Please see below selected recent consciousness-related change.
See also: Halcyon Consciousness Headlines
July 2018
Halcyon curates the most significant consciousness-related content from carefully selected sources. Please contact us if you'd like our help with consciousness-related challenges.
Would you travel across the land, in the hour of the summer solstice? - from Ancient Dream, by Aeolian Songspell
A time for the half-remembered inner pagan to re-emerge, dancing widdershins in the pre-dawn dew around the celebrity stones, or the authentic stones, or wherever one finds oneself this solstice-time.
The veil is thin now...
...and oh yes, a very happy birthday, Elaine.
The Ego Trick looked at the 'bundle theory' of the self, and argued that we don't have a permanent essential self, but instead are a bundle of thoughts, sensations and impulses.
Meanwhile, a Harvard clinical psychologist and Tibetan Buddhist scholar, examined the nature of awareness and self.
Research suggests that meditation can change brain structure, enhance mental abilities and work alongside traditional medicine to speed up healing.
Certainly, when I learned Transcendental Meditation back in 1989 it was a life-changing experience, though I gradually moved away from the more cultish aspects of TM. Perhaps anyway, as the Dalai Lama put it, "sleep is the best meditation".
Inspired by the interplay between therapy, poetry, neuroscience and novels in Start the Week.
Forensic psychotherapist Dr Gwen Adshead talked about the lost natures of her Broadmoor patients, in whom she can still sometimes recognise the little boys they once were.
William Boyd explored how early talent can flourish suddenly and then fade slowly.
Craig Raine compared the "language on point" composition of a poem to the art of dress-making.
...the story of the universe is that information, which I call novelty, is struggling to free itself from habit, which I call entropy... and that this process... is accelerating... It seems as if... the whole cosmos wants to change into information... All points want to become connected... The path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together... You can imagine that there is an ultimate end-state of that process—it's the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe - Terence McKenna, Workshop in 1998
Your head's like mine, like all our heads- big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was, big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over - Tom O'Bedlam (The Invisibles)
While the traditional model of psychiatry and psychoanalysis is strictly personalistic and biographical, modern consciousness research has added new levels, realms and dimensions and shows the human psyche as being essentially commensurate with the whole universe and all of existence - Stanislov Grof
What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself - Mark Twain