the village idiot

Sorry, tiny temporary derail but you have to see this! This video is a zoomed in view of a small portion of our nearest galaxy Andromeda. Each tiny pixel of white is a sun like our own. Almost all these suns will have planets and moons orbiting them. You don't need drugs (or meditation come to that) to seriously blow your mind!

Apologies for being annoyingly pedantic but this is rather a curious statement. I wonder what they mean by 'sky'? If they are talking about the number of stars we can see from our vantage point on Earth, the number is rather small (around 5000). This is pitiful compared to the number of trees (3 trillion) so would be factually correct but a very strange comparison to make. If they are talking about stars in the observable universe they are way,way,way out in the wrong direction. There are an estimated 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe. There are single galaxies with 30 times more stars in them than there are trees on the planet, and there are around 170 billion galaxies. Apologies again, not trying to cause trouble, just trying to understand that statement.

I agree. I think that becoming more personally aware of how the mind is going about it's business is as close to a magic bullet as we are going to get for some considerable time for addressing any negative conditions associated with the brain. I have read that compounds such as DMT can be very useful for demonstating to people in a very direct way that there are mind states of 'no self' that are readily achievable. I have never tried DMT. The important difference between mindfulness meditation and psychedelic trips is that the compounds produce a temporary state whereas minfulness meditation cultivates a more lasting trait. In other words meditation changes the nature of mind more permenantly. My friend went on a DMT retreat recently to get his first taste of selflesness. Unfortunately he experienced nothing more profound that three boring nights sitting on his arse, and a bucket full of his own vomit. From what I can gather he was just really unlucky, almost everyone who takes DMT has at least some form of psychedelic experience. All of his fellow retreaters had their minds blown.

Have you watched the video in the Brit girls-fat thread?

Welcome aboard wjotner It sounds like you want to approach this from the same starting point as me. There are loads of secular books on mindfulness meditation. If you browze Amazon and read the comments you can get a good feel for which books are purely science based and which hold onto elements of buddhist culture. They are all of value because they will all teach the same basic prinipals of practice (these are what matter) and buddhism is a relatively ungodly religion anyway. Judging by your disposition it is probably best to avoid titles that sound anything like 'The path to eternal paradise' or 'Let the crystals lead you to nirvana' or '10 easy steps to eternal enlightenment'. If you want to read more about the deeper realms of meditation you could try Sam Harris' 'Waking Up'. It is brutally secular and fairly heavy going in parts, but fascinating.

Yes, the individual thoughtful opinion on Trump came from me, and your response came from you. There is no useful way around speaking in these terms. In fact you have to to form any kind of coherent sentence. It would (in my estimation) be more accurate if I had of said the 'individual thoughtful opinion on Trump came from the brain that is part of this brain body combo that this brain tells this conciouness is me'. In the interests of word count and general intelligability the use of the words me, I, you and your need to stay in circulation. In absolute terms, when I speak of 'me' I am referring to the brain body combo that is the village idiot. When I speak of 'you' I'm referring to the brain body combo that is Billhook. It's a real minefield. One has to risk a few exploding devices of pronoun misappropriation to be able to communicate these ideas.

Thanks for the comments Billhook and Mortimer. I'm hosting more family for the next couple of days but will try to keep up with posting, probably late evenings. If anyone tries some mindfulness practice do let us know how you get on.

That's brilliant Mortimer Firewood. This is exactly the kind of situation where mindfulness can be really valuable. A life saver in some instances. It can also help with all of life's little annoyances, like WesD's frustration at the petrol garage. These seem petty, but they can mount up and cause real psychological harm over time. Mindfulness can help keep you in an intrinsically content and balanced state of being. This ability is fantastically beneficial and you can choose to continue to ride the overground train and generally make your life better. This is great, and is what most people use mindfulness for. There is an additional level which mindfulness meditation can provide access to (the underground train). This is where the truly profound insights sit waiting to be discovered. There is absolutely no obligation to go here, although it could materialise automatically if your practice is sustained enough. If you watched the video, this is what Sam Harris is referring to when talking about the 'spiritual' nature of mindfulness meditation. The term 'spiritual' is wrapped up in all kinds of religious baggage. This is a shame because these transformational insights are available to all. You do not have to believe in a God. Profoundity is constantly there, just below our perception, but you have to train your brain to 'see' it. There are examples of people who have stumbled upon the transformative insights by accident. I can talk about these later on. But they are very rare. The vast majority of us have to put the work in. I'm sure these utterances make me sound like a gullable old hippy, but I can assure you that I am a hugely sceptical person by nature. I am scientifically minded with what I believe to be a well tuned BS detector!

