Ancient Wisdom Beats Psychoanalysis

I recently came across this article discussing a recent study on managing anger. The study examined the concept of "venting" to see if it reduced anger effectively. This concept is very much a part of our popular culture, and it goes back to the psychoanalytic model of the mind proposed by Sigmund Freud over a hundred years ago. Freud was not a good scientist, but he was a pretty amazing popularizer.

It is something of a cliche that psychology (and magick, for that matter) tends to latch onto the latest new technology as a metaphor for how the mind works. The recent fascination with computer-like models bears this out today. Before computers it was telephone switchboards, before that it was electricity, and back in Freud's day, psychoanalysis latched onto a model based on something akin to hydraulic pressure. Freud saw emotions as a kind of energy that could be bottled up ("repression") or transformed into socially viable outlets ("sublimation") rather than expressed directly in socially unacceptable ways.

The idea of venting anger comes right out of this schema. Anger is seen as a building up of pressure, like water boiling in a closed pot. "Blowing off steam" in theory reduces this pressure. But in reality, the scientific basis for this has not been supported by studies. Conditioning theory, for example, suggests the opposite, that acting out in anger feels good in the moment but reinforces acting out. This can lead to more suboptimal behavior, not less. But again, studies that directly support this conditioning model are likewise sparse.

So that is what these researchers sought to test, in order to determine how to actually reduce anger. What they found was interesting because it lines up perfectly with recommendations from ancient spiritual practices and does not exactly fit either of the modern models. The most effective methods for curbing anger were found to involve reducing physical arousal - by means of, for example, meditation. That's advice they could have gotten from the Buddhist sangha up the street, and from many other sources including Hinduism and even contemplative Christianity.

Damien Echols is an Occult Author

Back in 2015, Damien Echols wrote an article for Vice about how he used meditation and magical practices to keep himself sane on death row. Echols was one of the West Memphis Three, a group of teenagers convicted of the murder of a young boy mostly because they were "weirdo loners" and because Echols was interested in occultism.

That provided prosecutors with a motive back in the Satanic Panic days, since what the fundies were going around telling law enforcement is that occultists did what they did "just to be evil" - as opposed to, say, casting spells that have an actual function and are intended to produce practical results. Echols has now written a book on the practices he was able to keep up in prison. The book covers pretty standard Regardie/Golden Dawn methods - LRP, Middle Pillar, and so forth - but Echols offers his personal experience of how these rituals and techniques can be employed in extremely difficult circumstances.

Though our culture has consigned “magic” to fiction, stage illusions, or superstitions about dark practices, the magick Damien learned is an ancient Western tradition equal the Eastern practices of Buddhism, Taoism, and yoga in its wisdom and transformative power. Here he brings you an engaging and highly accessible guide for bringing magick into your own life, including:

• What is High Magick? Damien clears away the stigma and reveals the history and core teachings of this extraordinary art.
• The Four-Fold Breath—a foundational meditation practice to train your mind and body to channel subtle energies.
• The Middle Pillar—how to bring divine energy into the central channel of your body for empowerment and healing.
• The Qabalistic Cross—a centering technique to help you stay balanced and protected regardless of circumstances.
• The Lesser Rituals of the Pentagram—powerful practices for banishing negative energies and invoking energy to manifest your goals.
• Working with angelic beings and other spiritual allies to support your practice.
• Creating thoughtforms to assist you in your ongoing magickal development.
• Guidance for overcoming your doubts, enhancing your visualization skills, creating talismans, practicing magick ethically, and much more.

“Magick is a journey,” writes Damien. “It’s a continuously unfolding path that has no end. You can study and practice magick for the rest of your life and you will still never learn everything that it has to teach you.”

Mark Stavish used to say that "nobody ever got enlightened using the LBRP." That's probably a true statement since generally speaking you need to invoke in addition to banishing in order to make real spiritual progress. But I think it's safe to say that Echols offers a unique perspective on these rituals and their overall effectiveness. Yes, you can do magick on death row without tools or implements or anything really, and it can and does work. Echols' example shows that these well-known rituals can indeed by part of a comprehensive spiritual practice that expands and uplifts your consciousness.

