One of the classic types of wisdom that reappears in teh human culture streams over and over around the planet is stoicism, in some variation or another. [...]]]> I have a saying, kind of a principle, that goes like this, with a few minor variations. “Don’t seek enlightenment, enlightenment will take care of itself. Seek wisdom.”.

One of the classic types of wisdom that reappears in teh human culture streams over and over around the planet is stoicism, in some variation or another. Not under that name, as we know it in our culture stream, a name taken from the ancient greeks. But, as a system of principles.

The kind of mental training you do to explore your own consciousness and ‘seek enlightenment’ can end up producing a range of different kinds of minds and personal philosophies. One of these, a fairly common place to ‘end up’, is somthing I think of as ecstatic stoicism – a complete accepting of things as they are, without emotional fixations that they should be one way or another, combined with a tendency fot the way things are to induce spasms of bliss, because the way things are is so freekin amazing.

So I’m always interested in references to stoicism, and it blisses me out that stoicism is becoming more popular.

Avi: Why are spiritual exercises important in Stoicism?

William: Seneca, a famous ancient Stoic, wrote that a Stoic must, at the end of each day, reflect on every decision and action he performed that day. He must scrutinize his deeds, one by one, and evaluate whether they were done well or poorly. Thus, Stoics are very serious about training themselves to apply their (Stoic) judgments about what is good (virtue), what is bad (wickedness), and what is neither (everything else) to their daily living. This intensive spiritual exercise, or introspective meditation, is vital for making progress in the art of living the good life as a Stoic. Studying the ideas, theories, and arguments in Stoicism is easy enough.  Applying Stoic judgments to every single decision, action, and reaction to events around us is very difficult. It requires great discipline and years of rigorous practice to apply Stoicism to all our beliefs, value judgments, decisions, intentions, and actions.

Interview with a Stoic: William O Stevens – from boingboing.com

Qaabalah is the fusion product of the mixing of european hermeticism and memory theatre technology with the bits and pieces of kabbalistic teachings that started to move thru the european noosphere and culturesphere as a result of the religions turmoil that first allowed islam and judaism [...]]]> I personally am more interested in qabalah than kabbalah.

Qaabalah is the fusion product of the mixing of european hermeticism and memory theatre technology with the bits and pieces of kabbalistic teachings that started to move thru the european noosphere and culturesphere as a result of the religions turmoil that first allowed islam and judaism into europe in medeival times, then attempted to suppress it and drive it out at the end of the medeival period.

To simply the comparison – qabalah (or cabala) is essentially a form of christianized hermeticism, while kabbalah is a stream of schools of jewish mysticism and magic. They both use some common elements, but they use them differently.

I practiced qabalah quite intensively, and in a miniaturized form it still forms part of my tool kit. At this stage in my work I am most interested in qabalah’s effects on memory and intelligence – I have said, qabalah improves memory, and since an improved memory is an essential part of increased intelligence, it can also be said that qabalah as a training method can increase intelligence. Qabalah training also does something else that GREATLY increases intelligenece – and that is, certain training methods greatly increase visual thinking and the capacity for visual thinking, and visual thinking is one of the most powerful tools I’ve found to enhance intelligence and creativity.

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Anyway – The Kabbalah Center, a rather famed school for the jewish mysticism and magic branch of this stream of esoteric material and content, is in the news these days.

Couple’s success spreading kabbalah yields to discord, tax probe

Karen began to study kabbalah seriously. They argued over what to do with
Philip’s spiritual knowledge. She suggested teaching kabbalah to anyone who
wanted to learn about it, including women and those without yeshiva training.
Philip acquiesced, and in so doing elevated Karen to a status well above a
rabbi’s wife. In the eyes of followers, Karen became Philip’s peer: He had the
education, she had the nerve.

In the eyes of followers, Karen became Philip’s peer:
He had the education, she had the nerve.

“What Karen Berg has done is what no man in history has done,” said Phillips,
the family friend. “Never have the words ‘kabbalah’ and ‘Zohar’ been known
outside the small circle of kabbalists.”

The Bergs advertised introductory classes; the cost was about “the price of a
falafel,” one former member recalled. The New Age seekers, retirees and others
drawn to the courses in Tel Aviv were from secular homes and knew little about
their Jewish heritage.

