Russell Brand
I never really liked this guy, as he is quite easy to dislike, but he makes that almost natural dislike of him fun. He is the perfect example that meditation is not going to take away our edge. When you watch him on stage he is just as high energy and observative as before.
These days he is a very active advocate for meditation. Too many quotes to fit here. Just give him a quick look up yourself.
Stress is great.. when it is within a certain range.
Meditation is not going to take all our stresses away from us. It just gives us the ability to rationalise with ourselves.
We all have the experience of being frustrated about something but at the same time knowing that what we are frustrated about is ridiculous. We talk to our friends about it, they give us the same advice that we would give ourselves and we say “I know, I wish I could just get over it”
This experience is when we are just enough past our limits to feel disturbed and unsettled, yet still able keep our heads a little bit, and at the same time not enough below our limit to just let go of the event even after the event has occurred and is now no longer an issue. We miss out on the good things in life because we feel horrible about a event which we know, deep down, that we no longer care about.
It is silly.
If Children could understand something that is so blatantly irrational, I am sure they would be laughing at us. And we know the advice that they would give, they would innocently say, with one of those stern, slightly confused and overly obvious facial expressions ”Why don’t you just let go?”.
And we would say “It’s complicated”.
Which basically means “I don’t know”.
We cannot let go because our bodies have learned how to become better (worse) at being stressed. Stress tells our bodies and brains that “YOU ARE GOING TO DIE , RIGHT THIS INSTANT, IF YOU DO NOT THINK OF ANYTHING ELSE OTHER THAN YOUR IMMINENT DEATH” ( Which will, in modern times, seem to be at the hands of a jammed printer or a inability to get our Facebook cover photo looking just right )
This silliness is going on all the time.
It is keeping us ignorant of the beauty of the world around us.
We need to be able to better deal with our stress, and we need to learn how to let go.
Learn to meditate.
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Investigated the effect of psychological stress on the generation of ideas in divergent problem solving.
The subjects (39 undergraduates) were administered 4 divergent thinking tests (alternate uses, story and figure interpretations, and block arrangements) in 2 situations: under stress and when relaxed (control). Performance on all tests was decreased from the stress induced by a threatening examination situation: the number of ideas (ideational fluency), the number of response categories (spontaneous flexibility), and the percentage of original responses were all reduced. The projection of anxiety and of a sense of threat upon the content of the generated ideas was more frequent, while ideas of aggressive and asocial content were less frequent in the stress than in the relaxed condition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
James Dierke, principal of Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco, CA, talks about the meditation program he implemented to try and improve student learning and behavior in his school.
When Dierke first arrived at the school it had the highest absentee rate, the highest suspension rate, the highest teacher turnover rate, the lowest academic achievement rate. The neighborhood had the second highest crime rate in San Francisco and about 85% of the kids were from homes of poverty.
Principal Dierke and his staff were instructed in meditation. They implemented the “Quiet Time” program in their 6th and 7th grade classes. Twice a day students practiced meditation for 15 minutes.
The results of their experiment were startling.
After the success of Quiet Time at Visitacion Valley Middle School, the program expanded to 3 additional schools.
Students are not the only ones benefiting from the Quiet Time. Since the program was implemented, the teacher attrition rate at Visitation Valley MS went from about half to virtually nil.
After years of consistent meditation certain themes start to appear. One of these is a general feeling that “I am are always in the right place at the right time”.
A everything-is-going-exactly-the-way-it-is-supposed-to kinda vibe.
You can not believe it, you can even flat out deny it. But the feeling is still there and it just keeps growing with every meditation.
I, in my earlier dark and moody days of meditation tried to rationalise it away as some crap that all that some people just people say.
I have truly given this feeling a real intellectual beating (for years even), but it is still there, with a stupid little knowing smile on its face.
As our consciousness starts to expand we see more of the bigger picture.—-we use a wider angle lens to view the world.
So, when something negative happens, and instead of completely freaking out, that smiling feeling tells us, “lets just keep the camera rolling and see what happens” and before we know it a positive event arises.
As one door closes, 37 more doors open. Often, when one door closes we keep knocking on it, “let me in” we say, “I wasn’t finished yet” we ignore the other doors until we are finished being upset because this one closed.
