It’s really fascinating to observe how two people can have two very different views of the same third party. The human mind is very good at being selective by focusing on some things and ignoring others. Two letters about Obama in today’s New York Times are a good illustration of that.

The immediate cause of the letters was David Brooks saying that Obama’s accomplishments lie in the future. He’s a conservative, and Obama’s a liberal, so of course this was not meant as a compliment about Obama’s potential, but as a criticism of Obama’s alleged lack of accomplishments in the past.

One writer responded as follows (I’ve changed the format for the sake of clarity, but the words are unchanged):

Mr. Obama’s accomplishments include

• overcoming the challenges of growing up with a single mother
• on a small income,
• heading The Harvard Law Review,
• doing community organizing instead of taking a lucrative job,
• writing two best sellers at a young age (before running for president)
• and inspiring an apathetic, disaffected generation not only to vote but also to truly feel part of the democratic process.

Of course one could have added that he became a law professor, beat an extraordinary field of Democratic candidates for president, became a member of the Illinois State Senate, sponsored 233 health care and health bills, 125 poverty and public assistance bills, and 112 crimes, corrections, and death penalty bills — to name but a few — and did all this despite being black in a country where skin color can be a major impediment to progress. But letters have to be kept short, I guess.

To any unbiased person, I would have thought that the son of an immigrant achieving all this in the face of financial and cultural handicaps is the epitome of the American Dream. But bias is a powerful thing. A second writer ignores, is unaware of, or simply doesn’t care about those accomplishments, and writes:

As did his wife, Michelle, Senator Obama tried to take an otherwise ordinary life and turn it into something exceptional. Does Senator Obama’s going to college, getting married, raising a family and, generally, reaching the age of 47 really represent an outstanding accomplishment? I think not.

Being the first black major-party nominee for president is Senator Obama’s only real accomplishment.

According to this writer, Senator Obama has done little but grow up and be a normal adult. He’s had an “ordinary life.” Oh, and got nominated as president, which is at least a “real accomplishment.” But the rest simply didn’t happen or doesn’t matter. If you’re a certain kind of Republican.

It’s a difficult practice, and one not much encouraged in these partisan times, to praise one’s opponents. It’s not something I do much myself, and that I should do more. I know I’m at least capable of it. But it’s astonishing to me that someone would go so far in dismissing real accomplishments in what I could only call an extraordinary life.

This morning in meditation I had the following passage from the Anguttara Nikaya in mind:

And what is the development of concentration that, when developed & pursued, leads to the attainment of knowledge & vision? There is the case where a monk attends to the perception of light and is resolved on the perception of daytime [at any hour of the day]. Day [for him] is the same as night, night is the same as day. By means of an awareness open & unhampered, he develops a brightened mind. This is the development of concentration that, when developed & pursued, leads to the attainment of knowledge & vision.

Basically I was working in keeping in touch with the sense of light within the mind. It’s a fairly simple practice and also enjoyable. It does seem to me that the mind is internally illuminated, and that when I pay attention to that sense of illumination there’s a decrease in the amount of mental activity, but perhaps more importantly my relationship to that mental activity changes so that I’m less caught up in it. My relationship to the mind also changes. It seems to me that the mind is generally taken for granted. It’s like we’re busy looking at things on a projector screen, and not noticing the screen itself, not to mention the projector. When I start to notice that there is a mental screen and that the images on it are coming from an inner projector I realize that my experience is an internally-generated movie and I’m therefore less caught up in it. There’s a loss of the delusion that the movie is reality.

This isn’t a new approach to meditation for me, but one that I’ve let slip for a while as I’ve been dealing with getting my mental affairs in order after a busy summer with a reduced meditation schedule and more external “stuff” to process. It seems like it’s now time o look at the bigger picture — or to look beyond the picture at the projector and screen.

I highly recommend this 1996 Psychology Today article by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the topic of the creative personality, in which he identifies “10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.”

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.
2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.
4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.
5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted. We’re usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show.
6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.
7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.
8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.
9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.
10. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.

This is an article that bears repeated reading, especially for those pursuing a spiritual path — something that I regard as being an inherently creative field of endeavor.

So my teaching at UNH has finished, final evaluations are in, the last meeting has been held.

