Where do thoughts come from and where do they go?

I started meditating again recently. About 10 minutes a day, using Sam Harris's "Waking Up" phone app. Often I feel very restless during the meditation sessions. Thoughts come up and I feel like "I've got an idea for a post in my blog!" But I force myself to sit through it, and then 1 minute later, the idea is gone again.

Often I feel like I have something in my mind that I have got to put into writing. The ideas remain coherent. However, sentences I type up are totally different than the ones that come up in my head. I have no idea why that is the case.

Or I get the feeling I have so much thoughts I need to express, and then three sentences later, I have no clue how to complete the paragraph, let alone a whole post. The brain just feels like the idea came out the tap and is lost in the drain, and I only managed to catch a few drops on the page. I know that to be able to write better, I really need to force myself to write more often. More practice will improve my writing skills.

As the guided meditation suggests, thoughts seem to come out of nowhere. If I just observe the thought, it disappears into nothingness too all of a sudden. Sometimes the restlessness persists, then more random thoughts appear into consciousness. Occasionally, I can attain a state where it feels great to sit still for several minutes, where I can just observe the breath, feelings in the body, random sounds in the environment, with no random thoughts materializing from the ether to distract me.

In my climbing, I do notice that sometimes the random thought of fear of falling comes out of nowhere, and I suddenly believe I should get down to the safety of the ground right away, but if I just hold on and breath, then that thought goes away and everything is fine. Or when my forearms start feeling the burn (from fingers clenching the holds too hard), the immediate fear that my body can't handle the stress arises. However, the moment my feet land on the ground, I would suddenly think that I probably could do one more route no problem.

My problem is that considering too many issues leads to indecision and inaction. I hope to be able to be less distracted and be able to accomplish more goals in the future.

Thoughts on the pursuit of spirituality

I know it's not a popular topic among my regular blog readers, but I can't help it: Matthew Remski of Yoga 2.0 wrote a brilliant article questioning spirituality at Elephant Journal, which elegantly put together so many issues I've been thinking about lately. Please feel free to skip my brain-dump until I start reporting my struggles with supta kurmasana again :)  (Maybe I'll actually get this pose by the time I finish dumping my brain?)

Remski talks about Jill Bolte Taylor's story of "A Stroke of Insight", where this Harvard trained neuroanatomist had a massive hemorrhaging stroke that damaged the left brain region, which governed language ability, logic, time, and the boundaries of the body. Instead of fear of death and excruciating pain (or maybe on top of that?) she experienced euphoria and oneness with the surrounding. Remski compared her experience to that of Geshe Michael Roach, who also seemed to have experienced out-of-body type euphoria through persistent meditation practice. A third case was Charles Buell Anderson who seemed to have some sort of "wireless connection to god". It seemed that he obtained spontaneous ecstasy and joy by "actively destroying left-brain logic and grammar". For all three of them, being boundary-less seemed euphoric, while coming back to the body appear to be of great suffering. Remski puts the three cases together and asks if these people actually temporarily achieved samadhi or made actual connections to a greater deity, either through an accidental stroke, or using rigorous mental exercises? Alternatively, is it possible that the rigorous meditation exercises served to dull (or even damage, similar to a stroke) the control of the logical left brain, allowing the right brain to go wild, in which case, these people became temporarily delusional rather than achieving enlightenment?

Awhile ago I read The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures by Nicolas Wade, which hypothesizes that spirituality is an evolved biological trait that helped bind society together. People who developed spiritual tendencies were more likely to believe that there's a greater purpose for living and were willing to stick together and work as a team. Those who were more willing to work as a group were more likely to survive than the nonspiritual loners and therefore the spirituality trait got passed on down the generations to today.

Remski calls for scientific research on this topic. Now I'm no neuroscientist, but it's possible to get experimental support for the case of left brain suppression. If we can can pinpoint the areas of the left brain that gets suppressed and areas of the right brain that gets activated consistently when advanced meditation experts experience euphoria, and can reproducibly induce samadhi in lay people, then it's strong support that spirituality is just the product of messing with the brain. I'm not saying the experiment is easy or clear-cut, and I have no idea if currently technology permits this kind of experiment to be done safely. I'm just saying the hypothesis is testable.

