Contemplation: The Mind in the Yoga Sutras – 2
[Exploring Life] The Five States of Mind: Pantanjali (2nd century B.C.) is a pioneer of the mind. The uncharted terrain he ventured into was the inner landscape of the mind. His method was the direct observation of his own mind. In this sense, Pantanjali was both scientist and artist of the inner realm of existence. [...]
Emotional Terrain: Anger
[Exploring Life] Anger is a strong emotional reaction in response to a perceived provocation or injustice. The emotional reaction consists of an often unintended improvisatory abyss of displeasure, irritation, resentment, outrage, and enmity. Anger is an extreme reaction that takes our body and mind to the very edge of a threshold in which rationale thinking [...]
Ecopsychology: Release from Spiritual Confinement
[Exploring Life] Ecopsychology embraces three vital concepts, relationship, interaction, and belonging. Psychology has had an incestuous history, one in which it constantly looked for solutions to the problems it was responsible for creating in the first place. In this sense, psychology created its own market by infecting people with false assumptions about behaviour, emotions, and [...]
Memory: The Revival of Experience
[Exploring Life] What is the nature of our memory? We often associate memory with an ability to remember, recollect, recall, or revive, a mental impression that refers to a past experience. The prefix “re” means again and again and therefore repetition; we associate repetition with memory in the sense that we can recall an experience [...]
Mental Degradation: Multitasking and the Inner Athelete
[Exploring Life] In Mental Degradation: Multitasking I explored the possibility that multitasking, or the ability to simultaneously process tasks, is a delusion. What really happens in the brain is a rapid shifting of attention between a series of tasks that creates the illusion of simultaneity. This constant shifting of attention is also the basis for [...]
Mental Degradation: Caffeinated or Decaffeinated Learning?
Caffeine is an addictive substance that produces stimulative effects in the body and mind. Caffeine simultaneously affects our body and mind and therefore influences how we think, feel and act. If we developed a diet based on the principle of do no harm to body or mind, then caffeine would be eliminated. If we developed [...]
Mental Clarity: Attention Training
[Exploring Life]In How To Get Unstuck From (almost) Anything, Joseph Cardillo provides six learning strategies designed to help us break out of confining patterns of thought and behavior through the art of being new, a phrase that originates in core martial arts training. Joseph is an expert martial arts practitioner and the author of three [...]