As with any skill you are trying to develop, it is crucial to practice. If you want to give mindfulness meditation a go you really need to come at it with an attitude of determination to do the practice, and curiousness as to what you might be uncovered. Try and set aside a certain period each day (even just 10 minutes will be beneficial) to sit (or lie down if you are not sleepy) and gently pay attention to the breath, non judgementally bringing your attention back whenever you notice it has wondered. Notice how you feel after your meditation sessions. You are not going to suddenly extinguish the sense of self after day three, and aiming to do so will destroy any aspiration you have to become more mindful. Regardless of whether you label a meditation session as having been good or bad, if you managed to notice you were lost in thought and returned your attention to the breath (however many times) you are doing the practice. Your brain will be silently and slowly rewiring itself in the background, and bit by bit you will find the practice becomes easier and your progress will accelerate. Many people find that guided meditation practice really helps as an introduction. There are quite a few apps for this, Headspace being the most well known and most highly regarded. These apps also help with discipline as they remind you to practice each day.

When you first start a mindfulness meditation practice you invariably find that you can't focus on purely the sensation of the breath for more than a few moments. Other thoughts automatically arive and you are swept away on them. Some time later you remember that you are trying to focus purely on the breath, so you start again. Unfortunately exactly the same thing happens, you get distracted by thought over and over and over again. This leads most people to conclude that they can't meditate, their minds are too full of clutter. The crucial point to take on board here is that this constant thinking is not a barrier to mindfulness. Everyone experiences exactly the same thing, even experienced meditators. The gold in the dung heap of rumination is the exact point in the cycle of thinking that you realise you have been lost in thought. Mindfulness meditation is all about training your mind to notice when it is thinking. In terms of the actual practice. When you notice that you are no longer focussed on the breath (this will happen many many many times), don't beat yourself up. Just gently acknowledge that you have been lost in thought and return to focussing on the breath.

Hi Gary. A very common misconception of meditation is that it is for relaxation, to clear the mind of thoughts. The practice of meditation is actually an active process. You are not trying to stop thoughts, you are ultimately trying to develop the levels of concentration necessary to notice when thoughts arive in conciousness. This is hard work!

Before getting too deep into this it is important to point out that I am a woodsman, not a meditation teacher. I see no issue in giving my thoughts on what meditation is, an introduction to the techniques, and my interpretations of the results. This all comes from what I have read about the subject and my own personal experience as a novice. If this thread kindles an interest, it is well worth going on your own research journey. There are 100's of books on the subject and 1000's of blogs etc written by people more qualified than me. Always be mindful though that it is the practice of meditation itself that leads to the changes occuring. Understanding it logically can certainly be beneficial but it only gets you so far. To have a mind that is skilfull in observing itself working, you have to train it.

Mindfulness meditation practice. 1.Sit comfortably but upright. 2.Close your eyes (not compulsary but it helps) 3.Focus purely on the sensation of the breath wherever you feel it strongest 4.Repeat step 3 over and over and over again for the duration of your practice time. The directions for this method of mindfulness meditation are very simple. The practice, as you will find, is somewhat more taxing. Focusing purely on the breath without thinking about anything else. Easy, right? Try it. If you can do just 30 seconds you are some kind of wizard.

Yes, absolutely. The self is like a mantlepiece where you put your stuff. Love it! My argument is that you are not choosing what to put on the shelf. Ornaments pop into place and sometimes they stay, sometimes they disappear back to Oxfam. The ornaments in place at any particular point of your life define who you think you are, but in reality (I would argue) you are actually the shelf. It is a unique and concious shelf who's grain patterns ripple in response to the ornaments and everything else it interacts with, but a shelf none the less.

She played a very big role in knitting together your current sense of self Stubby, so why not?

Have you watched the Sam Harris video on the Brit Girls thread? There is no contention that you are an individual Billhook. You have a body, a brain and mental processes that absolutely make you an independant individual distinct from everybody else. There is no suggestion that any of these are not real. The argument is that the sense of self, or you can call it the ego or a 'thinker of thoughts', is an illusion, a construct developed in early childhood and constantly reinforced throughout life. It might be easier to think of it in terms of the feeling of being a 'me' riding around in the head, pulling the strings, is real but not true. The illusion is incredibly persistant and pretty much everybody (me included) live life in it's thrall pretty much all of the time. It is our default state and it can be very helpful. What this particular thread is going to be about is showing ways to demonstate that it is an illusion that can be broken through if desired, and that the benefits that can be had from having this insight and ability are life changing. Without wanting to desend into a political discussion, many of the dangers of over identification with the ego are clearly demonstrated in the current American president. Imagine if he realised that, but for the false narrative of himself that he has attached to in his head, he is essentially (biologically) on a par with every other human being on the planet. Yes, his ego got him into holding the most powerful post in the world, but I strongly suspect that if he now started a dedicated meditation practice and became more mindful, then by the end of his tenure, he would be remembered by the world as perhaps the greatest all round president America has ever had. Whatever your thoughts on Trump, I think it is pretty clear that the vast majority of the world's population do not think this scenario at all likely at present. Perhaps we can leave that thought as 'just my opinion'. I don't want to distract too much from the purpose of this thread. I was just using it as an example of what I believe the benefits of mindful meditation could bring.