Meditation Works

Last week's dramatic rescue of twelve teenage soccer players and their coach from an underground cave system in Thailand was all over the news. Not as well-reported, though, is how the coach managed to keep the boys calm throughout what must have been a pretty terrifying ordeal. As Vox reports, the coach had spent ten years at a Buddhist monastery and taught them meditation.

Rain trapped the group in the cave on June 23rd, and they were not found until July 2nd. That's eleven days during which they literally had no idea whether or not they would be found alive. The rescue effort took eight more days, and was not complete until July 10th.

“Look at how calm they were sitting there waiting. No one was crying or anything. It was astonishing,” the mother of one of the boys told the AP, referring to a widely shared video of the moment the boys were found. Turns out that their coach, Ekapol Chanthawong, who led them on a hike into the cave when it flooded on June 23, trained in meditation as a Buddhist monk for a decade before becoming a soccer coach.

According to multiple news sources, he taught the boys, ages 11 to 16, to meditate in the cave to keep them calm and preserve their energy through their two-week ordeal. And British diver Ben Reymenants, who was involved with the rescue operation, told Vox on Thursday that each of the boys did an hour of meditation with the coach before they were brought out of the cave between Sunday and Tuesday. “He could meditate up to an hour,” Ekapol’s aunt, Tham Chanthawong, told the AP. “It has definitely helped him and probably helps the boys to stay calm.”

Ekapol, 25, went to live in a monastery at age 12 after he was orphaned. According the Straits Times, he trained to be a monk for 10 years at a monastery in Mae Sai, Thailand, but left to care for a sick grandmother. He then was hired to be the assistant coach of the team, known as the Wild Boars. Coach Ake, as he is known, still maintains close contacts at the monastery. The abbot there told the Wall Street Journal he’s “a responsible young man who meditates regularly.”

As a teenager I loved caves and I still do. I dragged my parents to every cave tour on every vacation we ever took. I never have felt lost underground, or claustrophobic, or anything. But I can tell you that my high school self would have found this absolutely horrifying. Even being violently murdered is over quickly. This is sitting in the cold and damp, wondering if any future awaits you besides slowly starving or suffocating in the dark.

But meditation works. Focusing on the practice helped the boys remain as calm as possible under the circumstances, such that when rescuers arrived they seemed confused that they had been underground for as long as they had been. Keeping your attention on the present moment helps to pass the time, and helps you feel less depleted by boredom when all you can do is wait. And hey, it works great for practicing magick too!

Yoga. Meditation, and "Ego Inflation"

The occult community tends to be a little behind the times with respect to modern psychology. As I've covered here before, the psychoanalytic model of cognition is still something that some occult traditions work with, or at the very least a model on which some esoteric ideas are based. The trouble is that the psychoanalytic model doesn't work. Not only has it been shown to be ineffective under controlled conditions, it is mostly rendered meaningless by what we now understand about memory and so forth.

One psychoanalytic concept that has a lot of staying power in occultism is the idea of "ego inflation." After all, who hasn't seen idiots going on and on about how awesome and powerful they are, especially on the Internet? And one of the ideas is that, in theory, spiritual practices are supposed to prevent this. The problem is when people don't really understand how egotism works, or where it comes from - usually because they accept one or more of the many incorrect assumptions that are endemic to the psychoanalytic model.

Today's story is a perfect example. Two Australian studies claim to show that practicing yoga or meditation leads to "ego inflation." This is an interesting area to look into, but it seems to me that both studies have significant problems. The biggest is that it appears the researchers have assumed that high self-esteem is the same thing as an "inflated ego." On the other hand, I don't think this is true at all. While it is possible to evaluate egotism from a behavioral perspective, treating "the ego" as a "thing" that gets bigger or smaller has almost nothing to do with how cognition really works.

In the paper, published online by University of Southampton and due to be published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers note that Buddhism’s teachings that a meditation practice helps overcome the ego conflicts with US psychologist William James’s argument that practicing any skill breeds a sense of self-enhancement (the psychological term for inflated self-regard.) There was already a fair bit of evidence supporting William James’s theory, broadly speaking, but a team of researchers from University Mannheim in Germany decided to test it specifically in the context of yoga and meditation.

