Breathing in, I calm my body.
Breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment,
I know this is a wonderful moment!
My meditation teacher used the first four lines of this Buddhist poem as a meditation exercise for his beginning students. To do the meditation, become conscious of your body. Begin to breathe in and out slowly and think about each breath. On the first inhale, recite the first line to yourself. On the first exhale, recite the second line. As you breathe again, recite the third and fourth lines, and repeat this process for a solid few minutes.
Meditation has nothing to do with the supernatural. It is a common practice associated with religions that preach the supernatural as part of their worldview, but the practice itself is firmly grounded in science.
Like other positive thinking methods, meditation works by using thoughts to influence emotions. In this case, the thought of calmness causes an emotion of calmness. When we see, hear, or think about calm things, that perceptual activity has an effect on our emotional state. Our brains are responding to stimuli by activating the centers of our neurological system associated with feelings.
Those stimuli may be external or internal -- we might see a peaceful beach in front of us, or we may simply imagine a peaceful beach. Either way, our brain activates the mechanism associated with a feeling of serenity.
We don't need to be beholden to narratives and categories that don't fit with a rational worldview in order to experience the joy that these time-tested methods offer. I think many of us would love to calm our bodies by calming our minds without accepting any new-age or age-old mumbo jumbo about Gods or spirits.
Let us take the exercise for what it is -- an incredibly effective cognitive behavioral therapy, that will make us happier, and not dilute its power, or our ability to seek truth in the universe by shackling our practice to a mythology.
[ add comment ] | permalink
Ants, like humans, are influenced by their genes and by their environment.
Researchers studied Florida harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex badius) to investigate what factors decide a particular ant's social caste.
"Basically what we found is that things are more complicated than previously thought," said researcher Christopher R. Smith, a former graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and now a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University. "Our study shows that there is a large genetic component to caste determination, but that there is also a very strong environmental component."
The social caste of ants is determined by genetic factors environmental factors, including diet.
Other studies have found that meerkats conduct classes teaching their young how to disable scorpions, that ants teach each other to find food using tandem running, and that apes imitate rationally.
Humans and other animals possess the ability to transfer learned knowledge that is not passed through the genome or “instinct.” What distinguishes humans from animals is our ability to master skills like intergenerational transfer of information, and a host of other capabilities that we share in kind, if not in degree. The power that grants us a high level of proficency in all skills is toolmaking.
Birds and monkeys chatter, express jealousy, love, hatred, sympathy, fear, and so do humans. But we humans can also write about it with our nifty charcoal sticks, and mats of paper, and computers, preserving it in precise form, to refer to later. Our ability to engineer tools enables us to enshrine our thoughts exactly.
That precision of ideas enables further discourse, epicycles upon epicycles of discourse, that can be tracked and measured. Tools allow us to think further ahead in the game of life because they enable us to record the moves.
But despite our phenomenal ability to assist ourselves by building tools, we are still composed of genetic material we largely share with other animals, and our behavior shows our kinship with them.
Like ants, our life patterns are determined by our genetic material and our environment. Ants teach their children what they believe to be the right things. They have a hierarchical society, job specialization, and school. We don't think they are intelligent because they lack the tools to inscribe their language and thoughts, and build on what we would consider basic perceptions and cognitions.
Our kinship with the rest of life is not a reason to feel marginalized on Earth. We are clearly the dominant organism, and because we have the ability to make tools, we are the only creature likely to be able to build an escape pod from Earth. If our ultimate destiny is survival, then we, as a species, are the chosen ones. Read More...
[ add comment ] ( 2 views ) | permalink | related link
Livescience says:
If you want to boost your teenager's grade point average, take the kid to church. Or, a new study suggests, find some similar social activity to involve them in.
Researchers found that church attendance has as much effect on a teen's GPA as whether the parents earned a college degree. Students in grades 7 to 12 who went to church weekly also had lower dropout rates and felt more a part of their schools.
On average, students whose parents received a four-year college degree average a GPA .12 higher than those whose parents completed high school only. Students who attend religious services weekly average a GPA .144 higher than those who never attend services, said Jennifer Glanville, a sociologist at the University of Iowa.
The study does not suggest God is smiling on the students, per se. Rather, it identifies several reasons the students do better:
* They have regular contact with adults from various generations who serve as role models.
* Their parents are more likely to communicate with their friends' parents.
* They develop friendships with peers who have similar norms and values.
* They're more likely to participate in extracurricular activities.
Those factors account for only half the predicted effect, Glanville and colleagues say.
As the article goes on to mention, "Other studies have shown that regular church-goers breathe easier and live longer." GPA is just one benefit derived from religious practice, benefits which are derived due to the above factors as well as the practice of positive thought.
None of the cited reasons has anything to do with belief or existence of supernatural beings. Besides belief, positive thought is that which otherwise seems to be the common thread between the world's religions.
Many social groups and phenomena exist which foster bonds across generations -- school, sporting events, dance, chess, music, a neighborhood pool, gathering to eat, working together, shopping, sailing, bars, barbeques, parties, associations.
