’s the easy part, but now you have to go somewhere, where are you going?

Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better – and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.

People who meditate say the practice restores their energy, and some claim they need less sleep as a result. Many studies have reported that the brain works differently during meditation – brainwave patterns change and neuronal firing patterns synchronise. But whether meditation actually brings any of the restorative benefits of sleep has remained largely unexplored.

So Bruce O’Hara and colleagues at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, US, decided to investigate.

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Spirituality is important to a majority of scientists in the United States’ elite research universities, says the researcher of a new study on religion.

These scientists are confounding the
prevailing opinion that academics
aren’t religious.

Researcher Elaine Howard Ecklund,
a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University
in Houston, surveyed more than 1,600
scientists from 21 elite research
universities. Ecklund designed the
survey to examine scientists’ religious and
spiritual beliefs as well as their practices.

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Jose Silva, parapsychologist and founder of the Silva UltraMind ESP System used to demonstrate an experiment on creativity with kids in his hometown of Laredo, Texas. He would ask kids to think of solutions to a particular problem while they were at the beta, or waking, level of mind.

He would then guide them to the alpha, or meditative level of mind and ask them to think of further solutions. The children were always able to come up with more ideas while at alpha.

Does your mind function more creatively when you’re at the alpha level of mind?

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For decades, Dalia Isicoff has suffered the agony of rheumatoid arthritis—joint pain, spinal fusion, multiple hip surgeries. Painkillers dull the aches, but it wasn’t until she took a course at the University of Maryland’s Center for Integrative Medicine that Isicoff discovered a powerful weapon inside her own body: her mind. Using a meditative practice called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, Isicoff learned to acknowledge her pain, rather than fight it. Her negative and debilitating thought patterns—"This is getting worse," "I’m going to end up in a wheelchair"—began to dissipate, and she was able to cut back on her medication.

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Do you have a high opinion of yourself, a good regard for you? Then you have a good, strong ego. If you have a poor opinion of yourself, and little regard for yourself, then you have a weak ego.

It is possible, of course, to have different opinions of yourself in different areas of your life. You may have a good, strong opinion of yourself in one area, and think rather poorly about yourself in another.

Unfortunately, the poor opinion is generally the one that is focused on—the old homily of the squeaking wheel getting the grease. Here is how you correct that situation.

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