Consciousness

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 through a formal course many years ago it was in some ways a life-changing experience, although I quickly moved away from the more cultish aspects of TM. 

I don't entirely buy the claim that just a few minutes' daily meditation can make a difference between an anxious existence and a life of quiet contentment...but it helps.

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.

March 2020

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.

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. 

Halcyon curates the most significant thought-related content from carefully selected sources. Please contact us if you'd like our help with thought-related challenges.

We can be at our most reflective, and perhaps society could be at its most reflexive, around St John's Eve and the other, similar seven calendar points...

Goin' ridin' down by Avalon
Would you meet me in the country
In the summertime in England
Would you meet me?
In the Church of St. John . . .
Down by Avalon . . . .

 - from Summertime in England, by Van Morrison

Are we beginning to act as if there were a global brain? We ask Google expecting it to know the answers to all our many questions. We assume a global awareness: if something happens in Mumbai, we are certain we'll be able to know about it instantly. We expect this brain to be on, 24/7, feeding our awareness, educating and entertaining us. We currently view it as "our" brain, our collective brain, and that is how we act towards it.

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.