Reply to comment

I, too, am interested in biofeedback-and meditation, and a whole host of other awareness sharpening technologies. I use the word technologies because even though some of these techniques are quite ancient, dating back to the beginning of recorded history, the term best captures my view of them. They are tools, in the strictest sense, as I understand them.

Biofeedback has been proven to help people gain mastery of their pain and other physical complaints, while meditation has been proven to help people reduce stress, lower their blood pressure, etc. It can also be rather convincingly argued that meditation increases one's general feeling of well-being, sense of connectedness with and compassion for other, etc. An of course, some figures of world-historic significance have claimed that meditation helped rthem achieve Enlightenment. I can say from my own experience that regular meditation greatly ameliorates the anxiety/sadness/unhappiness I feel as a result of that "I'm just a lonely bag of skin in an indifferent cosmos" metaphysics of Western analytic philosophy. Hey Descartes! The whole mind-world separation thing? Thanks a lot bud!

I am a firm believer in the idea that thought creates one's reality, and nothing I've yet heard in this course has dissuaded me of this. As the old hermetic saying goes, "As above so below; as within, so without". In more modern lingo, "As you think so it becomes." The idea becomes a lot less fruity-seeming when you consider the fact that we are tool-wielding animals who both make and are made by our tools. All of which began with a thought, or many many thoughts which were thought by many many people...

I am a bit incomfortable with the idea that some folks may have more of a natural aptitiude for control of their awareness/attention. Perhaps it *is* true- just as some people seem to be born with an aptitude for music or art. But I think *training* is the key to developing control of one's attention. Some meditative technologies take more than seven years to learm (and this is after mastering more basic skills)!!This is akin to earning one's Ph.D.

More later, many thoughts. Hope this isn't too scatterbrained. Serendip ate my first post! Bad, bad Serendip.