Yesterday I listened to one of the CDs I recorded with Sounds True in Colorado a few weeks ago. It’s called “Still the Mind” and it’s part of a two-CD set. The one I listened to yesterday is a “lecture” on meditation; the second one (which I guess I’ll receive soon) is guided meditations. That set comes out in January, I believe.

There’s another 2 CD set coming out later, called “The Wisdom of the Breath,” which deals with bringing insight meditation perspectives into the mindfulness of breathing.

Sounds True are also interested in having me write a book based on the Six Element Practice, and that’s my project for the next two to three months: not the book itself, but writing an outline and a sample chapter or two. I’ve been thinking about the project a lot over the summer, and I’m very excited about getting started at last. I have to pass on a few office tasks in order to free myself up, but by the end of next week my research and writing should be in full swing. I have a working title for the book, but I’m sitting on that for now. It wouldn’t seem right to announce a working title until I’ve bounced it around with a few of the Sounds True people.

Incidentally, the folks at Sounds True are all delightful to work with — very friendly and incredibly competent.

Fascinating article: How magicians control your mind

Magic isn’t just a bag of tricks - it’s a finely-tuned technology for shaping what we see.

I have a strong interest in understanding the mind as an evolved, organic computer — a computer made of meat, if you will. Part of the recent course I taught at UNH involved highlighting to my students the deficiencies of the mind’s ability to pay attention. The purpose of the course was to help students become better students, and one of the perennial problems that students face is how to pay attention. So the real problem is, how do we control our own minds?

Without the ability to pay sustained attention we’re like Gary Larson’s dog who hears his owner saying “blah blah blah Ginger blah blah blah blah blah Ginger blah blah.” Except that it’s more like “DNA is blah blah chemical blah blah blah blah genetic code blah blah blah cells blah blah blah blah nucleus.”

The Boston Globe article mentions a couple of studies I touched on in class, including one where half-way through a conversation the person we’re talking to is replaced by someone else and another where people focused on a basketball game fail to notice a woman in a gorilla suit walk across the court. In class we watched “The Amazing Colour-Changing Card Trick,” which is worth checking out.

As well as exploring the mind’s problems with paying attention, we also worked on strengthening our powers of attentiveness by practicing meditation. I don’t think it was entirely because of the meditation, but one student went from being so inattentive and lacking in executive control that it seemed every thought he had would express itself in words, no matter how appropriate the circumstances, to by the end of the course helping to bring other students back to the topic of discussion when their minds wandered.

These students have far more to contend with in terms of learning to focus than I did when I was their age. When they’re doing homework (say writing a paper on a computer) they’re juggling incoming IM, text messages, TV, emails, etc. By constantly shifting their attention they’ve actually lost the ability to pay sustained attention, especially when listening to a lecture or when trying to read.

I wonder how seriously they’ll take my advice on avoiding multitasking? Or perhaps more appropriately, given the addictive mature of multitasking I wonder if they’ll be able to act on my advice?

Interesting little article on Slate: Is it better for the environment to drink cow’s milk or soy milk? by Jacob Leibenluft

it takes about 14 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of milk protein on a conventional farm …

By comparison, Pimentel’s data suggest that it takes about 0.26 calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of organic soybeans

I’m really struggling with my resistance to being vegan these days. Someone described biofuels (at least the ones that use food crops) as a crime against humanity because the food could be used to, well, feed people. The same is therefore true of dairy and meat. Eating animals is a crime against humanity in a world that doesn’t have enough food. And yet I still find myself craving and eating dairy products, even though on a certain level I find them rather gross.

Part of the problem is eating out. It’s easy to be vegetarian eating in a restaurant, but much more difficult to be vegan — especially once you get out of major towns (at least in my corner of the US).

Another part of the problem is the label-scouring that you get into if you’re serious about being vegan. If a cookie has a trace of milk powder it’s immediately outside the pale, although practically speaking the eating of that cookie (with its half gram of milk powder) is leading to an almost immeasurably small contribution to the suffering of animals.

So what that boils down to, I suppose, is the problem of being attached to labels. I tend to think that if I can’t be completely, 100%, utterly, totally, wholeheartedly vegan, then it’s not worth doing at all. I think I’m actually more attached to the purity of labels than I am to dairy products, which I know from experience I can do without quite easily. So perhaps I should just embrace being a half-assed vegan who sometimes eats suspect cookies and who may occasionally accept pizza from his father-in-law, who hasn’t been known to cook anything else in the years I’ve known him.

