one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced; for, after all, Love is the last word. Complement this fragment of Huxley’s wholly illuminating and illuminated The Divine Within — which also gave us his meditation on mind-body integration and how to get out of your own shadow — with his contemporary Erich Fromm on the six steps to unselfish understanding and the pioneering nineteenth-century psychiatrist Maurice Bucke, whose work greatly influenced Huxley, on the six steps to cosmic consciousness, then dive into what modern neuroscience is revealing about the central mystery of consciousness. ... posted on May 21 2021 (5,847 reads)

coast of California. Their journey began in Pasadena and ended three years and 800 miles later at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah. And most astonishingly, their knees had already endured over a million bows…. Loc: Would you describe the purpose and benefits of a bowing practice? Rev. Sure: Bowing, like other Dharma practices, can be considered a technology. It’s actually a method for changing one’s consciousness. And because it’s a Dharma practice, it works by using the body. It is true that Buddhism emphasizes the mind; however, we often use the body to get to the mind. A renowned Chinese monk from the Tang dynasty, Master Cheng Guan, explained th... posted on Jun 1 2021 (6,774 reads)

awareness. When we are in touch with physical reality, we feel physically grounded. As subtle levels of feeling and energy unfold, we feel subtly grounded. When we know ourselves as open awareness, not separate from anything, we rest in and as our deepest ground that is sometimes called our homeground or groundless ground. As attention deepens and opens, our experience of and identification with the physical body changes. Our felt sense of the ground shifts accordingly. After decades of working with clients and students, I have observed a continuum of groundedness that spans four broad experiential stages: no ground, foreground, background, homeground. Each has a corresponding body i... posted on Jun 10 2021 (9,685 reads)

all other living beings.2> A fundamental shift is waiting for us. In my last book, I called this new logic and worldview ‘Enlivenment’—the insight that every living being is fundamentally connected to reality through the irreducible experience of being alive. The experience of being alive is not an epiphenomenon, however. It is the center.3 It is still too early to even guess the future implications of this revolution in biology. The neurobiologist David Rudrauf, who works together with the brain researcher Antonio Damasio, asserts that “the search for the way organisms bring forth value and meaning is at the heart of modern cognition research, from robotics... posted on Jun 29 2021 (4,107 reads)

humans, we inevitably experience harm: we feel hurt, we get hurt, and we hurt others. We free ourselves from this experience not by imagining we can escape harm but knowing we can heal it— moving from wound to scar—and then learning to love the scars. This can, of course, be the work of a lifetime. Luckily, I have long loved scars. When I was four, I accidentally cut my left eye. As a result, a small scar formed directly under my eye and inside the eye, where the pupil stayed dilated with a keyhole in it. After I had the eye removed at twenty-one, a photographer I knew told me she wanted to record people’s scars, so I asked her to photograph me with my empty socket. I... posted on Jul 4 2021 (5,371 reads)

self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his patron as he contemplated the interplay of discipline and creativity. A century later, James Baldwin echoed the sentiment in his advice on writing, observing: “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” But for those of us who show up to do what we do day after day, inner rain or shine, as the days unspool into years — Brain Pickings turns 15 this year — there is something more than white-knuckle discipline makin... posted on Jul 24 2021 (6,106 reads)

Pennsylvania, Johnstown's scenic location belies its tragic history as the site of one of the worst catastrophes on American soil. On May 31, 1889, the Great Flood tore through Johnstown, destroying the city and killing 2,209. My life is intertwined with this tragedy. Not only was I born there, but all four of my grandparents immigrated to Johnstown from Eastern and Central Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Most survived the Flood and got on with their lives. They owned stores, worked in the coal mines, raised families, and died. Many rest in Grandview, near the 777 unknown people who perished in the Flood. Visiting the graves of our departed at Grandview is a significant... posted on Jul 30 2021 (4,891 reads)

letters of the alphabet. … Objects and people on our route became possibilities for interaction, rather than decoration or obstruction, as the urban pedestrian might define them. Kalman gently nudges Horowitz to remove the “invisibility cloak” so familiar to us urbanites as we shield ourselves from strangers, and the two do something city dwellers — especially New Yorkers — never do: They talk to policemen, movers, a mailman, churchgoers, and the social workers tending to a halfway house. In other words, they cease to simply coexist with their fellow citizens and, for the duration of the walk, live with them instead, attend to them with pre... posted on Aug 11 2021 (6,271 reads)

how this is made? Three reasons. First, curiosity. Primates are extremely curious -- and humans most of all. And if we are interested, for example, in the fact that anti-gravity is pulling galaxies away from the Earth, why should we not be interested in what is going on inside of human beings?  Second, understanding society and culture. We should look at how society and culture in this socio-cultural regulation are a work in progress. And finally, medicine. Let's not forget that some of the worst diseases of humankind are diseases such as depression, Alzheimer's disease, drug addic... posted on Aug 15 2021 (8,754 reads)