“We loved that we found mysticism in our own backyard, in Judaism. The
teacher spoke of things that very much resonated with us…. There was no
pressure to be observant,” said one longtime member who became disillusioned and
left the center after two decades. The former member, who continues to practice
kabbalah’s philosophy of helping others, asked not to be named because relatives
are still involved.

Philip held himself out as the spiritual successor to Brandwein and used the
name of a kabbalah yeshiva founded in Jerusalem in 1922. But Brandwein’s heirs,
who were running the yeshiva at the time, publicly disavowed any connection to
Berg.

Philip had fewer than two dozen regular students in 1977 when Langford
enrolled. Langford said he was captivated by the rabbi’s teachings: “Everything
we did felt so important. The future of spirituality was dependent on us.”

The Bergs spoke constantly of expanding and in published materials sometimes
exaggerated the size of the organization, he said. “There was a joke that
anywhere he had sneezed he would say there was a branch there,” Langford
said.

In the classroom, Philip, known as the rav, or rabbi, was beloved for his
clear explanations of lofty concepts such as shame and mercy. At home, his
conversations with Karen often concerned less spiritual topics.

“She was always talking about money and the need to have it,” Langford said.
Karen wanted a big house and her husband agreed, saying it could attract new
students, he said.

“He could see in her no evil. He could see in her no wrong,” recalled
Langford, who was the first student promoted to teacher. He is now a glass
artist in Israel and said he still studies kabbalah.

In the early 1980s, the Bergs returned to the U.S.

“He came to me and said that if he wants to make it big time, it can’t be
done in Israel,” Langford said.

Here’s an article about this phenomenon, suggesting the the brain speeds up in times of crisis – presumably triggered by some combination of [...]]]> Anyone studying brain and mind is likely to have noticed that certain things can change the speed and intensity of perception, and change the way memories of events are created and stored.

Here’s an article about this phenomenon, suggesting the the brain speeds up in times of crisis – presumably triggered by some combination of neurochemicals – to produce the “my life flashed before my eyes” and other slow motion effects of perception. The one experiment performed suggests it’s primarily a memory effect, that it is subjective not objective (primarily? or completely? further experiments needed).

Why A Brush With Death Triggers The Slow-Mo Effect

But, after a little searching, David discovered something called SCAD diving. (SCAD stands for Suspended Catch Air Device.) It’s like bungee jumping without the bungee. Imagine being dangled by a cable about 150 feet off the ground, facing up to the sky. Then, with a little metallic click, the cable is released and you plummet backward through the air, landing in a net (hopefully) about 3 seconds later.

SCAD diving was just what David needed — it was definitely terrifying. But he also needed a way to judge whether his subjects’ brains really did go into turbo mode. So, he outfitted everybody with a small electronic device, called a perceptual chronometer, which is basically a clunky wristwatch. It flashes numbers just a little too fast to see. Under normal conditions — standing around on the ground, say — the numbers are just a blur. But David figured, if his subjects’ brains were in turbo mode, they would be able to read the numbers.

The Time Blur

The falling experience was, just as David had hoped, enough to freak out all of his subjects. “We asked everyone how scary it was, on a scale from 1 to 10,” he reports, “and everyone said 10.” And all of the subjects reported a slow-motion effect while falling: they consistently over-estimated the time it took to fall. The numbers on the perceptual chronometer? They remained an unreadable blur.

“Turns out, when you’re falling you don’t actually see in slow motion. It’s not equivalent to the way a slow-motion camera would work,” David says. “It’s something more interesting than that.”

According to David, it’s all about memory, not turbo perception. “Normally, our memories are like sieves,” he says. “We’re not writing down most of what’s passing through our system.” Think about walking down a crowded street: You see a lot of faces, street signs, all kinds of stimuli. Most of this, though, never becomes a part of your memory. But if a car suddenly swerves and heads straight for you, your memory shifts gears. Now it’s writing down everything — every cloud, every piece of dirt, every little fleeting thought, anything that might be useful.

Because of this, David believes, you accumulate a tremendous amount of memory in an unusually short amount of time. The slow-motion effect may be your brain’s way of making sense of all this extra information. “When you read that back out,” David says, “the experience feels like it must have taken a very long time.” But really, in a crisis situation, you’re getting a peek into all the pictures and smells and thoughts that usually just pass through your brain and float away, forgotten forever.