As Chesterton said, “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”

It’s not often I discover a website where I want to systematically read all the articles. Today I found one. It’s We’re Only Human and it’s a psychology blog by Wray Herbert.

Here’s a great sample that’s of direct relevance to mindfulness and meditation:

Those with overall greater cognitive control–the ones who monitored themselves closely and adjusted efficiently–were also the ones who were best at handling stress … the ones who spotted and corrected errors in their own mental performance were in general more calm and relaxed, even with college life’s predictable stresses. The ones who did not inventory and learn from their mistakes were beaten down by life’s pressures.

Maggie Jackson has written a book (Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age) about the calamity of us being a world of information workers who are constantly interrupted and therefore are unable to think: Shifting Careers - Fighting a Workplace War Against Distraction - NYTimes.com

What’s needed is a renaissance of attention — a revaluing and cultivating of the art of attention, to help us achieve depth of thought and relations in this complex, high-tech time.

The first step is to learn to speak a language of attention. The exciting news is that the enigma of attention has just begun to be mapped, tracked and decoded by neuroscientists who now consider attention to be a trio of skills: focus, awareness and so-called executive attention. Think of it this way: You can be “aware” that you’re in a beautiful garden and then you can “focus” on an individual flower. The last piece, “executive attention,” is the ability to plan and make decisions.

This is territory familiar to Buddhist practitioners:

Awareness = sati (mindfulness: a general awareness of our experience)

Focus = ekegata (one-pointedness: selecting one thing from our awareness and paying attention to it in a focused way)

Executive attention = sampajañña (continuity of purpose, mindfulness of where we’ve been, where we’re going, and what we need to do to get there)

Although arguably that third one could be appamada. The Buddha’s last words were appamadena sampadetha — with mindfulness, strive. The particular quality of appamada that sets it apart from other aspects of mindfulness is its readiness to act. It’s sometimes translated as “diligence” and it’s said that we should pick up our mindfulness (by means of appamada) as swiftly as a warrior would pick up a dropped sword on a battlefield.

I’ve ordered the book!

For years, psychotherapists have worked to relieve suffering by reframing the content of patients’ thoughts, directly altering behavior or helping people gain insight into the subconscious sources of their despair and anxiety. The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process — and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach. “The interest in this has just taken off,” said Zindel Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where the above group therapy session was taped. “And I think a big part of it is that more and more therapists are practicing some form of contemplation themselves and want to bring that into therapy.”

(Mindfulness Meditation, Based on Buddha’s Teachings, Gains Ground With Therapists - NYTimes.com)

This is a good overview of the history and current state of mindfulness in therapeutic practice. It gives a fair showing both to the proponents of mindfulness as part of therapy and to those who are skeptical.

Yesterday and today I meditated with a friend who lives a couple of thousand miles away in Spokane, Washington. We both used our computers to log on to Skype, a free service that allows you to talk with other people (and even see them). My computer was set up on a coffee table, with the built-in webcam pointing at the area where I meditate. Priyamitra was likewise sitting in front of his computer. I could see him in full-screen, and he could see me the same way.

We did a little chanting together, and then I rang a bell and we meditated for 40 minutes.

I find it to be very supportive when I sit with other people. My sits are calmer, my mind is more settled, I’m less inclined to restlessness, and the time goes by faster.

I’m very appreciative that I can do this! Just a few years ago the idea of having a full-screen image of a friend meditating 2,000 miles away would have seemed like science fiction.

I’ve been looking into the possibility of having group videoconferencing that would allow a few of us to meet and discuss our practice or to study together, but so far that’s still in the Sci-Fi realms, unless you’re prepared to spend a lot of money. At the moment Skype only enables you to videoconference with one other person, but hopefully they’ll add that facility soon.

Here’s an interesting account of someone trying to step back from being online, in touch, and on call 27/7.

There are interesting lessons here for many people, including some meditators. It’s increasingly common these days for people to take laptops and cell phones on retreats. When I was a lad (even just ten years ago) it just wasn’t acceptable (not seen as necessary) for people to make phone calls when on retreat. Phones were definitely for emergencies. But now you get people disappearing “behind the bikeshed” in order to have chats or even to do work.

