Ever been in a lazy river before (like the one pictured below)? It’s a popular water ride found at amusement parks and resorts where you sit in a water tube and let the slow and gentle current drift you along.
Usually they go around in a circle, so you can basically sit there for an indefinite amount of time – not really having a care in the world. The whole experience can be really relaxing, and even a bit trance-inducing.
A good lazy river will also have some scenery (nature stuff – trees, flowers, waterfalls, maybe some animals) which can add a whole other layer of serenity.
I actually haven’t been in a lazy river in years. I know there is one at the Splish Splash in Riverhead, New York, but that’s at least a couple hours away and I haven’t made the trek yet (to be completely honest – I haven’t even been to the beach yet this summer, and that’s only 20 minutes away – yeah I’m bad).
But either way, I actually think the idea of a “lazy river” is a good analogy for relaxation. That’s because, when you’re in the lazy river, there is a healthy sense of non-striving:
- You’re not trying to get anywhere.
- You’re not trying to accomplish anything.
- You’re not trying to control anything.
You’re just letting yourself flow wherever the water goes.
No fight. No resistance.
I think there is something incredibly useful in being able to tap into that energy every now and then.
To just relax – and not always feel like we need to go somewhere.
That’s not to say we should never try to have goals, or go anywhere important, or try to fight resistance. But I believe being able to turn off that drive every now and then is very healthy.
It allows us to take a step back, recharge our batteries, and maybe even re-examine what’s really important in our lives.
Question.
- What is your “lazy river?” What activities do you do when you just want to sit back and relax? Meditate? Watch the weather? Listen to music?
Share your answers and thoughts in the comment section!
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MINDFULNESS AND CREATIVITY
Thoughts are a lot like bugs…
- Some fly right by us and we don’t notice. Others buzz in our ears and won’t stop. Some come with stingers. And some can be a pleasure to behold.
Quick! Grab a net before it gets away…
A lot of creative problem-solving is about being in the right place, at the right time, with the right mindset. And because we never know exactly when or where this is – maybe on the bus, in the shower, or while talking to a friend – it is important to be alert of potentially good ideas at all times.
Creative people collect thoughts like a bug collector, that means always having your net around and an empty jar. When something crosses your path, catch it and contain it, write it down somewhere or leave yourself a voice memo.
Have a place to store these ideas long-term: a notebook, a blog, or a digital folder.
Some ideas you might want to put into action right away while others you may never put into action. It doesn’t matter, good ideas are worth holding onto because you can always build upon them later, suggest them to others, or use them to stimulate your mind when it goes blank.
Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’ll remember an idea when you get home, or when you wake up, or when you finally need it – you won’t. Like a bug, thoughts are always fleeting; they can be in your awareness one moment and then out the next. Get them while they are right in front of you or they might be lost forever!
“But, but…I’m never creative.”
- Bullshit.
Everyone has the capacity to be creative. Insights occur spontaneously all of the time, the problem is that they are often hidden underneath the everyday noise humming in our brains. Instead of using our minds to create and discover meaning, we get caught up in the smaller things: worrying about what to make for dinner or what grade we got on our latest exam. Lame!
Everyday we have tens of thousands of thoughts between hundreds of billions of neurons firing. That is a lot of competition going on in our heads and it is impossible to pay attention to it all at once. Neuroscientist Mark Beeman says that while an everyday thought, like what to eat for lunch, may take millions of neurons, an insight is usually made up of far less connections: a few tens of thousands. Therefore, Beeman claims that “…variables that improve the ability to detect weak associations may improve insight solving.”
One of the big variables might be better mindfulness. By becoming more attuned to our surroundings, and how we are reacting to them, we can more easily discover connections in our world, and therefore find meaningful solutions. This is just my hunch, but I like to think of mindfulness as the “net” we use when trying to catch those elusive ideas. In other words, by practicing better mindfulness we can be more aware of what would otherwise be unconscious to us – the “weak association” that tend to get outperformed by the “stronger associations.”
Another way to improve your insight ability is to just write down any ideas you come up with, even if they aren’t very good. My reasoning behind this is that it gets you in the groove of idea-making and thinking more creatively in general, which will push you to have more ideas in the future. As the ideas pile up, better insights will become more likely. A lot of this is a game of probability, and the more you practice the better your chances become.
1. The strange face-in-the-mirror illusion
- “An intriguing article has just been published in the journal Perception about a never-before-described visual illusion where your own reflection in the mirror seems to become distorted and shifts identity.
To trigger the illusion you need to stare at your own reflection in a dimly lit room. The author, Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo, describes his set up which seems to reliably trigger the illusion: you need a room lit only by a dim lamp (he suggests a 25W bulb) that is placed behind the sitter, while the participant stares into a large mirror placed about 40 cm in front.
The participant just has to gaze at his or her reflected face within the mirror and usually ‘after less than a minute, the observer began to perceive the strange-face illusion.’”
2. Could learning self-control be enjoyable?
- “When it comes to self-control, consumers in the United States are in trouble. But a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says there’s hope; we just need a little help to see self-regulation as fun. ‘Self-control failures depend on whether people see activities involving self-control (e.g., eating in moderate quantities) as an obligation to work or an opportunity to have fun,’ write authors Juliano Laran (University of Miami) and Chris Janiszewski (University of Florida, Gainesville).
3. Analogy as the Core of Cognition by Douglas Hofstadter
- “In this Presidential Lecture, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter examines the role and contributions of analogy in cognition, using a variety of analogies to illustrate his points.”
