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#2704 -
Nondual
Highlights
The theme uniting
these three articles could be called "surrender."
To what? To whatever you recognize as greater, vast, infinite, or
real.
One of our
stingers covering part of Nonduality Street (north
of Liquorman Ave., south of West Advaita Blvd.), sends
the following:
~ ~ ~
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8732&feedId=online-news_rss20
discover magazine has
a write up too, think it's worthwhile reading both takes:
http://www.discover.com/issues/may-06/departments/blinded/
Complex decisions are
best left to your unconscious mind to work out, according to a
new study, and over-thinking a problem could lead to expensive
mistakes.
The research suggests the
conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such
as selecting a brand of oven glove. Sleeping on a big decision,
such as buying a car or house, is more likely to produce a result
people remain happy with than consciously weighing up the pros
and cons of the problem, the researchers say.
Thinking hard about a
complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears to
bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a
subset of information, which they weight inappropriately,
resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. In contrast, the
unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information
and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with Ap
Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands,
and colleagues recruited 80 people for a series of lab-based and
“real-world” tests. The participants were provided with
information and asked to make decisions about simple and complex
purchases, ranging from shampoos to furniture to cars.
Snap decisions
In one of the tests, half
of the participants were asked to ponder on the information they
were given and then decide which among similar products to buy.
The other half were shown the information but then made to
perform a series of puzzles including anagrams and simple
arithmetic. At the end of the puzzle session, the participants
were asked to make a snap decision about the products.
“We found that when
the choice was for something simple, such as purchasing oven
gloves or shampoo, people made better decisions – ones that
they remained happy with – if they consciously deliberated
over the information,” says Dijksterhuis.
“But once the
decision was more complex such as for a house, too much thinking
about it led people to make the wrong choice. Whereas, if their
conscious mind was fully occupied on solving puzzles, their
unconscious could freely consider all the information and they
reached better decisions.”
Expectation
counts
However, the unconscious
mind appears to need some instruction. “It was only when
people were told before the puzzles that they would need to reach
a decision that they were able to come up with the right one,”
Dijksterhuis told New Scientist.
If they were told that
none of what they had been shown was important before being given
the puzzles, they failed to make satisfactory choices. “At
some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions
consciously, and we’re not very good at it. We should learn
to let our unconscious handle the complicated things,”
Dijksterhuis says.
Petros,
who reports nondual news from around the world, or some
place like that, sends this:
1. "The internal
sensory world of the human organism is as actively transduced as
is the external sensory environment. The number of neurons acting
as receptor cells for the transduction of internal stimulus
events far exceeds the number of receptor cells devoted
exclusively to external energy source transduction.
-- from Consciousness in Four Dimensions: Biological Relativity
and the Origins of Thought by Richard M. Pico, Ph.D., M.D.
2. "While many nerve cells link us to the outside world by
mediating sensation and movement, the majority of neurons
communicate only with other neurons. Indeed, the brain is much
more in touch with itself than with anything else."
-- from Brainscapes: An Introduction to What Neuroscience has
Learned about the Structure, Function, and Abilities of the Brain
by Richard Restak M.D.
In short, what these scientists seem to be saying is that we (via
our brains) spend most of our time talking to ourselves!
A new book, Nothing
I See Means Anything, by David Parrish, M.D., has this
to say:
http://www.sentientpublications.com/catalog/nothing_i_see.php
The ego has maintained
the illusion that we have created ourselves by way of our bodies
and the projected the mental images out onto the world screen,
where they can be perceived. This process leaves us in a position
where we regard ourselves as separated from the process we
effected in the first place, and we now believe we are acted upon
by a world beyond our control. Reframing this, we believe we are
split off from ourselves and split off from our divine source.
The ability of the ego to perpetuate itself by diverting us from
mindfulness to mindlessness should never be underestimated. We
did not create ourselves; we are apt to forget this. David
Hawkins, in this book, I: Reality and Subjectivity,
states,
"the ego is the
victim of itself. With rigorous inspection, it will be discovered
that the ego is really just 'running a racket' for its own fun
and games and survival. The real 'you' is actually the loser. The
ego has an endless store house of prizes on which to feed. It
greedily pounces on sentimentality, on the virtue of being right,
on the prize of being the victim, or on the martyrdom of loss and
sadness. It also offers the excitement of winning or gain as well
as the pain of frustration. It offers the ego inflation of
getting attention or sympathy. One can see that each emotion is,
in and of itself, its own pay off. The ego clings to
emotionality, which is intimately connected with its
positionalities; it pretends to think it has no choices. To
'surrender to God' means to stop looking to the ego for solance
and thrills and to discover the endless, serene joy of peace. To
look within is to find the underlying, ever present Source of the
illumination of the mind itself."
There is a choice: One
can forsake the ego's forced forgetfulness, denial, arrogance,
and deception and intend to leave the world not be death but by truth.