Let's Be Present

Here I am again telling you the story of my newly found interest in the spiritual side of the human beings!

After I finished reading Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr. Brian Weiss, still kind of dizzied by the surprising story, another book came to my hands. This time it was The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Ekhart Tolle (funny I mentioned this to a colleague at work only to discover that he had also read the same book, several times!)

People not familiar with spirituality and non religious folks like me can be put off by Tolle's way of expressing himself. But if one looks beyond the form then I think this book indeed has value and actually many people consider it a great book.

I am among the most common human beings that have trouble being present in the Now. My mind too often fantasizes with the future. Also the past pops in, although much less. I've been observing myself since I started reading the book only to confirm how undisciplined my mind is, how much it apparently dislikes being fully in the Now. Tolle insists in his book the past and future are not real and that focusing on them only creates unhappiness. The present moment holds the key to liberation form our unhappiness. 

Tolle asks us to observe our thoughts and observe our emotions and be conscious of them; also he urges us to not identify with our minds. Tolle says "The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as your unobserved mind runs your life". 

The recipe Tolle gives us to free ourselves from the mind is to be present on the Now, to end the delusion of time, to escape from the trap of time. Furthermore, he tells us that present-moment awareness creates a gap in the stream of mind and in the past-future continuum and that true creativity can only come to this world through this gap. 

I personally find some of these concepts totally fascinating. For the time being, I keep on reminding myself to come back to the present whenever I realize my mind is drifting to the future or the past..I have no personal experience with the "gap" (yet)

My next read, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra reiterates the benefits of being present in the Now. It will be the subject of my next post.

Reincarnation, really?

As I mentioned in my previous post this summer I've done some unusual readings: Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr. Brian Weiss was the first of them.

Back in July I attended my first group meditation session. When the session ended I heard somebody in the group talking about past lives. The other people intervened in the conversation as if that would be the most natural thing in the world... My face is always an open book, and it was evident I was clearly skeptical and shocked by what I was hearing. I was then invited to read Many Lives, Many Masters: that night I downloaded it in my Kindle and got started reading.

Dr Brian Weiss is an American psychiatrist, and hypnotherapist. To his surprise, in 1980 one of his patients began discussing past-life experiences while under hypnosis.

I had always seen hypnosis and a sideshow entertainment, nothing to be taken seriously. Now I've come to understand that reputable medical institutions actually view and use hypnosis as a powerful therapeutic tool. Dr Brian Weiss describes in his book his most amazing experience(s) with patients that, through hypnosis, were regressed to past lives and the healing power of those regressions.

Personal takeaways from the book:

1. Apparently reincarnation happens, and often happens within families. It could be more than an unproven religious belief. I am still unsure I believe this as truth but...

2. If I decide to believe it, then the consequence is enormous: I better find out why I am here, what I have come to learn in this life. I was hoping to be done with the goods and the bads of this world by the time I die...but then if I do not learn my lessons my immortal spirit might come into physical form again and again and never make enough progress to make it into the next level; and I do want to make it to the next level!

I'm committed to learning more about this topic. My next read was  The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Ekhart Tolle. I'll comment on it in my next post!

My readings this summer: beginning a journey to deep transformation?

It's been a long time since I last decided to write a post on my readings. It was not for lack of reading but rather for lack of comments worth sharing.

About three months ago I was given a gift: an online basic training on energy polarization ( "polarización energética" in the Spanish original version). The training consisted of a two hour video recording that includes a guided meditation practice at the end.  I was advised to practice the proposed meditation for at least 21 days in a row. I actually did not pay much attention to the teachings in the recording, but I did start practicing the meditation in the hope that it would help me quieten my always restless mind.

I had never practiced meditation before, in any of its different ways. Now, I do not think I am stopping. And I feel deep inside that this is just the beginning. My mind continues to be restless - no miraculous change -, but in a way I cannot explain, I just feel relieved.

To get me started with the "Energy" world I've spent some time reading three books this summer: Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian L. Weiss; The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Ekhart Tolle and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra. I'm still trying to digest these books, I admit it.

I'll talk about them in future posts. I feel my mind is resisting these teachings, but my heart is asking for more. Which one will win? Soon to find out

All the Light we Cannot See

So many books have been written about World War II. I'm not particularly fond of books around war themes and yet, only in the last couple of years, I've probably read more than five novels that use WWII as the scenario for their plot (The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak  The Storyteller, by Jody Picoult; Winter of the World, by Ken Follett; Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, just to name a few).

All the Light we Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, is the title of the last novel I've read and its plot is also set during WWII. I agree with many people that has written reviews about this book that it is a beautiful novel. It is also terrible, and sad as all war books usually are.

In today's extremely interconnected world, in which data communications are ever present, for business and entertainment alike, it almost strikes odd to read a book in which the radio plays a central role in communicating people, for good as well as for bad.

If you are in the mood for a book set on WWII German occupied France this is an original story that you'll likely enjoy.

Thinking Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, summarizes the research that he has done over the past forty years; beginning with his work with Amos Tversky.

What Kahneman, through numerous experiments, comes to demonstrate, is that human beings are intuitive thinkers and that human intuition is imperfect. There’s a large part of the book dedicated to explain the many ways our thinking is biased and how humans make irrational choices.

I studied Economics in the early 80s. Although much of what I studied is buried is some rather inaccessible part of my brain, I still remember a couple of assumptions often at the core of much of what we were taught:  one was that “consumers are rational and make rational choices”, the other was the idea that ”consumers are risk averse”. I never felt quite comfortable with the first (this book proves that my intuition was at least correct that time)

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel prize in Economics in 2002. Over the last recent decades his research has had a major influence in the area of Behavioral Economics. One key contribution is the demonstration that human beings do make choices that are not rational and this leads to real world results that significantly differ from theoretical predictions based on economics models.

Our “fast thinking” (system 1) is effortless, is an intuitive thinking and is actually the one that takes control most of the time. Our “slow thinking” (system 2) is the one we use to resolve complicated problems; it is effortful, requires attention and, interestingly,  happens to be slept most of the time and is “lazy”, often endorsing what comes from our intuitive selves (without realizing it). Our system 1 is, as Kahneman puts it “a machine for jumping to conclusions” even if there is very little evidence to sustain them and, consequently, our conclusions are sometimes wrong; especially when having to make choices in situations where there is a high degree of uncertainty.

Three interesting features of fast thinking are largely discussed in the book:

• People make decisions in a rather “narrow way”, focusing a lot on the immediate emotional reaction to an outcome rather than to long term consequences
• People are much more sensitive to potential losses than to potential gains, this tends to makes people unreasonably risk averse
• People tend to be optimistic and overconfident, and this leads people to take unreasonable risks

Thinking Fast and Slow is a long book, to read it takes time and patience. It is, I promise, a healthy exercise for our System 2. I found the time invested in it both enjoyable and instructive. 

If you’d rather read some serious review before trying the book itself there’s plenty available in the internet. Lastly, if you do not have much time but are ready to spend an hour having the author walking you through some of the main themes of the book here’s a video for you. Enjoy!