What does this have to do with us, practically? Well, um, if they prove that spirituality is just a by-product of the brain (not with a single experiment of course, contrary to what media likes to report with screaming headlines over "scientists' unanimous conclusion" based on one single scientific paper), but if a series of experiments exploring this issue support the point, then there's going to be major unrest in society. But don't worry; experimental results are never as expected. Experimental design is just as important as the results. Is my perceived samadhi same as your perceived samadhi? Does the brain state of hardcore praying to the Christian God look the same as hardcore Tibetan buddhist meditation, vs Zen Buddhist meditation, vs. Vipassana meditation for that matter? Should researchers focus on brain regions or types of brain waves generated? If the experimental design is flawed then the conclusions are not trustworthy. The experimental results are usually more baffling and introduce more questions than initially anticipated anyway. Then scientists have to struggle to come up with 100 theories to try to explain the findings, and then more studies go on for decades. I've learned the hard way that when one embarks on a scientific journey to hunt down an answer, one could spend the entire career coming up with more questions and never reaching the answer they initially seek even at retirement. I'm not sure if I have the persistence and tenacity to choose this career.

For me, yoga teachings helped me get deeper in touch with my body, and taught me to calm myself down with a few deep breaths whenever I experience anxiousness, as anxiety, anger, fear and all states of mind are impermanent. After a period of yoga I found I could work my anxiousness out of my body and manage to sit still for a period of time without fidgeting. So then I started meditating. Not that I can keep my mind still for more than a few breaths at a time, but I find myself craving to practice meditation more often. I also want to read up more about the other limbs of yoga, to figure out this spirituality thing. Instead of being able to focus and work on my tasks at hand, I just want to spend all of my time practicing more yoga, reading more about yoga, learning more meditation and pranyama techniques. All this because of how good I feel after yoga practices and meditation sessions. Is this any different from sugar addiction? It's not quite as severe as a heroin addiction, but it's an addiction that interferes with daily mundane tasks nevertheless.

Not all advanced meditation practitioners achieve a state like Michael Roach and Charles Buell Anderson. I'm not saying their meditation practice actually damaged their brains. It's a tough struggle to decide how much you want to fit in with the social norm and how much you want to say "the hell with it" and pursue an extreme path to happiness at the expense of people giving you odd looks or calling you coo-coo. It's easy to say we just want to achieve a "balance", but is your balance same as my balance? Why do we pursue anything that we do? They say the pursuit of happiness is what drives everyone to get out of bed in the morning. Sure, some people end up stuck in a job that they hate, in a relationship that's not working, with children that they have to feed by keeping their hated jobs, but initially, we all find a job in order to make us money which is supposed to allow us to buy stuff that will make us happy. We pursue romantic relationships because that's supposed to make us feel loved and whole (or fun and exciting), and we have children because kids are supposed to bring us joy. So when things don't turn out they way they're supposed to, the spiritual teachings remind us that everything is impermanent, be grateful with what we have, and don't base our happiness solely on trying to please other people, etc etc. These teachings on their own help make life bearable, but here you have two gurus who have obtained the psychic power to invoke euphoric states at will! Their spiritual teachings no doubt also help them to not get upset by conventional criticisms towards them.

Sorry for being long-winded again. Basically, should I keep on practicing meditation, pranyama, yoga, chanting and other spiritual activities that are no doubt strengthening the spiritual neuro-pathways in my right brain, knowing that these activities make me happy, at the expense of non-yogi friends distancing themselves from me? Or should I reduce the amount of spiritual pursuit (or happiness brain exercise, if spirituality doesn't actually exist), so I can better relate to my old-time weekend-alcoholic friends, couch-potato friends, iPhone-addict friends and fitness-fanatic friends (as Evelyn discussed in her recent blog post)? If I firmly believed in an Almighty God, and that my existence is to serve and honor God, then there's no question that the pursuit of spirituality trumps all other activities. The biggest problem I have with this way of thinking is that so many religious people swear by this, but they do not constantly inquire within themselves, seriously asking the question: "Would my beloved God really approve of my actions (start a war, condemn people who think differently from myself, etc)?" Oh man, I just realized I can write another post on the topic of human-to-God communication mechanism. I better stop here before I go on for another 10 pages.

Genes, Time, Immortality, and Consciousness

Deepak Chopra discusses genes and DNA with Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, Harvard neuroscientis/geneticist.