You are not the same person you were a moment ago. Our life's moments are like film footage: played onscreen they look like a single thing, but if you look at the reel frame by frame, each is slightly different. Therefore, the Buddha said, there is no need to cling to anything. Clinging or craving is what causes the dissatisfaction in the first place. Learning to get beyond that, following his precepts and path, is our spiritual quest. Karl Sundermeier, a German missionary with whom I worked early in my ministry, used to say that Christians are called to live in tents—meaning that they must live lightly, ready to move when God calls.  Having gained insights such as th... posted on Sep 15 2021 (5,097 reads)

originally by non-living molecular structures. These protocells essentially staged a temporary, local reversal of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which describes how the universe is undergoing an irreversible process of entropy: order inevitably becomes disordered and heat always flows from hot regions to colder regions. We see entropy in our daily lives every time we stir cream into our coffee, or break an egg for an omelet. Once the egg is scrambled, no amount of work will ever get the yolk back together again. Those first protocells, however, learned to turn entropy into order by ingesting it in the form of energy and matter, breaking it apart, and reorganizi... posted on Sep 12 2021 (4,862 reads)

because I take everything in my stride, smile through everything, doesn’t mean I don’t feel pain, loss or get hurt, it just means that every day I make a choice to transcend the negative and use every moment there is breath in this body to positively impact the world around me."  -- Preethi Srinivasan Born in 1979, Preethi was a very gifted and hard working child. She became the captain of the under-19 Tamil Nadu women's cricket team, and led the state team to the national championships in 1997 at the age of 17. She was also a gold-medalist national level swimmer. She excelled academically in her school life which spanned 9 countries across 3 cont... posted on Sep 18 2021 (4,698 reads)

is the second in a series of articles: Enduring Wisdom in Times of Great Change. In the spring of 2013, during my decade+ journey with chronic fatigue and vertigo, I stumbled across the work of Francis Weller, a grief therapist and self-described “soul activist,” who facilitated daylong grief workshops. Though wrestling in the muddy realm of the soul with strangers was hardly how I wanted to spend one of my weekends, I imagined there were invisible, inaccessible stresses I had to contend with. Stresses that made me unpleasantly reactive instead of thoughtfully responsive. Stresses that kept me in a fearful state rather than a healing one. What is chronic fatigue, any... posted on Oct 7 2021 (12,487 reads)

plasticity of the hippocampus. After the now-iconic 2000 study of the brains of London taxi drivers — which found that their elaborate qualification exam, requiring the memorization of thousands of city landmarks and 25,000 streets, resulted in significant increase in synapses and gray matter in the hippocampus — scientists have been studying what we can do to protect and even bolster our primary instrument for navigating space and selfhood. O’Connor points to the work of McGill University neuroscientist Véronique Bohbot, who has devised a hippocampal health regimen of recollection and navigation exercises of incrementally increasing difficulty that deli... posted on Sep 26 2021 (4,338 reads)

you’re a movie buff, as I am, you might remember Awakenings (1990). The main character, played by the late Robin Williams, is Dr. Malcolm Sayer. Though inexperienced, Sayer cares deeply about the residents in the mental hospital where he works as a neurologist. He’s especially curious about the patients who have been immobilized, or even comatose, since an epidemic of “sleeping sickness,” decades earlier. Eventually Dr. Sayer discovers that a drug called L-Dopa can “awaken” these patients from their strange state. A character named Leonard, portrayed by Robert De Niro, returns to normalcy after thirty years in a coma. He even falls in love,... posted on Oct 1 2021 (4,160 reads)

comes like a heron to fish in the creek, and the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing in the trees in the silence of the fisherman and the heron, and the trees that keep the land they stand upon as we too must keep it, or die. This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land and your work. Answer with knowledge of the others who are here and how to be here with them. By this knowledge make the sense you need to make. By it stand in the dignity of good sense, whatever may follo... posted on Oct 31 2021 (17,452 reads)

isn't just untrue, it's dangerous, because it erases the very real challenges of recovery.  Now, don't get me wrong -- I am incredibly grateful to be alive, and I am painfully aware that this struggle is a privilege that many don't get to experience. But it's important that I tell you what this projection of heroism and expectation of constant gratitude does to people who are trying to recover. Because being cured is not where the work of healing ends. It's where it begins.  I'll never forget the day I was discharged from the hospital, finally done with treatment. Those four years of chemo had tak... posted on Nov 5 2021 (9,751 reads)

while also drawing them inward into the dazzling potentials of the human spirit. Theirs is a music that believes deeply in our fundamental interconnection, and the capacity we have to heal together. They embody the messages of their music in every aspect of their lives. It is this authenticity perhaps, that gives their music wings, allowing it to touch and inspire thousands across the world. Based in Bonn, Germany they both weave multiple traditions into their work. Nils grew up with extensive training in western classical music, and as an adult was profoundly influenced by his travels in West Africa where he had the rare chance to st... posted on Dec 8 2021 (5,125 reads)

this be the day We come together. Mourning, we come to mend, Withered, we come to weather, Torn, we come to tend, Battered, we come to better. Tethered by this year of yearning, We are learning That though we weren't ready for this, We have been readied by it. We steadily vow that no matter How we are weighed down, We must always pave a way forward. * This hope is our door, our portal. Even if we never get back to normal, Someday we can venture beyond it, To leave the known and take the first steps. So let us not return to what was normal, But reach toward what is next. * What was cursed, we will cure. What was plagued... posted on Dec 31 2021 (52,647 reads)

dear,” I thought. “What a loving but absurd vow.” I was reminded of being a small child, seeing with such tenderness my mother’s awkwardness in the world, and wanting so much for her to have a sense of her absolute belonging. Here I was, a helpless child, leveraging the only thing I had, my own nervous system, to create the world I wanted to live in.  I decided to follow along with this process that was creating itself. What was the next logical step in working with the contract? Somehow the way that I had begun the wording, it sounded so legal and contingent, and the ritual unbinding of contracts came into my head. Since every contract has at least ... posted on Jan 3 2022 (7,034 reads)