And as for laptops, although I’ve never taken one on a retreat I’ve been on as a retreatant, I have taken one when I’ve been teaching. In fact that seems to be pretty much standard these days — so many of our notes are in electronic form — but I think that more retreatants are taking their notebooks with them, which is a huge shame. Sometimes people are even checking email!

Making phone calls and being online on a retreat are just totally the opposite of what’s meant to be going on, which is an abandonment of the normal “opiates” of busyness and discursiveness that we use to keep from experiencing ourselves more deeply. But it’s getting harder and harder to convince people that it’s even possible to disconnect for a week or weekend. The same unacknowledged and untreated anxiety that drives them to be in touch 24/7 makes them think that something bad — something really, really bad — is going to happen if they’re out of contact.

There’s a level of magical thinking in there, of course, which takes the form of thinking that being in touch continually through electronic devices is going to keep everything all right. It’s certainly nothing quite as rational as “if my mother falls and breaks her hip I can drop everything and go to help her” because that could be achieved just as easily by giving the phone number of the retreat center as an emergency contact. The thinking seems to be more an unconscious assumption that the world will somehow run more smoothly if we’re in contact with it. In other words it’s egotism — the sense that we are so important to the running of the world that it can’t get by without us. It’s that egotism that gets fed by taking cellphones and laptops on retreat, and that’s why we need to unplug once in a while and just experience ourselves.

A friend just reminded me about these two articles from a few years back:

Does E-mail Make You Dumber?: If you feel like a zombie at work, perhaps you’re suffering from infomania, the term the Hewlett-Packard affiliate in Britain coined for people addicted to e-mail, instant messaging, and text messages.

Infomania’ worse than marijuana: Workers distracted by email and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers, new research has claimed.

A curious thing. The pilot and writer, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, said:

No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.

To live is to be slowly born.

It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls!

And yet it’s more common to find the quote mangled, so that the first two sentences read:

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.

“A single event…” is found in 780 results in Google.
“No single event…” is found in 135.

(The third sentence is invariably omitted).

The original suggests that change in ourselves comes about slowly. We are “slowly born” because no one event can awaken a completely new us, although that, by implication, can happen given enough time.

The mangled version puts more emphasis on the individual changes of which Saint Exupéry was so skeptical. And yet it too suggests that we are “slowly born.”

When I first compared the two versions side by side I thought that the difference was simply a discussion of gradualism, with the original seeming to suggest that the individual events of our lives are not in themselves significant, and yet they mount up to the point where a stranger previously unknown to us is awakened within us, while the mangled version is saying that, yes, those small changes are significant precisely because they awaken, even if just by a small degree, that stranger, that new us.

But then I realized that my reading of the mangled version was mangling my reading of the original! The correct version is not talking about a succession of small changes amounting to a large change overall, but that large, sudden awakenings do happen, but that there is no one thing that happens to us that causes this. There may be one apparent trigger for the sudden awakening of a new us, but that awakening is the end result of a long and gradual path of preparation.

The mangled version says that awakening is gradual; the original version says that awakening is sudden, but arises because of gradual changes.

Added later:

Another curiosity is that when looking for the French original I discovered that while English-language sites invariably quote only the first two sentences:

A/No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born

The vast majority of French sites quote only the last two:

Vivre, c’est naître lentement. Il serait un peu trop aisé d’emprunter des âmes toutes faites ! (To live is to be slowly born. It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls!

And the quote comes from de Saint Exupéry’s book Flight to Arras (Pilote de Guerre).

The mangled quote appears to have been published in several books, which gives an idea of how well modern publishers check their facts. To their credit my own publisher, Windhorse, insist on tracking down a source for every quotation. This had me at times stuck in my local library until late at night, trying to find exactly where in a book a quotation was, and that was sometimes after I had spent many hours trying to find which book the quotation was in, and whether it had even been correctly attributed in the first place. The world of online quotations is basically a giant system of plagiarism, with each quotations site copying material wholesale from the others. Under this system misinformation propagates with unstoppable momentum. So much for the wisdom of crowds!