As a point, yoga as currently practiced in Western countries does no such thing. It's not really even Buddhist. It's (sort of) Hindu, and the spiritual goals of Hinduism are different than those of Buddhism. Furthermore, modern yoga is not even a traditional Indian spiritual practice. It is a synthesis of poses illustrated in Hindu scriptures combined with European calisthenics that was really only assembled into a system in the 1960's. Yoga from before that time was very different than what we have today. Yoga was practiced during meditation, which is maybe where the authors' confusion comes from, but meditation is a discipline in its own right that was performed in addition to holding the poses for long periods of time.

Lessons from Wild Wild Country

There's been some buzz on the Internet about the new Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. The series documents the conflict between the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later known as Osho, and the residents of Antelope, Oregon. Antelope is a small town twenty miles from the site where the Rajneeshis attempted to build a city called Rajneeshpuram based on the teachings of their guru.

The series makes it clear that there was all sorts of bullshit on both sides of the conflict. The people of Antelope come off as a bunch of intolerant hicks who hated on the Rajneeshis before they even interacted with them basically because they were "weird" and - gasp - liked having sex. I find it hard to believe that if the Rajneeshis were a bunch of Christians there would have been anywhere near the level of conflict that eventually took place.

The Rajneeshis, on the other hand, made elaborate claims about how enormous their new city was going to be. They promoted estimates of fifty thousand people, when the community at its height was more like maybe ten. In response to those exaggerated projections, the people of Antelope freaked. They put through legal motions to block the formation of Rajneeshpuram, which meant that the Rajneeshis had to relocate their official offices to the nearest community - Antelope. So the tiny town was overrun with Rajneeshis conducting the business of the movement.

Some Rajneeshis started buying property in Antelope to be closer to the group's administrative offices, which stoked fears that they were "taking over" the community. That fueled more conflict and more resentment, and everything escalated from there. It's easy to suggest that if the people of Antelope had just left the Rajneeshis alone they would have built all of their infrastructure in Rajneeshpuram and likely would have left Antelope alone.

As Aleister Crowley commented in Magick Without Tears, ninety percent of "Do what thou wilt" can pretty much be summed up as "mind your own business." Both sides could have used that principle to better effect.

Regarding "Experienced Practitioners"

Last week it was pointed out to me that a lot of magicians online tend to say things like "practice xyz should only be done by experienced practitioners," without any real frame of reference as to what an "experienced practitioner" might be. As I see it, there are a number of reasons people say things like this, and some simple benchmarks you can apply to your own work to see if you "qualify."

First, there is a lot of nonsense in the magical community with people trying to one-up each other to show how "hard core" they are, and this is generally a recipe for disaster - or at least a whole lot of bullshit. You should pay attention to your own work and where it is getting you rather than trying to compare yourself to what others say they do. This is an important point - social media is full of people who exaggerate what they do, and how successful their magical work is. In fact, there is a tiny percentage of the population that are interested in magick at all, and the majority of those folks don't really practice. Also, there is a talent for magick like there is a talent for everything else, and a really tiny percentage of people get great results on their first or second ritual.

Second, anybody who has been a magician on the Internet for any period of time has run into "dark fluffers." Sometimes this is a variant of the previous case, but other times it consists of people who immediately gravitate towards the "evil" parts of magical systems and ignore the others. Enochian cacodemons are a classic example of this. The cacodemons are actually kind of a pain to work with not because they are "evil," but because they are stupid. They are less complex and less intelligent than basically every other class of entity in the system. That means that you are a lot more likely to run into a "monkey's paw" situation when working with them if you are not entirely clear with your injunctions and limitations.

Practical Magick Versus Mysticism

This article is a response to this post over on Talking About Ritual Magick, and is essentially an expanded version of my comment which you can read over there. Frater Barrabbas begins with what I think is a completely reasonable denunciation of hucksters in the occult community peddling magick as an end-all, be-all, instant panacea - to anyone who is willing to pay up. The New Age community went through that whole thing back in the 1970's, and what emerged was a culture of ten thousand dollar "become an instant shaman" weekend retreats. As serious magicians and occultists, we would be wise not to repeat that nonsense.