4. Nude psychotherapy and the quest for inner peace
- “The first session of nude psychotherapy was held in 1967, at a nudist resort in California. It was the brainchild of radical therapist and ordained minister Paul Bindrim who made headlines around the world with events intended to enhance emotional connectedness and dismantle body-image hangups.
Despite the massive interest at the time, ‘nude psychotherapy’ would have largely disappeared from the history of psychology if it weren’t for a truly amazing article by historian Ian Nicholson, published in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, which you can read in full as a pdf.”
5. Current decisions shape your future preference
- “Psychologists have known for a long time that after you make a choice, you adjust your opinion to think better of the thing you chose. Now a new study has found that this is true even if you don’t know the options that you’re choosing between.
People change their minds about a choice after they make it. If you ask someone how he feels about Athens and Paris, he might rate them the same. But after you make him choose one as a vacation destination, he’ll rate that city higher. This is thought to be a way to reduce the psychological tension that is created by rejecting one perfectly reasonable alternative and picking another one.”
6. Emotional Cognition and Philosophy of Mind with Tim Maudlin
- “Nowadays; there’s a lot of interest in emotion. There was a focus on, as it were, pure cold, calculative reasoning because you can give a cleaner looking, formal account of that, but as soon as you start looking at how people actually reason, you find that they’re systematically affected by their emotional state. And I would say that the demonstration of that forces philosophers of mind to think much more clearly about to what extent emotion and affect play a role in our cognitive economy, and probably it’s easier to ignore that question if there aren’t a lot of cognitive scientists running experiments and pointing out that, in fact, emotions play a big role in how we think.”
7. Creativity, fulfillment and flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
8. Microelectrodes Convert Thought Into Speech
- “In what may be a huge step toward helping severely paralyzed people communicate, scientists were able to use non-penetrating microelectrode that sit on the brain to decode spoken words from brain signals. When they compared any two brain signals, they were able to distinguish brain signals for each word 76 percent to 90 percent of the time.”
9. Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization
- ” According to Gestalt psychology, the whole is different than the sum of its parts. Based upon this belief, Gestalt psychologists developed a set of principles to explain perceptual organization, or how smaller objects are grouped to form larger ones. These principles are often referred to as the “laws of perceptual organization.”
However, it is important to note that while Gestalt psychologists call these phenomena “laws,” a more accurate term would be “principles of perceptual organization.” These principles are much like heuristics, which are mental shortcuts for solving problems.”
10. Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
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“Shinzen talks about how the ten zen ox-herding pictures can be interpreted in two different ways. One shows the stages on the path of enlightenment and the other shows you the process of truly grasping what consciousness is. Shinzen talks about pictures 1 thru. 4 in this first of three parts. Filmed on the second last evening of a 14-day intensive Jan. 9, 2009 at La Casa de Maria Retreat Center in Santa Barbara.”
“Shinzen continues in part two talking about pictures 5 thru. 7. He shares that the last three pictures 8, 9, and 10 tell us the substance, appearance, and ultimate use of enlightenment.”
“Shinzen talks about the “final cause” of enlightenment, and the historical person illustrated in the tenth ox-herding picture, the cloth-bag monk. He shares various examples of how retreat participants will be sharing gifts in the “marketplace” – the final goal of meditation practice.”
Visit Shinzen Young’s YouTube Channel for more videos on zen, vipissana meditation, Buddhism, consciousness, and philosophy of mind.
Consciousness is like a house of mirrors.
While inside, it is all too easy to get caught up in the distractions of each individual reflection. The mind wants to recognize each reflection as distinct, full – originating on its own. And it is because we believe that each reflection is separate from another that we begin to build preferences, desire and fear. We may find ourselves seeking to distinguish between truth and lies, pleasure and pain, good and bad. But this is all just noise of the mind blocking our recognition of the One.
The search for this One – “the absolute truth” – can become like a search for a mirage in a desert. The moment you think you see it, and begin to approach or try to grasp, is the same moment it begins to dissipate.
By the time you are there – it has vanished from all seeing. Why? Because you think you need to be there in order to see it. This only creates another reflection, and another distraction, in the house of mirrors. You only see the “real you” staring at the reflection, but you can’t see the other you that is staring right back. It is in everything. This is only the recognition of consciousness in every thing that can be attended to.
Each moment is only a reflection in this house of mirrors. It is a snippet of time in the infinite, and utterly empty, consciousness-space continuum. You are not an individual snippet of time-space. This would be identifying with something that is much lesser than what you really are; it would be selling yourself short. You are the flow of time itself – the experience of it – you are the empty awareness of process, change, impermanence, rising and falling, and evolution itself.
By recognizing that we were never an individual reflection, but the house of mirrors itself, we recognize ourselves as inherent empty space, like time, that gives way to all change. No longer do we get caught up in this experience of illusions, false identities, and other mind tricks. We recognize that we are something greater than a single object, a single thought, and a single experience. We are natural, naked, and empty awareness that witnesses all change: failure, success, and growth. We are the flow of change itself, not any of the individual ripples in the tide. Our being is present in all we know and understand as reality. This is always there to be recognized.
This kind of discovery can lead to a sense of new being. A being that is beyond physical and mental activity, or what we might conventionally define as a self. Instead in this state of recognition, we are simultaneously seeing and knowing that the Self is one with the Whole.
In this recognition there is not a busy stream of mental utterances (no attention on the reflections or distinctions of Self and Other). There is only a nurturing nothingness which gives way to all process and all change as it arises in the emptiness of time-space-consciousness. The reflections are still there to be noticed by the mind, but the mind is not present to witness those illusions of permanence and identity. Instead, only One sense of being shines through. It is the only ray of light traveling through the vacuum of space. It is only One.