A great article on mindfulness and a simple if not easy way to achieve it

Life unfolds in the present. But so often, we let the present slip away, allowing time to rush past unobserved and unseized, and squandering the precious seconds of our lives as we worry about the future and ruminate about what’s past. “We’re living in a world that contributes in a major way to mental fragmentation, disintegration, distraction, decoherence,” says Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace. We’re always doing something, and we allow little time to practice stillness and calm.

When we’re at work, we fantasize about being on vacation; on vacation, we worry about the work piling up on our desks. We dwell on intrusivememories of the past or fret about what may or may not happen in the future. We don’t appreciate the living present because our “monkey minds,” as Buddhists call them, vault from thought to thought like monkeys swinging from tree to tree.

Most of us don’t undertake our thoughts in awareness. Rather, our thoughts control us. “Ordinary thoughts course through our mind like a deafening waterfall,” writes Jon Kabat-Zinn, the biomedical scientist who introduced meditation into mainstream medicine. In order to feel more in control of our minds and our lives, to find the sense of balance that eludes us, we need to step out of this current, to pause, and, as Kabat-Zinn puts it, to “rest in stillness—to stop doing and focus on just being.”

EUROPEANS may have used magic mushrooms to liven up religious rituals 6000 years ago. So suggests a cave mural in Spain, which may depict fungi with hallucinogenic properties - the oldest evidence of their use in Europe.

The Selva Pascuala mural, in a cave near the town of Villar del Humo, is dominated by a bull. But it is a row of 13 small mushroom-like objects that interests Brian Akers at Pasco-Hernando Community College in New Port Richey, Florida, and Gaston Guzman  at the Ecological Institute of Xalapa in Mexico. They believe that the objects are the fungi Psilocybe hispanica , a local species with hallucinogenic properties.

I wasn’t feeling very political today so I thought I’d dig through my bookmarks and throw up something weird and mystical.

So this is a virtual recreation of a dream machine.

The real dream machine is basically a weird lamp that spins on a record player. The point is to stare at it with your eyes closed and experience all kinds of mind-expanding hallucinations. Originally created by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville in the midst of the Beatnik movement it was an attempt to provide each home with their own psychedelic television.

Brion would later comment that the major electronics companies, another potential source of commercial revenue, bailed out when he told them the dreamachine made people ‘more awake’.

‘They lost interest,’ he said.

‘They were only interested in machines and drugs which made people go to sleep.’

Is it archaic trivial woo or a lost mechanism for understanding the mind? According to the inventors it was created with a scientific principle in mind and as an attempt to follow historic precedents.

I think it scares people… Because of the fact that it deals with that area of interior vision which has never been tapped before. Except in history, one knows of cases — in French history, Catherine de Medici for example, had Nostradamus sitting up on the top of a tower… he used to sit up there and with the fingers of his hands spread like this would flicker his fingers over closed eyes, and would interpret his visions in a way which were of influence to her in regard to her political powers… they were like instructions from a higher power… ‘They could also foretell bad things. Peter the Great also had somebody who sat on the top of a tower and flickered his fingers like that across his closed eyelids… And any of us today can go and look out the window or lie in a field and do it, and you get a great deal of the type of visions — in fact, it’s the same area in the alpha bands of excitation of the brain — within the alpha band between eight and thirteen flickers a second. And the dreamachine produces this continuously, without interruption, unless you yourself interrupt it by opening your eyes like that.

Anyways, the website is interesting enough. If you’re not epileptic that is, otherwise I wouldn’t recommend it. Just close your eyes, lean in close and make your room mates think you’re talking to Poltergeists.