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A friend wrote to me recently asking, ‘Is there any way to ascertain whether the feeling of “I” is being attended to? Is it enough if the mind’s “power of attention” is brought to a standstill?’ He also quoted the following (inaccurate) translation of question 4 and Sri Ramana’s reply in the second chapter of Upadēśa Mañjari (‘A Bouquet of Teachings’, or ‘Spiritual Instructions’ as this English translation in The Collected Works of Sri Ramana Maharshi is called), and asked ‘How can remaining still be considered as intense activity? Is being still a state of effort or effortlessness? I am slightly confused’: 4. Is the state of ‘being still’ a state involving effort or effortlessness? It is not an effortless state of indolence. All mundane activities which are ordinarily called effort are performed with the aid of a portion of the mind and with frequent breaks. But the act of communion with the Self ( atma vyavahara ) or remaining still inwardly is intense activity which is performed w...

I recently did an interview with Laurent Bannock, an expert in sport and exercise nutrition.  His podcast We Do Science  has rapidly become quite popular, due to Laurent's credibility and the interesting guests he interviews.  We covered body composition, metabolically healthy obesity, the relationship between BMI and mortality, calorie counting, body fat regulation, and other related topics. If you've already listened to several of my interviews and are starting to find them repetitive, you might enjoy this one because we cover some new ground.  Laurent was a gracious host.  Follow the link below to listen: Neurobiology of Obesity, with Stephan Guyenet

I have mentioned in several blog articles Vice-Admiral W. Usborne Moore's books documenting the epoch of Spiritualism at the beginning of the 20th Century:  Glimpses of the Next State (1911) and The Voices (1913).  The following passage from the earlier book provides an account of the first seance that he attended.  His circumstances in life allowed him to intensively study what he referred to as Spiritualists and spiritism, resulting with many unforgettable experiences.  The mediumship of Cecil Husk (1847-1920) is also a subject of the two preceding articles. The first séance I attended was on November 16, 1904, in a private room—a studio in Acacia Gardens, St. John's Wood.  The medium was Cecil Husk, who is nearly blind.  I believe he can see pictures or writing put very close to his face, but for all the ordinary purposes of life he is helpless, and has to be attended out of doors by a member of his family.  The table on this occasion...

This week's lucky "winner"... the Cinnabon cinnamon roll!!! Read more »

A friend recently sent me a PDF copy of The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and referring to the sixth chapter of it, ‘The Inner Body’, he wrote: The chapter that talks on the inner body is quite remarkable, by taking the attention away from thoughts/body/sense perceptions and into the energy field of the body, there is the clear and vibrantly alive feeling “I Am” and nothing else. Going deeper into it, the feeling of inside and out dissolves, subject and object dissolve, and there is this sense of unlimited, unbound (by the limits of the body) and unchanging beingness or I Amness. Can this be likened to self-attention? Or more clearly, is this the same practice? Because in both we are removing attention from everything except the feeling “I Am” and focussing it on the feeling. Could it be that only the description is different? Where you describe it as focussing the attention on the consciousness “I Am” Eckhart describes it as focussing the attention on the aliveness/consciousness th...

The metabolic syndrome (MetSyn) is a cluster of signs including abdominal obesity, insulin resistance, high blood pressure, and blood lipid disturbances.  MetSyn is the quintessential modern metabolic disorder, and it affects about one third of Americans.  Many MetSyn diets recommend eating high-fiber foods, and research on the role of the gut microbiota in body weight and health tends to support this recommendation.  Yet these diets are complex, so it's difficult to attribute positive effects to the high-fiber foods specifically, and some people have questioned the benefits of dietary fiber.  Do high-fiber foods really improve MetSyn and promote weight loss? The study Read more »

In several comments on some of my recent articles various friends have tried to argue that we need not be concerned about whether or not the world is real or exists independent of our experience of it. For example, in his first comment on Science and self-investigation Periya Eri wrote: What is wrong in our deep-rooted “but unfounded” belief that the world exists independent of our experience of it? The statement saying that the world is unreal does not in the least change the fact that we have to master all difficulties in our life. The same evaluation goes for the conclusion that the world does not exist at all independent of our mind that experiences it. And the same is true of the statement that even the mind that experiences this world is itself unreal. Also the account that the mind does not actually exist at all and that after its investigation it will disappear, and that along with it the entire appearance of this world will also cease to exist. […] In reply to this I wrote a...

Henry Morgan materialization at Charles Williams seance ( The Voice Box  photo) This article is about seance manifestations of the visitor from the ascended realm known as 'John King' as chronicled in W. Usborne Moore’s books.  Passages from Glimpses of the Next State (1911) describe incidents at seances conducted by the nearly blind medium Cecil Husk.  The book is subtitled "The Education of an Agnostic."  In the Introduction, Moore wrote: "The principal control or familiar spirit of Husk is the famous buccaneer of the time of Charles II, Sir Henry Morgan, who now calls himself 'John King.'  Often have I heard his stentorian voice and seen him materialize above the medium's head and dematerialize through the table."  Moore presented a description of Husk's seances: The séances were held in the dark.  When a spirit materialised it showed itself by aid of an illuminated slate, prepared and lying on the table.  Sometimes they spoke while in si...

Health can be defined as the absence of disease, and that is the lens through which we've been examining meat so far.  However, most of us have a broader view of health that also includes optimal growth and development, physical and mental performance, well-being, fertility, immunity, robustness, and resilience.  What role does meat play in this broader view of health? Non-industrial cultures One of the things I keep coming back to in this series is the strong natural affinity that our species has for meat.  Every culture that does not prohibit meat consumption for religious reasons (e.g., Indian Hindus) seeks and eats meat avidly. A key fact that stands out from my recent conversations with anthropologists is that hunter-gatherers and subsistence agriculturalists place a high value on meat, even if they already have regular access to it.  Here's an excerpt from a paper by Kim Hill, Magdalena Hurtado, and colleagues ( 1 ): Observations of the exchange rate between other forager...

In the final paragraph of one of my recent articles, The connection between consciousness and body , I wrote: So long as we allow ourself to attend to anything other than ourself, our body and all the other extraneous things that we thus experience seem to be real, so Sri Ramana advises us to try to attend only to ourself, the ‘I’ who is conscious of both ourself and all those other things. Therefore if we wish to follow his path and thereby to experience what this ‘I’ really is, we should not be concerned with our body or any connection we may seem to have with it, but should focus all our interest and attention only on ourself, the one absolute consciousness or pure self-awareness ‘I am’. Referring to this, a friend wrote to me asking: 1) If Sri Ramana advises us, the advice is for our mind or intelligence — that is, the action needs to be performed by the mind or intelligence, or by the ego-I — through attention. 2) But then since you explained very often that attention on the self ...