The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Monday, October 15, 2012

Personal Reflections ... Public Policy ... Society ...

Just a quick follow-up to my last note, regarding Holotropic Breathwork. Plus a few other reality-based ideas rattling right now in my head.

Regarding Holotropic Breathwork — or actually, regarding the facilitator who gave the presentation on HT recently at our zendo — during her talk, she gave an example of the effect that the practice of holotropic breathwork has had on her life. I.e., she was driving home from work in traffic a few days after a ‘very intense’ HTB session. Somewhere along the way, she had a powerful revelation: the world is an illusion! But there were cars driven by fellow commuters all around her, and so she swatted that thought away with another thought: “Najiah, not now!!”

I.e., she was too busy dealing with reality to ponder that reality isn’t really real. Hmmm. You know, I’d feel better about Holotropic Breathwork if it heightened the practitioner’s sensitivity to irony. I suspect that it doesn’t.

Next, another random reality thought: I might yet live to see (might being the key word here) the demise of the public library, the public postal service, and public radio and TV (bye bye Big Bird). » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:00 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, October 13, 2012

◊ Holotropic Hypoxia: Just My Imagination

Brain / Mind ... Psychology ... Spirituality ...

Last week at the zendo, one of our members gave a talk about holotropic breathwork; the person in question was quite qualified to do this, as she has been practicing it for over 15 years and is now a group facilitator. I wasn’t familiar with that particular form of “bodywork”, so I listened with interest. It sounded quite interesting, especially the claim that holotropic breathers plumb the depths of the psyche and glean great personal and metaphysical insights — without expensive long-term talk therapy or the use of dangerous psychotropic drugs. And without any extraordinary life commitment; the typical breather attends a day-long session every two months, and that’s it. Hey, I’m all for personal and metaphysical insights without a repetitive and burdensome daily practice! So, like many of the other listeners at this talk, I was interested in signing up.

But before I signed on the dotted line, the quasi-scientist in me wanted to know how it worked. The other parts of me said, “oh come on, quasi-scientist, that kind of attitude is exactly what holotropic breathwork puts on hold”. It’s all about the Journey to the Center of the Mind (remember that cheezy song by Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes?).

Nonetheless, the quasi-scientist soon had me in front of a Google page typing in terms like breathwork and hyperventilation. Hyperventilation? It was made clear at the recent zendo talk that breathing fast for a good long time (around an hour) is the key to holotropic breathwork, the gateway to » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 2:41 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Monday, October 8, 2012

◊ Early Autumn

Photo ...

Some early autumn shots from Wawayanda State Park, NJ.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 6:42 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, October 6, 2012

◊ What A Difference A Butterfly and A Black Swan Make

Politics ...

Over the past 2 weeks, a lot of commentators wrote Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaign off, D.O.A. Romney’s 47% comments before a room of super-wealthy partisans from Florida’s Gold Coast seemed fatal; about a week later, the poll averages showed a 2 to 4 point divergence toward Obama from a previously tied race. Here are some article titles from that period:

This Election Is Already Over – Obama Has Won

Today, Mitt Romney Lost the Election

A Mood of Gloom Afflicts the Romney Campaign

But, as Gloria Gaynor once sang, what a difference a day makes. Mitt Romney put in a surprisingly strong performance » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:49 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, October 4, 2012

◊ Has Obama Lost Heart?

Politics ...

After watching the first Presidential candidate debate last night, the thing that comes to my mind, along with thousands if not millions of other would-be pundits, is whether Barack Obama still really wants to be the President of the United States. Many commentators did sense a lack of enthusiasm on his part in his performance against Mitt Romney last night. E.g., Ms Franke-Ruta in The Atlantic.

Andrew Sullivan said that Romney started reminding him of Ronald Reagan during the debate. That briefly crossed my mind too last night. What was even more scary was Obama’s dispirited closing remarks about his not being a perfect man or a perfect President. (Back to Mr. Sullivan for a quick second, he also accused Mr. Obama of “political malpractice” in his debate performance.) This all reminded me of the incumbent President that Reagan beat in 1980, Jimmy Carter. I’m specifically thinking of a clip that I saw on American Experience of a very exhausted Mr. Carter making a short speech to a campaign crowd in the early morning hours of Election Day. His closing words to the crowd were “help us”, spoken in a rather dejected, rather pathetic fashion . . . as though he already knew what was coming. In a way, I sensed that the soon-to-be-ex-President was saying “help ME”; and I also sensed that the best way to personally help this man was to lift the great burden of world leadship off his shoulders, let him have a long rest.

Which is how things turned out. And after Jimmy Carter had that long rest, » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:54 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

◊ Night Blooming Jasmine

Photo ...

So the lady upstairs in my apartment building is very much into planting plants around the building, and . . . . FULL STOP — I need to make a quick comment on how popular it has become to start sentences with the word “SO”. I hear it all the time on every radio station that I listen to. I’d like to know, to use another modern colloquialism, “what’s up with that” . . . ANYWAY, so one of the plants that this woman has on the apartment grounds is a jasmine plant. Her husband recently explained to me that this plant only blooms at night.