At the same time, though, I think the post goes a little too far in the opposite direction. Maybe it's something that I'm reading into it, but parts of it come off as a little dismissive of practical magick in general. I'll freely admit to having a bit of a chip on my shoulder regarding that perspective - I have heard it many times over the years from people who start out doing magick and get heavily into mysticism and/or meditation. Now I don't think there's anything wrong with either of those approaches, and there's also nothing wrong with deciding that practical work is not really your thing. But it is mine, and I never have understood why for some, the result of mystical work seems to be that they feel a need to denigrate the practices of others.

To be clear, I do not think that this is what Frater Barrabbas is doing. He's saying that from a non-dual perspective, practical magick is essentially pointless - and to be fair, this is entirely true. However, this is also true of striving for anything in your life, not just magick. Through meditation and mysticism it is true that you can train the mind to accept almost anything. Former OTO head Karl Germer famously relied on his mystical training to help him survive a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. And sometimes it's easier to train yourself to accept your place in the world than it is to transform your situation.

But should you? I'm convinced that the answer there is not "always," but it also is not "never." It's somewhere in between, and I have run into too many folks over the course of my life who at some point in their magical career have decided that "always" really is the best answer. I agree with the general principle that the eventual goal of magick is self-transformation and mystical attainment, but why not make your life circumstances better along the way? It also seems to me that practical work can sometimes reveal the nature of your will more simply and elegantly than meditation can. It gives you a benchmark for your practice that is objectively measurable, which is generally not the case with more subjective mystical work.

Inside a Cult

Filmmaker Will Allen recently released a documentary entitled Holy Hell about his experiences inside a cult. A lot of the time, the word "cult" gets thrown around in such a way that it could refer to any new religious movement, but as Allen tells it, in this case the moniker fits. Allen was a member of a group called Buddhafield (which, as far as I can tell, did not in fact practice Buddhism) for more than twenty years. In the documentary he alleges that the group's leader, a man named Michel Rostand, was a classic manipulative cult leader who abused his followers.

His insider document of two decades of life inside the cult, entitled Holy Hell, combines home movies and official footage from these years alongside new interviews with former members detailing the sadistic, predatory nature that lay behind their leader's ostensibly gentle, omnipotent façade. Buddhafield's service-oriented, off-the-grid approach to attaining peace and harmony — "It was our little utopia in the middle of this big giant city," says one former member in the film — disguised its leader's iniquities, ranging from total mind control and forced abortions to alleged widespread sexual abuse and rape. The carrot dangled to all adherents was "The Knowing," a ritual in which Rostand would "transfer his energy" to the participant so they would truly know God.

I should probably point out here that nobody can do spiritual practice for you. Priests can't do it, gurus can't do it, even Jesus can't do it. It is useful to find a teacher who can show you how to practice, but after that you're on your own. The ironic thing here is that if some of these students expended the time and effort that they spent fitting into the group on their own personal practice, they probably would be a lot further along the spiritual path at this point.

Incidentally, that's why my Enochian books are written the way that they are. Instead of filling them with a bunch of personal "received material" or deep symbolic analysis, what they teach you is precisely how to get in touch with the Enochian entities and work with them. I don't necessarily know what you'll get when you do the work, but realizations stemming from your own work will always be more significant for your spiritual development than the realizations of others.

Thoughts on Meditation

Meditation is a practice that every ceremonial magician should know how to do. There are a number of misconceptions about meditation that I run into all the time, so I want to go over some of those and explain why they don't make sense. Then I want to share some insights from my own practice over the years.

It doesn't really matter that much what form of meditation you use. So if you've studied Zen or Vajrayana or some other system and those methods work for you, there's no reason to stop doing them because you're also doing ceremonial magick.

Studies have found that while meditation has many cognitive benefits, the differences between the various systems are negligible and probably have more to do with individual differences. The point is that you do the practice, and that you do it regularly.

For those who have never studied meditation, the method I recommend learning is modern mindfulness meditation, a simplified non-sectarian system that is based on techniques akin to those of Zazen or Shamatha.