Excessively long post alert!! Mindfulness meditation is brain training. To be mindful is to be aware of what is occuring in conciousness. Our minds are capable of being in a variety of different states. Almost all of the time the mind is in thinking mode. It feels very much like this is all there is but in actual fact, whilst we are awake, there is a constant unchanging state below this constant stream of thoughts. This is concious awareness (or pure conciousness). This is the state that some of you snowboarders and motorcyclists have acessed automatically for short periods. I don't need to tell you that this is a very pleasant place to be. People can also access this state whilst praying or taking certain psychedelic drugs. Mindfulness meditation trains the brain over time to access this pure awareness state more readily. This has the benefit of increasing your time in this pleasant state, but it is a kind of side effect bonus. The real goal of spending time in pure awareness is to give you the necessary detachment to 'observe' your thought patterns as opposed to identifying with them. Identifying with your thoughts (automatically attributing them to a self or 'you') inevitably sweeps you off into repeating patterns of very often debilitating nonsense. When you have the ability to simply observe your thoughts you realise how completely bonkers you are. So far, so understandable. The really important insights come when you realise that all there actually is are automatically generated thoughts occuring in pure unchanging conciousness. There is no 'you' thinking these thoughts. The sensation of there being an 'I' is actually an illusion. I can go into how this illusion develops, and why, in later posts. The importance of coming to understand that you are not your thoughts is that it provides you with a little window of pure awareness space after thoughts arise to let them waft on by without getting ensnared. Without this insight we spend almost all our lives riding these often unhelpful thought waves instead of truly experiencing what is actually happening moment to moment. The little pure awareness window also gives you the opportunity to run with the constructive, positive automatic thoughts, so long as you stay mindful of when they go astray. Let's take the example of Wes or Bolam owning their way down the off piste slopes. I think the fact that they experienced pure awareness states in fresh powder is telling. They are flying down the slope, they are well practiced so their brains are able to perform the necessary actions without thinking. They are focussed but not judging. Because the brain has got so good at this activity it is not second guessing, no error correction thoughts appear in conciousness. Because there are no thoughts to identify an 'I' with, conciousness is liberated. It feels as if there is only snowboarding, no 'me' snowboarding, and this feels great. They become accutely tuned to their senses and this pure experiencing mind state is wonderful. Now imagine their eyes suddenly fall on another snowboard track in the snow. If the brain is not trained to be mindful of thoughts this visual input will invariably trigger the thinking brain into unstoppable overdrive: 'I' wonder who left that track? 'I' wonder if they're a better snowboarder than me? They got here earlier so they are probably more dedicated than 'me' Why can't 'I' get up that early? 'I' reckon he's probably a right bell end, spending all his time snowboarding and neglecting his family. 'I' wonder what he had for breakfast? What shall 'I' have for breakfast? Oh shit, 'I'm' at the bottom of the slope! Their brains have continued to take care of the snowboarding but their conciousness has been automatically filled by an automatic stream of inconsequential nonsense which their brain has attributed to 'them' and they have not been present for most of what could have been the ride of their lives. They did it but they missed it. This is 'us' almost all of the time. Imagine if you had the focus, not to stop the thoughts (this is impossible) but to instantly 'see' them for what they are, not engage with them and have them float harmlessly through pure awareness, being a small part of the ride but not your whole experience of it. Even better if they don't see any tracks and the whole descent can be bliss! Mindful meditation and the associated detachment from the illusion of self can get you there. Not just when you are snowboarding but also when you are doing the washing up. A level of detachment from the illusion of self can also have other very significant psychological benefits, especially if you are prone to depression or self criticism/over analysing. This is probably most of us, right?More on this to come. Right. I am extremely self concious that I still haven't managed to tell you how to meditate. Onto the next post!