Well, actually the flowers open up after sunset, but they stay opened until maybe 11 am or so; they don’t just swoon as soon as the sun rises. They aren’t THAT poetic!! Thus, I could have taken this shot in decent mid-morning light. But there is something about flowers blooming at night that deserves notice. So here’s a late night shot of my neighbor’s night-blooming jasmine plant, in all its nocturnal glory.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 3:00 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, September 30, 2012

◊ Zen and the Flynn Effect

Brain / Mind ... Psychology ... Technology ... Zen ...

I just found out about the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect is all about “psychometrics”, i.e. the measurement of human intelligence. About 28 years ago, a New Zealand sociology researcher who specializes in intelligence issues (whose last name is Flynn, not surprisingly) noticed that IQ scores have been rising steadily since at least the late 1940s, possibly since 1932. This effect has been taking place for both the highest and lowest scoring groups, as well as the middle. In effect, every new generation seems to be smarter than the one preceding it. That effect goes on today. I got out of college in 1975, so the class of 2012 has me and my peers beat by quite a bit — around 12 points (the effect is about 1/3 IQ point per year).

According to a recent Scientific American article (which brought me up to speed on this issue), the Flynn effect has been driven by one specific component of the IQ tests. It is not the component for arithmetic skills, nor the component for vocabulary skills; these scores have only gone up a bit over the past 60-odd years. The big jump is in “similarities”, the measurements of “fluid intelligence”. These are the tricky questions that attempt to gage a person’s “abstract intelligence”, the ability to see patterns (according to someone’s judgment about what patterns are important to see). I.e., which of the following animals is least like the others: orangutan, anteater, skunk and zebra; or BOOM is to 4267 as ZOOK is to (choose one): 3902, 54892, 3319 . . . or Mary is 16 years older than her brother, and is four times her sister’s age; if her sister was born two years before her brother, then . . . (these are not real IQ questions, of course).

Interestingly, the Sci Am article points out that Dr. Flynn and others feel that the Flynn Effect reflects changes in what society expects from us, both in » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:11 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Monday, September 24, 2012

◊ Hierarchy Problem Jumbo Mumbo

Science ...

The existence of the Higgs Boson particle has been confirmed by experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Europe, and particle physicists now have proof that a mechanism exists within their “Standard Model of Particles” that imparts the quality of “mass” to various particles (i.e. most everything except the photon, the force carrier of electromagnetism, and the gluon, the particle that holds quarks together as protons and neutrons in the interior of atoms). Does that explain everything? Well no, there is still a big problem that they call “The Hierarchy Problem”. This problem is a bit tricky for we physics junkies who don’t understand all the heavy duty math behind it. I will now cite three articles that try to explain this important Problem in three different ways, and see if I can weave them together into a “hierarchy for dummies” presentation.

Ethan Siegal’s “With A Bang” column gives a brief overview of the huge disparity in energy levels between gravity and the old familiar electrical force (light, magnetism) along with the weak force (radioactive decay and neutrino interactions — rare as they are). Gravity is extremely smaller than electrical and weak forces, by a factor of 10 with 40 zeros following it; i.e., one big number. Well yes, but just what is the problem with that arrangement? Mr. Siegal doesn’t really take you across that divide, he just forges ahead to reviewing the possible solutions, and how they imply some interesting future discoveries for the CERN collider.

Fine, but . . . maybe you’d like to know more about the problem before you jump to the solution. OK, so let’s try out Matt Strassler’s often insightful blog called “Particular Significance”. » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 1:26 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, September 22, 2012

◊ Ta-Nehisi Coates and Black Prez Fear — Not So Wrong

Politics ... Society ...

I was progressing through the September (2012) issue of The Atlantic, thoroughly enjoying James Fallows’ detailed comparison of the debating skills and experiences of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, willing to consider Hanna Rosin’s theory that the modern emphasis on casual sex on the college scene (the so-called “hook-up culture”) is actually “an engine of female progress . . . harnesses and driven by women themselves” . . . when I came to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Fear of a Black President“. And at first I was going to give it a quick look then move on to the usually interesting short notes at the end of the magazine.

I had previously read some of Mr. Coates’ by-lines, and knew more-or-less that he was quite sensitive to alleged racial issues in 21st Century America. It is clear right from the start of his new article that Mr. Coates, a young African-American, is quite angry with the state of black-white relationships in America today (“a properly angry essay”, as James Bennet writes in the Editor’s Note). I am somewhat familiar with the phenomenon of on-going yet under-spoken racial anger on the part of educated black professionals, having seen occasional signs of it in my own workplace. I didn’t think at first that Mr. Coates would tell me anything that I didn’t already know.

But on second thought . . . maybe I owed it to those people at work » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 6:50 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, September 16, 2012

◊ Home of . . .

Photo ...

Local dojo on Sunday morning. And if you need to know who Shakil is . . .

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:41 am Read Comments (3) / Leave a Comment

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