Here's how you do it:

1. Find a comfortable sitting position with your spine straight.
2. Soften your gaze and look downward at about a 45-degree angle.
3. Focus on your breathing, paying attention to how it feels as you inhale and exhale.
4. When you catch your mind wandering, bring your attention back to the breath.
5. Maintain this practice for about 20 minutes.

That's it. Simple, right?

But more people have trouble with it than you might think. Some of that is due to false expectations, and some of it is due to poor instruction. Here's some of what I've learned from my own practice.

Mummified Monk Still Alive?

A Buddhist expert has claimed that a mummified monk found in Mongolia is still alive, in a deep state of meditation called "tudkam." The remains are about 200 years old and show a remarkable degree of preservation, though from all outward appearances the body is completely mummified and shows no signs of life.

According to the same expert, Dr. Barry Kerzin, the tudkam state is a predecessor to the attainment of the "rainbow body," a transformation in which the body is converted in some fashion to "pure light." I have heard reports of lamas entering tudkam at the moment of physical death, and apparently their bodies do not seem to cool normally even after more than a week. But of course that's not nearly as long as two centuries.

Forensic examinations are under way on the amazing remains, which are believed to be around 200 years old, having been preserved in animal skin. But one expert has insisted the human relic is actually in ‘very deep meditation’ and in a rare and very special spiritual state known as ‘tukdam’.

Over the last 50 years there are said to have been 40 such cases in India involving meditating Tibetan monks. Dr Barry Kerzin, a famous Buddhist monk and a physician to the Dalai Lama, said: ‘I had the privilege to take care of some meditators who were in a tukdam state.

‘If the person is able to remain in this state for more than three weeks – which rarely happens – his body gradually shrinks, and in the end all that remains from the person is his hair, nails, and clothes. Usually in this case, people who live next to the monk see a rainbow that glows in the sky for several days. This means that he has found a ‘rainbow body’. This is the highest state close to the state of Buddha’.

It seems to me that observation of the mummy makes for a perfect test of the "rainbow body" effect. If the monk is indeed still alive in some sense but on the way to accomplishing the transformation, perhaps we could capture it on a security camera or something. A few of these transformations allegedly took place in the last century, listed here. But as far as I know it has never been directly observed.

It can't be a matter-to-energy conversion because the mass of the body would yield energy far in excess of that produced by even hundreds of nuclear explosions and nothing of that magnitude has ever been reported. But if it's real, what else could it be? Suffice it to say that I would love to be able to study a real case and make some sort of scientific determination.

Brain Research and Meditation Methods

One of the more intriguing current trends in brain research is that over the course of the last decade or so, neuroscientists have been paying more attention to altered states of consciousness produced by "mystical" practices such as meditation. While I am not a proponent of the "mind as epiphenomenon of the brain" model of consciousness, at the same time it's clear that subjective experience can be related to neural events.

One of the more recent developments that came from this research is "mindfulness meditation," a non-sectarian meditation method similar to the Buddhist shamatha method. In this practice, thoughts are observed as they arise, and whenever the practitioner notices his or her attention being drawn to them, the attention is returned to the breath. This method produces a physiological state that researchers call the "relaxation response."

In this state, both the mind and the body are calmed. Studies have shown that the relaxation response can reduce everything from anxiety to inflammation, and that the benefits of this can be obtained after a relatively short period of practice. It should be no surprise to anyone familiar with neuroanatomy that the relaxation response achieves those results by activating the parasympathetic, or calming portion of the nervous system.

This explains in part why Theravada Buddhists who primarily practice this sort of meditation abstain from alcohol. Alcohol behaves like a stimulant in low doses because while it is a depressant, it depresses the parasympathetic nervous system before it acts upon the sympathetic, or arousing nervous system. So in fact there is a clear physiological reason why consuming alcohol interferes with Theravada practice - it undermines the primary mechanism behind the relaxation response.

In some cases, mindfulness meditation can produce the same sorts of cognitive problems that Buddhist teachers also sometimes encounter with shamatha. Again, this should be no surprise since the methods are so similar. Earlier this summer an article was published by The Atlantic discussing the work of Dr. Willoughby Britton, who is investigating cases in which the mindfulness meditation technique goes wrong.