Religion certainly doesn't win because it causes people to engage in "extracurricular activities." Some debate, play football, and sew; some have poker, drinking, and sex. None of these is particularly compatible with or dependent on religion, and all of them would probably count as "extracurricular activities."
And we don't need religion in order to pick people that have things in common with us -- we all have that bias. You don't have to be a prejudiced person to want to seek like-minded individuals. Many activities require groups, and who doesn't like hearing her or his preconceptions validated?
Religion fosters bonds, facilitates recreational activities, and does these things very well, encouraging the happiness and well-being of people. But so do many other things in society. And notice that the measure that is associated with the GPA boost is church attendance, not belief. Other destinations might be equally, or more productive, like the library.
So why is religion uniquely suited for heightening humanity's well-being? Because it comes with the practice of positive thought, and it is the only societal forum in which massive doses of cognitive behavioral therapy are applied to the public.
Whenever these studies are done, it never matters what church it is, only that religious practice of one kind or another causes well-being. Buddhists have mantras, Christians have prayers, and some prayers sound like mantras and some mantras sound like prayers. It's hard to tell the difference because they are the same thing -- a repeated, disciplined positive thought.
The placebo effect is real, and dogs every scientific study, and while doctors wonder how to harness it, religion has already done it. That power can be harnessed outside the fog of superstition. It only has to be found and named.
[ add comment ] | permalink | related link
I have argued that humans lack knowledge about the organization of time/space on distance scales greater than 300 million light years or so, and that this lack of knowledge means that agnosticism is necessary regarding higher intelligence, to the extent that “higher intelligence” means an entity who exists on incredibly large distance scales. But what kinds of things or entities could we imagine exist on these scales?
When we talk about quantum mechanics, we accept that there is a different physics on small scales. We call the physics that we observe in our day to day lives, the gravity that holds us down, and the mechanics of objects that we can observe “macro level” or “Newtonian” physics. Suppose we imagine that there is something on larger distance scales than what we can observe. Let’s call this the “supermacroscopic” level.
When I talk about supermacroscopic physics, I am talking about huge things, bigger than galaxies, and obviously, we don’t know what exists on those scales, if anything. I can just imagine hypothetical supermacroscopic beings laughing at our feeble attempts to pretend we understand something about them. Of course, I don’t believe that there are Gods laughing at me – this imaginary entity I have created in my brain is a metaphor for the lack of knowledge that I have.
What do we know about the supermacroscopic? Almost nothing. It is easier to list what we do know, because that is a very short list. We know that there is some physics operating there that we don’t understand, because we can measure the influence of dark energy.When scientists talk about dark energy and dark matter, they are really just talking about certain unknowns in physics. Astrophysicists believe that galaxies are held together by gravity. Judging by the number of stars and nebulae that are visible, and including objects such as black holes which are invisible but can be measured, there still is a large deficit of matter. If the only gravity doing the heavy lifting of keeping all the stars together in a galaxy is the gravity of the stuff we can know is out there, there just isn’t enough gravity. Galaxies should just fall apart. But they don’t.
And scientists don’t know why. Maybe the laws of gravity change at larger distances, or maybe some undiscovered geometric property of space time is responsible, or maybe there really is some hidden matter. So the shorthand for this problem is “dark matter.”
“Dark energy,” on the other hand, refers to the fact that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. As far as scientists can tell, if something expands at an ever increasing rate, there must be something pulling it. They call this unknown force “dark energy.” But just like dark matter, dark energy could actually be a manifestation of some unknown property of gravity, or of the geometry of the universe, or of something completely unknown. Read More...
[ add comment ] | permalink | related link
Perpetual progress is impossible. Yes, our planet will be consumed when our sun matures into a red giant. However, it is possible to imagine that our more durable successor-replicants could survive the transition by escaping to other planets and eventually seeding other star systems.
But even in the best-case scenario we will not survive the eventual death of our galaxy. Astronomers believe that our local group will end its life as an orphan in the universe, beyond sight or reach of any other object.
One day, the exponential curve of progress will stop. I wake each morning alive, and yet I know someday I will die. Am I a Cassandra because I recognize my mortality?
Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who believe that we are close to reaching a "technological singularity," is optimistic not because he believes in exponential progress, but because he believes that humankind will be preserved in the process. We'll just have to accept being replaced by the next model, because life will continue to evolve whether we like or not.
We can't selfishly say that the only legacy of life is the legacy of homo sapiens. We're just the ape that happens to be the best (by far) at making tools. But we are little more than one step in a great chain of accelerating change stretching back to the Cambrian. Just like industrious little bacteria-like creatures that banded together to form the first multi-cellular organism, we apes are on the verge of engineering the next great transition in the evolution of life.
All of this progress, however, requires that we avoid an accidental nuke-fest and promptly clean up the environment. And there's always the possibility that we could get hit by a cosmic bus.
We know our curve will end someday. But as long as we can manage to keep rolling, chances are, it won't be today, or any day soon.
[ add comment ] ( 1 view ) | permalink
Categories