Added even later: After a bit more searching I found all three sentences in French:

Aucune circonstance ne réveille en nous un étranger dont nous n’aurions rien soupçonné. Vivre, c’est naître lentement. Il serait un peu trop aisé d’emprunter des âmes toutes faites !

plus the passage immediately following them in the book:

Une illumination soudaine semble parfois faire bifurquer une destinée. Mais l’illumination n’est que la vision soudaine, par l’Esprit, d’une route longuement préparée. J’ai appris lentement la grammaire. On m’a exercé à la syntaxe. On a éveillé mes sentiments. Et voilà brusquement qu’un poème me frappe au cœur.

I’d highly recommend Stanley Fish’s column, All You Need is Hate, in today’s New York Times, in which he discusses the prevalence of “Hillary-hating.” This is something I’d been thinking about recently on my visits to Digg.com, where in the comments on almost any story about Hillary Clinton you’ll see the most vituperative and unhinged criticism you can imagine. This ranges from accusations that the Clinton presidency was constructed on the basis of political assassination (real, not metaphorical) to Hillary being equated with Hitler.

On the conservative side much of the criticism of president Bush is labeled as “Bush-hating” but one rarely hears of “Clinton-hating.” The other day I found that on Google there were 142,000 results for “Bush-haters” and only 34,300 for “Clinton-haters.”

Hatred against the Clintons seems to be much more acceptable, and therefore less visible. I suspect that many of the Clinton-haters (and no doubt Bush-haters as well) have no idea that they’re indulging in hatred. They actually believe that their enemy is as bad as they think. Fish does a good job of highlighting the sometimes absurd and often unhinged ways in which Clinton-hatred shows itself.

For the record, I experience a visceral disgust when I see president Bush. There was once an issue of Newsweek (which I used to subscribe to) which had his face on the cover. Both my wife and I had to keep that issue face down on the coffee table. But disgust is not hatred. And my distaste for the man was based on a revulsion for his policies, which I find vile, as well as his mendacity, which I find detestable. Some people would of course call this “Bush-hating” but since I don’t wish the man any harm I don’t think of myself as a Bush-hater.

Last week I posted a couple of articles on the Wildmind blog.

One was a discussion of a quotation from Muhammad Ali: “Children make you want to start life over.”

The other was a review of an excellent book about teaching meditation to pre-school children.

I also put a fair bit of work into editing Steve Bell’s reflections about parenting and his children’s role as “gurus” helping him to identify what he has to work on.

Part of our household practice is not having a television set. This prevents us (especially me) from mindlessly channel-hopping and watching trashy TV just because it’s on. We do watch DVDs and often buy boxed sets of TV shows, and this helps keep our TV watching in the realms of intentionality. It drives me crazy when I visit someone and they have the TV on all the time. I feel like my brain’s going to rip in two because of my attention being split.

One of the other advantages of watching only DVDs is that we’re not exposed to television advertising!

We just finished watching Season Three of Lost. In fact we watched the two hour finale twice. And tonight we’re doing something unusual — going round to my father-in-law’s place to watch the first episode of Season Four of Lost, at the same time as the rest of the world.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the story unfold. Being exposed to 30 minutes of advertising in a two hour period, less so.

While we’re at it, if you’re a Lost fan you may appreciate this Cracked.com article on “Five Questions Lost Writers Need to Answer and Why They Won’t.” I enjoyed it. My wife didn’t. It’s a wee bit cruel and sarcastic, so I guess that says something about our respective personalities!

Remember that slogan from Microsoft in the 1990’s? I think it was for Windows 95, that much-delayed operating system that seemed in danger of becoming Windows 96. The slogan came up in the context of an excellent article on multitasking. Here’s a quasi-Buddhist extract about “Where to you want to go today?”

…consider that “Where do you want to go today?” was really manipulative advice, not an open question. “Go somewhere now,” it strongly recommended, then go somewhere else tomorrow, but always go, go, go—and with our help. But did any rebel reply, “Nowhere. I like it fine right here”?

And that’s the problem with technolust: it taps into a deep restlessness that is driven by a longing for completeness and connection, yet the objects of our longing can never ultimately take us to those goals. Completeness and connection start by being right here, right now. It’s when we learn to like “here and now” that we find ourselves losing our technolust and finding our happiness.