So I guess consciousness is encoded in the DNA too. Even though the body dies, the genetic message is passes on to the next generation with some recombinations from mom genes and dad genes. Human beings used to be short-lived and had children as soon as we were biologically able to do so. Now it seems like the more educated want less kids (if any) while those without the opportunity or desire to pursue a lot of schooling continue to have many children. Some people say that intelligence is being negatively selected. That doesn't really mean anything because the way it's going (hopefully), more education will become available to more people in the world, so in 30 years maybe university education will be free to everybody in the world. Also, super-smart parents don't necessarily always produce smarter kids (although if they have lots of children than the chances of some of them being super smart might be quite high).

I'm wondering if the DNA that drives some people to keep pursuing further education, to be obsessed with wellness (exercise, yoga, cleansing, life balance, meditation etc) have genes that are so selfish they just want to keep improving themselves and live on forever rather than recombine into the next generation? What I mean is, raising children takes time away from continuous improvement and education of the parent, so these people have lower desire to have kids?

What I'm speculating is totally unscientific (ie. no supporting evidence). I'm just curious because I find it fascinating that I have all these weird thoughts while a lot of people I know just ponder about what they're going to do the next day. If I can have less of these weird thoughts, I might be more productive at work. I do find some yogis with fascinating thoughts too though, and that makes me happy I'm not the only weirdo out there :) I really celebrate those who think differently from the norm.

What is consciousness?

A conversation topic came up at dinner with geeky science colleagues about a future of uploading human consciousness to a computer or a robot body as a way of living forever. I guess non-yogis and non-dancers -- basically people who are not intimately in touch with their limbs -- still think of their bodies as a vessel that serves to transport the brain from place to place. They think of the organic flesh and blood as a burden and would happily replace them with robotic body parts instead, thinking they will serve as enhancements, allowing them to move faster and better (I am not sure if athletes are willing to take enhanced robotic limbs if it'll improve their performance. I suspect some might).

So, what exactly is consciousness? Can it be separated from the neurons and get "uploaded" into a machine? Before I started yoga I did a variety of sports and exercises for the purpose of health, ie. if I don't exercise regularly then fat will accumulate in my blood vessels; my body will get stiffer and I'll easily injure myself doing simple every-day life activities (eg. carrying grocery, catching a bus, trying to reach something from a high shelf, etc). I guess if physical health is the only reason that we exercise, then replacing our aging flesh and bones with robust machine parts can indeed be a viable option.

But wait a minute, even assuming consciousness can be separated from the body, would my consciousness want to live in a machine? We've evolved to derive pleasure from eating and the human touch. I suppose one can implement artificial tongue and skin (and even the equivalent of sexual sensory organs if you will) on the robot so that pleasure can be maintained, but would life still be the same? Now, as yogis, we have learned to savor the sensations from the inner parts of our body as well: the expansion and of the lungs as we inhale; breath leaving the nostril as we exhale; we have learned to use rhythmic breathing to calm our anxiety and the busyness of our thoughts. Transporting our consciousness to a machine solves the problem of aging bodies, but how does it deal with our messy consciousness and subconsciousness?

I suppose if we can pull consciousness out of the brain, it should also possible to sort out our thoughts before we upload it to a machine. But what would a sorted mind look like conceptually? Would it be like a file cabinet where each thought has been given a label and sorted alphabetically (and by color, by size, plus some other classification scheme)?  Are emotions part of our consciousness? If we remove all of our emotions and feelings would we think more clearly? Would that still be considered as living?

Maybe I've gotten less imaginative, or maybe I'm too caught up on the details, but I can't imagine a good life living inside a machine. I guess if I became quadriplegic then I wouldn't mind getting replacement limbs that my brain can control again. However I'm not sure what total body replacement will "feel" like (am I too attached to my central nervous system and my breath now that I've become a yogi?). The technology of an artificial heart is already available, which means that some people are currently walking around with a machine controlling their blood flow, ie. they live without heart beats. That's such a strange concept to me!

I think people who think that uploading their consciousness to a robot, or even the internet is an appealing idea to extend life may not be intimately in touch with their bodies (which tend to be true for intellectuals and those who are happy with desk jobs as a career). But then again, I am not 80 years old with a broken hip. However, by the time one reaches 80, it's not just the body that deteriorates; the mind deteriorates too, as a result of agin neurons. So, if we want to transfer our consciousness to a medium that's more superior than our organic flesh, is it best to do it when we're in our 20s? But that's when our bodies are at their prime. So... this would be an option only for the handicapped and people who hate exercising and doing sports? Too many streams of thoughts going on in my mind right now.

What are your thoughts on the concept of consciousness? If you can somehow pull it out of your brain and transfer it somewhere else (or into someone else), would you do it?