That Guru's Not Dead!

In a story oddly reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch, followers and heirs of an Indian guru are now in a legal battle over whether the guru is dead or in a deep state of meditation. Shri Ashutosh Maharaj was - or is, depending on whose side you're on - one of the wealthiest gurus in India with assets valued around £100 million. According to his family, he died in January and his followers placed his body in a freezer. His followers, on the other hand, believe he is simply meditating and claim that they froze his body in order to preserve it for when he eventually awakens.

While he is thought to have died from a heart attack, his devotees believe he has simply drifted into a deeper form of the meditation he promotes as a pathway to self-realisation. A statement on the group's website reads: "His Holiness Shri Ashutosh Maharaj ji has been in deep meditative state (Samadhi) since 29th January 2014."

According to one of his aides, who asked not to be named, "Maharaj has been in deep meditation. He has spent many years meditating in sub-zero temperatures in the Himalayas, there is nothing unusual in it. He will return to life as soon as he feels and we will ensure his body is preserved until then", he said.

His body is held in a guarded room in a deep freezer on his 100 acre retreat in Nurmahal, Jalandhar, where only a few elders and sect doctors are allowed to enter.

Although Punjab Police initially confirmed his death, the Punjab High Court later dismissed its status report and local governmental officials said it was a spiritual matter and that the guru's followers cannot be forced to believe he is dead.

While there may be a spiritual component to all of this, Maharaj's followers also seem motivated by financial concerns. According to his family, if it can be successfully argued that the guru still lives his followers will maintain control of his extensive financial resources. There's no mention in the story of whether or not Maharaj made a will, but it sounds like he didn't - so everything goes to his family by default once he is officially dead. There's a lesson for any would-be gurus out there - if you don't want anything this silly to go on once you pass away, make sure that you have a will specifying exactly how much of your estate is to remain with your followers and how much of it is to be distributed elsewhere.

Politicians Who Meditate

Meditation has been found to both reduce stress and expand awareness, and there are few who could benefits from those effects more than members of the United States Congress. Congressional approval ratings have been low for many years, and over the last two decades harsh polarization between the two major parties has been the norm. Republican gains in 2010 gave their party control of the House of Representatives while Democrats retained control of the Senate, creating a divided congress that has passed little major legislation since that time. Salon has an article up about the so-called "mindfulness caucus," a group of legislators who have taken up meditation.

This year saw gains for bona fide Buddhists, with Mazie Hirono becoming the first to enter the Senate in history, and with fellow Buddhist Hawaiian Colleen Hanabusa in the House. And from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, to health-conscious Bill Clinton, to redeemed Southern Republican lawmaker Mark Sanford, a growing number of politicians and the people they employ are getting turned on to the benefits of meditation, in general.

“If more people meditiated, we probably would have less arguing, less animus, physically, mentally, and legislatively, and we’d probably have a lot more effective legislation because people would be coming from a much more balanced place when they’re doing their jobs as legislators,” said Los Angeles Democratic Rep. Tony Cardenas, who has been meditating twice a day for a little over a year (at least when his schedule allows).

Many of those involved are Christian rather than Buddhist, but there's nothing wrong with that. Contemplative Christianity has a long history of meditators inspired by Western rather than Eastern esotericism, and studies have shown that the benefits of meditation accrue regardless of the practitioner's religious foundation. Contemplative practitioners have the advantage that they actually are doing spiritual practice, unlike those who do little more than attend church services.

The mindfulness caucus is small, and unless it grows substantially I doubt it will do much to change the tone in Washington. On the other hand, I'm certainly open to be proven wrong. Lawmakers with more enlightened perspectives certainly can't hurt.

Do The Practice, Get The Results

A subject that gets discussed a lot among magicians is the role of belief in spiritual and magical practice. The chaos magick paradigm emphasizes belief as the engine that makes magick work, but many adherents of other schools take a more nuanced approach. In my experience you can't treat belief like a quantity that you can have "more" of, but rather the key is that during the time in which you are performing a practice you will get the best results if you remove all doubt in it's effectiveness. It seems to me that the better hypothesis here is not that you need to cultivate "more belief" but rather "less doubt" to get the best magical results. This is a self-reinforcing process, since nothing removes doubt like success.

In Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae, Aleister Crowley writes the following:

In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist.

It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

A number of atheists have in fact taken up practices such as meditation and prayer, having discovered the value of working with their minds in terms of how they function in their daily lives. Practices such as meditation do in fact work whether or not you believe in any sort of supernatural or even paranormal level of reality, as they focus on the powers and properties of the mind itself.

There Are Limits

A British woman who attempted to test "breatharianism," the idea that it is possible to live on sunlight and water without eating food, has ended her experiment at Day 47. On the one hand it's pretty easy to scoff like many skeptics on this forum are doing in the comments because the whole concept seems so outlandish, but at the same time I'm impressed that she would be willing to put this to the test in such a public fashion.

After dropping about 20 percent of her body weight, Naveena Shine, the 65-year-old Eastside woman who got worldwide publicity for trying to just live on light and no food, is calling it quits with her grand experiment. Monday was Day No. 45 of no food, just water and tea “with a splash of milk.”

Shine had dropped to 126 pounds from her original weight of 159 pounds on her 5-foot, 4-inch frame. She says she’s quitting on Wednesday in part because she’s run out of money, and part because of the public reaction.

What I find remarkable here is that I think I would lose a lot more than thirty or so pounds if I didn't eat for a month and a half. Hunger strikers generally start dying at around 50 days, and Shine only dropped to what is still considered a relatively normal weight for her height during that time. We do know that meditation can slow metabolism and little of her spiritual practices have been reported, so perhaps a mechanism like that may have come into effect.

Your Brain on Yoga

Aleister Crowley was one of the first Western teachers to recommend a simple, practical regimen of Hatha yoga to his esoteric students. While his system includes only a handful of postures rather than the hundreds you can learn today at your local yoga center, it is remarkably complete in that it does a good job of including one posture of each general type. In Confessions, Crowley wrote that one of the functions of his yoga method was to allow the student to produce genius at will, and according to a new study it appears he was onto something. The study found that after twenty minutes of Hatha yoga practice students performed better on various brain functioning tests.

Researchers found that people did better -- both speed-wise and accuracy-wise -- on brain functioning tests after just 20 minutes of Hatha yoga, compared with aerobic exercise.

"It appears that following yoga practice, the participants were better able to focus their mental resources, process information quickly, more accurately and also learn, hold and update pieces of information more effectively than after performing an aerobic exercise bout," study researcher Neha Gothe, a professor of kinesiology, health and sport studies at the university, said in a statement. Gothe conducted the study while a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"The breathing and meditative exercises aim at calming the mind and body and keeping distracting thoughts away while you focus on your body, posture or breath. Maybe these processes translate beyond yoga practice when you try to perform mental tasks or day-to-day activities," he added.

Yoga and Meditation in the Military

The United States Military is trying out a new program called Mental Fitness Training, which integrates yoga, meditation, and breathing exercises in an effort to cultivate mindfulness among active service members and manage stress. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the military has reached epidemic proportions, particularly among soldiers who spend multiple tours of duty in occupied areas and war zones. Meditation appears to be one of the few methods that can help ward off this condition. By acclimatizing the brain to calmer states, it should be possible to limit the damage caused by artificially high adrenaline levels maintained over a significant period of time. Research has shown that meditation evens out the "fight-or-flight" response in the limbic cortex, so there's reason to think that it might be just the thing to help keep our soldiers more mentally healthy and address rising suicide rates that most experts link to PTSD.

The suicide rate of active service members has skyrocketed in the last few years. In 2012, the U.S. military averaged one suicide every single day, with service members were — shockingly — more likely to commit suicide than be killed on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, there is already a disturbing pattern of aggressive Christian proselytizing and accusations of government-sponsored prayer in major military institutions, including at West Point and the US Air Force Academy, which some say is more divisive than healing. A Yale Divinity School study voiced “concern that the overwhelmingly evangelical tone of general Protestant worship encouraged religious divisions rather than fostering understanding among basic cadets.”