That is, death is the origin of religions, and death is the origin of [...]]]> Death, the contemplation and confrontation of death, the implications of death, and coping with the experience of death of loved ones and the shock of possible death for oneself, is the major impetus for esoteric and spiritual thinking and philosophy building.

That is, death is the origin of religions, and death is the origin of esoteric systems.

Death is the great question, and the great puzzle.

And the near death experience is arguably the origin of much of the content and world models of religion and esotericism.

So, it’s relevant to we explorers to consider how the near death experience works.

National geographic recently posted an article that basically restates and provides a bit of popular literature supporting an old theory, which is that the characteristic content of the NDE, visions of light, the sense of meetings with beings, tunnels, and the like may be caused or supported by a higher concentration of CO2 in the bloodstream, and presumably by a change in the oxygen/CO2 balance.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100408-near-death-experiences-blood-carbon-dioxide/

James Owen

for National Geographic News

Published April 8, 2010

A model like this, incidentally, may OR may not invalidate the content.

And one thing is certain – the NDE has a huge impact on those that experience it.

But, we explorers have to be open to new information and new models, so it’s important to keep in mind that the content of the NDE could easily have a physiological and chemical origin.

Consciousness is chemical, or at the very least, has a very large and significant chemical component – this is the great unacknowledged lesson of the human onsession with the large array of psychoactive drugs, including those produced by the huge anti-depression and anti-anxiety pharmaceutical industry, those produced by the legal inebriant industries (alcohol, tobacco, and other legal inebriants around the planet), the pleasure drugs of the illegal inebriant industry, and especially of the psychedelics.

I thought a boingboing’s poster’s take on [...]]]> This Sciam article discusses a recent experiment with memory, that illustrates some of the complex detail that our memory can store. The experiment demonstrated that with a visual image to trigger memory recall, ordinary humans were able to quickly match and compare a really large number of details.

I thought a boingboing’s poster’s take on this was clever – managing long term memory may be a “search problem”.

Since I’m interested in memory, and the memory and association training systems from the underground esoteric culture like qabalah, art of memory, and mantrayama, I found this new study interesting, especially the visual cueing.

In the past several decades, cognitive psychologists have determined that there are two primary memory systems in the human mind: a short-term, or “working,” memory that temporarily holds information about just a few things that we are currently thinking about; and a long-lasting memory that can hold massive amounts of information gained through a lifetime of thoughts and experiences. These two memory systems are also thought to differ in the level of detail they provide: working memory provides sharp detail about the few things we are presently thinking about, whereas long-term memory provides a much fuzzier picture about lots of different things we have seen or experienced. That is, although we can hold lots of things in long-term memory, the details of the memory aren’t always crystal-clear

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-forget-things

A recently published study by Timothy F. Brady, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues suggests that these long-term memories may not be nearly as fuzzy as once thought, however. In their work, the researchers asked subjects to try to remember 3,000 pictures of common objects—including items such as backpacks, remote controls and toasters—that were presented one at a time for just a few seconds each. At the end of this viewing phase, the researchers tested subjects’ memory for each object by showing them two objects and asking which one they had seen before. Not surprisingly, subjects were exceptionally good (more than 90 percent correct) even though there were thousands of objects to remember. This high success rate attests to the massive storage ability of long-term memory. What was most surprising, however, was the amazing level of detail that the subjects had for all of these memories. The subjects were just as good at telling the difference between two pictures of the same object even when the objects differed in an extremely subtle manner, such as a pair of toasters with slightly different slices of bread.

If It’s Not Fuzzy, Why Do We Still Forget Things?
This new work provides compelling evidence that the enormous amount of information we hold in long-term memory is not so uncertain after all. It seems that we actually hold representations of things we’ve seen in a fairly detailed and precise form.

Of course, this finding raises the obvious question: if our memories aren’t all that fuzzy, then why do we often forget the details of things we want to remember? One explanation is that, although the brain contains detailed representations of lots of different events and objects, we can’t always find that information when we want it. As this study reveals, if we’re shown an object, we can often be very accurate and precise at being able to say whether we’ve seen it before. If we’re in a toy store and trying to remember what it was that our son wanted for his birthday, however, we need to be able to voluntarily search our memory for the right answer—without being prompted by a visual reminder. It seems that it is this voluntary searching mechanism that’s prone to interference and forgetfulness.

And it is this voluntary searching mechanism that is trained and developed with associative tools like qabalah.