Liberation, Right Now

From Andrew Cohen of EnlightenNext Magazine:

I don’t believe we have to solve all of our psychological problems in order to become liberated human beings. In the way that I teach, the key to our liberation is simple and direct: it occurs when we discover and recognize something that is more important.

When you awaken to something that has infinitely greater spiritual, moral, and philosophical value than your personal problems, when you discover a higher perspective that is inherently more meaningful than the woes of your wounded self, those problems and woes won’t necessarily disappear, but they suddenly appear to be dramatically less important. Now, in a deep and profound and significant way, you are just not as interested in that personal world any more. And that’s how you find liberation. It’s not because you work through your psychological problems; it’s because you begin to lose interest in them.

The discovery of that which is higher is the secret to becoming a dignified, self-respecting, caring, and spiritually liberated human being, right now.
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Some related RoadKill posts:
Evolutionary Enlightenment 101
Spirit Is Higher
In The Driver's Seat
The Persona, The Shadow and The Soul
Albert Einstein on Mystery, Eternity and The Mind of God
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Got to let this ballast go
Got to float upward, till I burst
- Bruce Cockburn
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The Burning Times

This beautifully crafted film is an in-depth look at the witch-hunts that swept through Europe just a few hundred years ago. False accusations and trials led to massive torture and burnings at the stake, and ultimately to the destruction of an organic way of life. The film advances the theory that widespread violence against women and the neglect of our environment today can be traced back to those times. Part two of a series of three films on women and spirituality, which includes Goddess Remembered and Full Circle.

A powerful documentary from The National Film Board of Canada, accessible on YouTube as a six-part series.  Here are the first two:


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We've come a long way baby... or have we? See how you feel after viewing this remarkable series.

Here are links to the six segments in order:

Part 1 -- Part 2 -- Part 3 -- Part 4 -- Part 5 -- Part 6

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"It's first very difficult to find out what is our own experience, to find our own authority, to find our own voice.  And second, once we have found it, it is very hard to hang on to it - it is hard to remain true to it and it is also very scary when we think about what often happens to women when we do find our own voices and we proclaim our own experience and our own truth and we refuse to tell lies about it and to submit."
- Barbara Roberts, Historian
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Oh Maker, Let Me Die

For those in search of eternal life, Plastic Bag, a short film by American director Ramin Bahrani, enticingly narrated by Werner Herzog, will make you pause. For those on a fruitless quest to find your Maker, you will find solace. For those who believe in the Vortex, all will be revealed. For those about to do a little Wednesday afternoon grocery shopping, maybe you should think about cloth.

The film traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it. Along the way, it encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the world.
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To enjoy the film in FULL SCREEN mode (highly recommended), see a "behind the scenes" video, comments and more episodes from Futurestates, CLICK HERE.
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Drink Yourself Skinny

Well, ladies, here's some great news...

The New York Times today reported that Women Who Drink Gain Less Weight.  Yes, you read that right.  And they aren't talking about sissy herbal teas either!

"Dieters are often advised to stop drinking alcohol to avoid the extra calories lurking in a glass of wine or a favorite cocktail. But new research suggests that women who regularly consume moderate amounts of alcohol are less likely to gain weight than nondrinkers and are at lower risk for obesity."

The study was conducted at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and followed 19,220 women over a period of 13 years. The findings were reported this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine.  Unfortunately it seems this trend does not hold true for men - a 2003 British study showed that regular male drinkers gained more weight than non-drinkers.


CLICK HERE to read the full article - it's short and interesting.  It's on a NYT blog called Well authored by Tara Parker-Pope.  Just encountered it today and glancing over the post titles, will definitely bookmark the site for future exploration. This particular post was emailed to me by Anna, a colleague and drinking buddy. Thanks Anna.
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Everybody has to believe in something, and I believe I'll have another beer.
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What The Hell?!

I came across this video today from Steve Errey (The Confidence Guy).  His message is to take risks, to open ourselves to new experiences, and to have fun and gain confidence in the process.  First thought was oh, there's a good blog post - positive, inspiring, upbeat ... but then then second thought chimed in - well, you know, maybe I'm starting to sound like a broken record, so many posts saying the same thing, maybe my fans are getting bored with all that cheerful optimism, yada yada yada.

So I watched the video again and decided - WHAT THE HELL! 


What The Hell from SteveErrey on Vimeo.

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First thought, best thought
- Chogyam Trungpa
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Science's Dirty Secret

The problem with science isn't that most experiments fail - it's that most failures are ignored.

An interesting article in Wired magazine, courtesy of Dan Pink's blog, challenging what author Jonah Lehrer calls "the myth of objectivity".

In the early 1990s Kevin Dunbar undertook a research project at Stanford University looking into how scientific experiments fail or succeed.  His first surprise was how often experiments were deemed failures when the results failed to support or even contradicted the original theories; the second was the frequency with which the dissonant results were simply ignored.  In effect, the scientists had discovered a new fact, but had discarded it as a failure because it did not meet their expectations.

The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

Dunbar subsequently used fMRI imaging to track brain activity of both 'experts' and 'non-experts' when exposed to two video-taped experiments, one accurate and one inaccurate.  Not surprisingly, the part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) - associated with the perception of errors and contradictions - was triggered in the experts' minds when shown the inaccurate video, and in the non-experts' minds when shown the video that was accurate, but which they thought was incorrect.

But Dunbar's analysis didn't stop there.  Enter another area of the brain - the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) - whose task is to censor thoughts that don't mesh with our preconceptions, a bit of a problem for a scientist aiming for objective observation.  In Dunbar's words, if the ACC is the "Oh Shit" response, the DLPFC is the Delete key.  When the ACC and DLPFC “turn on together, people aren’t just noticing that something doesn’t look right,” he says. “They’re also inhibiting that information."

The lesson is that not all data is created equal in our mind’s eye: When it comes to interpreting our experiments, we see what we want to see and disregard the rest... Belief, in other words, is a kind of blindness.

So what are we to do if we can't trust our 'objective' reality?  In the section How to Learn From Failure Jonah Lehrer presents four main points, which he fleshes out in the article:

1. Check your assumptions
2. Seek out the ignorant
3. Encourage diversity
4. Beware of failure-blindness

To discover how we can learn to see more accurately, and make the most of our perceived failures, access the full article HERE.

Lehrer concludes:

What turned out to be so important, of course, was the unexpected result, the experimental error that felt like a failure. The answer had been there all along — it was just obscured by the imperfect theory, rendered invisible by our small-minded brain. It’s not until we talk to a colleague or translate our idea into an analogy that we glimpse the meaning in our mistake. Bob Dylan, in other words, was right: There’s no success quite like failure.

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In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities
In the expert's there are few
- Shunryo Suzuki Roshi
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Related RoadKill Posts:
Thought For Right Now - Success and Failure
Leave The Door Open
The Freedom To Not Know
Pay Attention
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