We then wander off and go into another door.
10-20 years later we look back and think “I am so glad that door closed, because if it didn’t, I would not have gone through one of the other 37 doors and be where I am now”.
We think “I wish I could go back and tell my past self that everything is going to be ok, as a matter of fact, it is actually going to get even better”.
Our consistent twice a day practice brings the warmth of that future self’s advice to today.
It is ok if you don’t believe me. I wouldn’t have.
The beautiful thing is, you don’t need to.
Many of us feel that stress is just a thing that happens, and then stops happening.
Often we do not think that much about it at all.
Sometimes we may get so used to it that we may even forget that it has been sitting in the background for days, weeks, years.
Until one day…
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Sound a little like the back cover of some B-grade horror movie?
Sure,
but this documentary is a must see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1wLDHkWKMU&list=PL98A671E8C64834A0
“It is really difficult to overestimate the effect that it has had. Making better decisions, becoming happier, being more creative , treating people better…”
“I used to be a shoe-gazer on stage but now I can really let go and have fun. Meditation gives me the ability to take a step back and think “ok here is the fear, now here is what I am going to do” and then the fear subsides.”
“It has helped me get over my stage fright.”
And when questioned about conflicts with his bandmates.
“With this practice I now have a tool to calm back down and think more constructivly and more helpfully.”
“Things are better than they have ever been.”
Rivers Cuomo lead singer of Weezer
Some of the benefits of meditation are increased happiness and a greater understanding of our thoughts and emotions.
This, naturally over time leads to less suffering.
Most art deals with the subject of suffering.
A fear that I had when I started to meditate was that it would take my suffering away from me. And I felt, instinctively, that this would take away what I felt to be true and real. Which was my right as a human to suffer.
After all, what kind of a life is it if we were just born and then from then on in we led a perfect life.
It would be very boring. For everybody.
This is what such a story would look like.
Once upon a time there was a perfect person who had a perfect life and then they died.
It would be like standing in a perfectly white room. forever.
There are no shadows, so what do you have to compare the white too?
It lacks definition.
It lacks a narrative.
Stereotypes of meditators as people wandering around in a completely untouchable detached state have been greatly exaggerated and misunderstood. The Dali Lama still gets upset.
Once we learn meditation, we are not sheltered from the ups and downs of life.
We still go down. That’s human. But lets ask the question of how interesting is that on its own?
The truth is, that it is also very boring.
This is what such a story would look like
Once upon a time somebody was a horrible person and had a horrible life and never learnt anything and then they died.
Do not be fooled, meditation does not protect you from going down. but it does give you the sense of mind to be aware as you are going down.
We are then more open to learning from the experience and feeling the depths of it. Instead of the “clinging to self pity” response.
This awareness that comes from meditation gives us a way out of those depths too. Like I mentioned before, wallowing in those depths is just as boring as fluttering around in those heights.
It is on the way out of those depths that a truly remarkable piece of original artwork is made. It has narrative. It has definition. It makes for a dam good story.
Sure, there is going to be a dip again, but it will not be the same as before. It will be our own personal and original take on another innately human problem, or, a now even more aware exploration of a similar theme.
This ability is, in my opinion, not only that which has been the driving force behind so many masterpieces, but also that which has been the real substance of true luminaries throughout the history of the world.
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Otto Rank, Art and Artist, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1943), pp. 40-41:
“If we compare the neurotic with the productive type, it is evident that the former suffers from an excessive check on his impulsive life…. Both are distinguished fundamentally from the average type, who accepts himself as he is, by their tendency to exercise their volition in reshaping themselves. There is, however, this difference: that the neurotic, in this voluntary remaking of his ego, does not get beyond the destructive preliminary work and is therefore unable to detach the whole creative process from his own person and transfer it to an ideological abstraction. The productive artist also begins…with that recreation of himself which results in an ideologically constructed ego; [but in his case] this ego is then in a position to shift the creative will-power from his own person to ideological representations of that person and thus render it objective. It must be admitted that this process is in a measure limited to within the individual himself and that not only in its constructive, but also in its destructive aspects. This explains why hardly any productive work gets through without morbid crises of a ‘neurotic’ nature.”