On the other hand, new programs like the Mind Fitness Training program are, in part, a non-religious response to these soaring suicide rates and the recognition that, for active service members, mental health and well being is just as important as physical training.

A New Meditation App

A while back I posted on an iPhone app developed by the Roman Catholic Church of Ireland for people interested in joining the priesthood. Now meditators have gotten in on the game with a new app for both Android and iPhone intended to get more people meditating. Called "Buddhify," the app provides basic meditation instructions and is being marketed by emphasizing the stress-reducing aspects of the practice.

The Buddhify app introduces users to restful mindfulness meditation practices by allowing them to select from 32 audio tracks to hear instruction from either a male or female voice.

Although its name makes reference to Buddhism, a religion in which meditation plays a key role, the app is intended for use by anybody interested in mental wellbeing.

"The only prerequisite is having a mind," Rohan Gunatillake said. "Its origins are in the Buddhist tradition, but it's totally independent. It's a way of training your attention in such a way that it develops positive qualities in your mind."

The app also has a two-player mode allowing friends to meditate together.

Even though the app makes few references to spiritual realization, if it succeeds at getting more people to meditate those results should follow for at least a subset of them. The dashboard shown above looks a little hokey, but if that means more people see meditation as accessible and take up the practice I'm nonetheless all for it.

One of these days I should see about developing my own set of apps devoted to magical practices. I can imagine, for example, an "Evoker" app that would bring up the appropriate conjurations for spirits and so forth as you reach each phase of an evocation ritual. I could implement it by putting together some kind of standard ritual notation that would allow you to import a specific text file for the ritual you want to perform, and in fact the ritual template I include in Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy would be a good place to start as far as the structure goes. It wouldn't have that big a market, but I can immediately see how useful it could be for serious practicing magicians.

New Findings on Meditation and Pain Management

Meditation for pain and stress management has been studied for decades. It is fairly well established that meditators can decrease their sensitivity to pain and reduce their stress levels, but a new study suggests that these benefits can be obtained without weeks of initial training. It also employs brain scans to identify some of the key areas activated by the practice and shed some light on how the pain management effect works on a physiological level.

In the study, researchers mildly burned 15 men and women in a lab on two separate occasions, before and after the volunteers attended four 20-minute meditation training sessions over the course of four days. During the second go-round, when the participants were instructed to meditate, they rated the exact same pain stimulus -- a 120-degree heat on their calves -- as being 57 percent less unpleasant and 40 percent less intense, on average.

"That's pretty dramatic," says Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., the lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The reduction in pain ratings was substantially greater than those seen in similar studies involving placebo pills, hypnosis, and even morphine and other painkilling drugs, he adds.

It's pretty remarkable to see that meditation was able to achieve greater levels of pain reduction than clinically effective drugs like morphine. There has been a lot of debate lately in the medical research community surrounding the placebo effect and how it might work, and my guess is that these meditators may be tapping into the same mechanism. It would be interesting to take a look at some brain scans of subjects who report strong therapeutic effects in drug trials even though they are part of the placebo control group and see how similar they are to those of Zeidan's meditators.

More Benefits of Meditation

Over the last few years more and more research has been done on both the cognitive and biological effects of meditation. Here are the results of several of these studies showing specific benefits of the practice.

Meditation can alter your DNA. Seriously. Meditation elicits a series of physiological changes that researchers call the "relaxation response," and these changes affect various genes related to the body's stress response. In turn, shutting off certain of these genes can lead to improvements in all sorts of medical conditions that are mostly genetic in nature, from hypertension to rheumatoid arthritis.

Meditation can help treat depression. I know from personal experience that this is also true of magical practices in general in addition to meditation. A psychiatrist has published a new book in which he contends that meditative practice can help to manage depression without the use of antidepressant drugs, and he reports solid results from his own 35 years of medical practice.

Meditation slows the progression of AIDS. Researchers don't understand how this works yet, but there is a clear effect that shows up after only a few weeks of meditative practice and it is hypothesized to be linked to changes in the immune system.

As Aleister Crowley wrote in Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae, "by doing certain things certain results follow." There are plenty of subjective reasons for magical and meditative practices, but as the research continues it seems that we are finding plenty of objective ones as well.