Continuing on the theme of clearing my desk and clearing my mind, I’m continuing to work on getting more organized. This strikes some people who know me as ridiculous because they see me as being already very organized, and compared to the average person I probably am. But I’m aware that there are some glaring weak spots in my ability to deal with bits of paper, and as I go through the heap of papers that has filled my desk’s in-tray I feel rather embarrassed. The most egregious oversights that have come to light are:

• A check from 2006 that never got deposited.
• A letter from 2006 that never even got opened.
• A folder titled “for immediate action” that contained the above-mentioned articles

What I’ve been doing is processing the heap. Well, actually, first I discovered that I had several heaps, and so I collected those all together. Then I started processing. Some stuff in the heap was simply shredded because it was junk. Some was filed in my filing cabinet because it was long-term material that simply hadn’t been returned there or had never been put in hanging folders for storage. Quite a lot of the stuff needed some kind of intermediate holding because it consists of things I want to action later. That’s the stuff that’s always caused me trouble.

So here’s what I’ve been doing.

1. I take the stuff that needs to be acted upon (e.g. an application form for a local business organization).
2. I take a manila folder.
3. I take a new hand-held label printer (A Brother PT-1010 if you’re interested) and create a nice neat label (”Newmarket Business Association”), which then gets applied to the said folder.
4. The folder gets filed alphabetically in a hanging file box that sits next to my desk.
5. I go to my organizational program (OmniFocus) and enter a task for that material (”Complete and mail application for Newmarket Business Association”).
6. And then I add the exact same text as was on the label at the end of the task, which now reads “Complete and mail application for Newmarket Business Association - “NEWMARKET BUSINESS ASSOCIATION.”
7. If necessary I date the task, but sometimes I’m not doing that since I don’t want to over-plan.

Ta-da!

Anyway, thanks to my hanging file box, the alphabetical filing system, the labels, and the fact that the task listing now tells me exactly where to look to find the actionable materials I no longer have to store stuff in my in tray.

My in tray is now close to empty. It’ll maybe take another hour to process the remaining stuff that’s in there.

In future my in tray will not be a depository for stuff I want to remember to do, but will be a genuine in tray — a kind of entrance hall for my office. Anything lifted from my in tray will be processed, filed if necessary (some will be shredded and recycled), and a task created (again only if necessary).

I think I’m finally getting the hang of dealing with paper.

Having a desk which is free from paper is good for my mind. Knowing that I’m unlikely to lose a task is good for my mind. I feel mentally cleaner already. Really, this is an important mindfulness practice.

I’m still using the emwave device while I meditate, in an experiment to see whether or not it’s helpful.

One hitch was that I thought the thing had died on me. The display would light up when I switched it on, and then the top LED would glow red and the rest of the display would fade out. I tried recharging it but that didn’t help. Maybe a dodgy battery, I thought, so I contacted HeartMath’s tech-support. At the end of the day I had a call from a really pleasant and helpful guy who figured out that I’d inadvertently set the device to “advanced mode” and “stealth mode.” Didn’t know it had a stealth mode. He guessed this straight away, and I got the impression he’d seen this a lot.

One problem with the emwave, as I mentioned in my last post on the topic, is that it tries to use one button and one display to control or show many different functions. Honestly, after two weeks I’ve had to have the manual with me every time I use it. It’s that complexity-to-the-point-of-unusability that made me think it was broken. Anyway, it’s “fixed” now.

I moved up from level two to level three. On level two I could keep the display in the green (”very coherent”) for at least 90% of the time. Okay, let’s move it on, I thought. On level three I found, first time around, that I was in the red (”low coherence”) for 90% of the time. The rest of the meditation I was in the blue (medium) zone. There was no hint of green to be seen. The shame!

A strong factor for pushing me into the blue was visualization. Another was metta (lovingkindness). The two of those together were able to get my coherence levels up. (Listen to me, I don’t even know if coherence is a real phenomenon!).

Anyway, this is an interesting challenge. I tend to think that since I’ve been meditating for years this should all be a skoosh, but apparently not. Of course I’m a new father, frequently sleep-deprived, and for much of last year my meditation practice was non-existent, so maybe I’m just not back in the groove yet. But if that was level three, what the heck would level four be like?

More later.