WesD you are amazing! I was beginning to think (Vesp and maybe mesterh aside) that the topic was going to be too inpenetrable. It is possibly the most unintuitive proposal imaginable and no surprise that it is mindboggling. People can also be somewhat disturbed when you start claiming that the self they believe themselves to be is an illusion. It feels threatening. If you come to realise that this is in fact the case it is certainly startling but it is not fatalistic. In fact it opens you up to very significant opportunities for very positive change. You obviously feel that there is good reason to explore this further and that is great. You are right, and also probably correct that we needed to move on from theory to practice. Practice helps massively with getting to grips with the apparent craziness of the concept. But enough waffling. I'll collect my thoughts (hopefully the mischievous brain cells will cooperate) and give some starting advice on the practice of meditation.

I've done the best I can Vesp with my lumberjack's brain capacity. I think I have already addressed these questions in earlier posts. Re. the crime pill. That would be a very effective solution and I think we should be working towards it. Brain science is coming on leaps and bounds. It may not be as unrealistic as it sounds.

I completely understand where you are coming from. It really feels as if we can all do as we please. There is some truth to this at the macro level. There is some scope for a sort of distant 'self' guidance in vaguely the desired direction, but at the micro level (inside the brain at crunch time) the concept of doing as we please basically falls apart. Sincerest apologies for monopolising this thread, but this is really important stuff. Starting a new thread would stop anyone interested (anyone??) from following the argument through.

It certainly is a mind warper. You kind of have to hijack your brains natural processes and turn them in on themselves to gain the necessary insight. Real mental gymnastics. I'm not even sure that you can sort it all out through thinking alone. Brain training (ie meditation) really helps. After a while this gradually gives you the opportunity to observe how your mind is fuctioning. You get to see that you are not in control and the 'self' becomes an untenable concept. This can lead, and did in my case, to a bit of an identity crisis for a couple of days, but then you realise (as you rightly point out) it doesn't change an awful lot physically. What it does do (and this is really important) is subtly but fundamentally change the nature of your cognitive relationship to yourself and your conception of all other sentient beings. (It is impossible to talk about this stuff without sounding like a total lunatic). You become aware that you are not your thoughts, this is hugely positively liberating as most of our thoughts are damaging- this becomes very clear when mindfulness meditation gives you the necessary concentration to be able to watch them. You also realise that other people are not their thougts either. This insight has the potential to connect you compassionately to all other humans, and I would argue that we really need more of this phenomenon at the moment. Try not to over think it for a while. Let it rattle around in your subconcious for a bit. Consider taking up a meditation practice and start to see your mind at work, if only for 10 minutes a day.

I think you may have inadvertantly but enthusiastically disappeared down the wrong rabbit hole Stubby. Anyone got a Jack Russell?

If anyone is at all interested in the whole self/free will illusion stuff. I seriously recommend watching the video posted below. Some of you have no doubt encountered Sam Harris. He is a neuroscientist and author/podcaster and in my view one of the most important people on the planet right now. He is most well known for his views on the dangers of religious dogma, but is also a clear thinking communicator on secular spirituality, mindfulness, ethics and artificial intelligence. In this interview he is talking about the 'self' illusion and the benefits of penetrating it with mindfulness meditation. Towards the end he talks about free will and the consequences of not accepting it. You will see where a lot of my thinking on the subject originates from. It is an hour long, and at the risk of sounding like a dick, I think it's really worth setting the time aside to watch it in it's entirety with no distractions. As is pointed out in some of the viewers comments he has the habit of dropping extremely profound statements into normal everyday sentences. If you accept and internalise the argument it can have seriously beneficial consequences on the quality of your life. This sounds like a new age woo woo statement, but I sincerely think that it is not overstating things. TVI.

Sorry folks. Fat fingers!

You're almost there Vesp I think you are attaching too much significance to the concious mind. It is certainly true to say that the concious mind influences the unconcious mind. This is undeniable. The important thing to appreciate here is that what appears in conciousness (thoughts) are themselves products of the unconcious mind. These thoughts can and do feed back to the unconcious mind generating more thoughts (ad infinitum) until death. The unconcious brain is constantly automatically churning out stuff. A small proportion of this stuff appears in conciousness as thoughts. This is what gives us the sense of being a Self. We have no control over the unconcious, what appears in conciousness or how these appearances feed back to the unconcious. These are the processes that dictate how our lives pan out in every way, and as we have no control over any of it, by extension, we have no free will. The sense of Self in conciousness gives us the very strong impression that 'we' are pilling the levers of life experience, but this too is all just part of the automatic feedback loop generated by our marvelous but ADHD smitten crazy unconcious brain. Your points about crime clinics and forgiveness are very interesting.