The Binary Circumstance

I recently wrote about how to make your own yogurt.

Urinalysis of populations from several different countries showed there are wide variations in metabolism based on the types of microbes that reside in the gut. What is particularly mind-boggling is the amount of bacteria we all having living in our intestines.

Each country turned out very different, metabolically.

“For instance, Chinese and Japanese people are almost identical genetically, which isn’t surprising, since they diverged culturally only a few thousand years ago - but they are very different metabolically,” said researcher Jeremy Nicholson, a biological chemist at Imperial College London.

“We know there’s a huge difference in the diseases that different nations risk - broadly speaking, the Japanese tend to die of strokes, the Chinese of heart attacks - and we see those differences reflected in their urine,” he added. “Of course they’re different in terms of lifestyle - the Japanese tend to eat more fish than the Chinese as a whole do - but their gut bacteria are also very distinct as well.”

Gut microbes help us get energy from our food.

“In your guts, you have about 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) of 1,000 different species of bacteria,” Nicholson explained. “If you include all the genes from bacteria along with your own, only about 1 to 2 percent of the genes in your body are human, with the rest from the gut microbes. And what bacteria you have can be quite different from person to person.”

Next time you want to thank somebody for being alive, you might want to start with the bacteria of the world.

For the third time in the past few days I looking at snow coming down outside my window. Though we’re well into Spring, it looks like the dead of winter outside complete with darkened, gray skies, cold air and snow.

These are not just little snow flurries but a steady snowfall and it’s sticking. There doesn’t seem to be any rain or sleet mixed in with it as there was in some of the other snowfalls we’ve had this week. This is just a pure, steady snowfall.

My deck is white as well as many of the leaves on trees and bushes, my neighbors’ roofs and my driveway. It’s not yet sticking to the yard but that’s probably because my yard is mostly mud since it had it plowed up about six weeks ago and new grass seed planted. The grass has been coming in very slowly over the past couple of weeks, but it’s still mostly mud.

At the rate it’s coming down I expect that everything will be white if it keeps up for another 30 minutes or so.

A couple of days ago we had snow with thunder. That’s a new one on me. I’ve experienced plenty of thunderstorms in my life but the thunder snowstorm was a first.

I recently took up meditation. At first I was reading about self-hypnosis and then I started trying to figure out how it was different from meditation. The more I read about the two techniques, the more I became interested in them. I found so many people with scientific and medical backgrounds extolling the benefits of meditation that I committed to practicing it for a while. There are many scientific studies that have shown health benefits associated with meditation.

Both meditation and self-hypnosis are using focus as a way for inducing an altered state of consciousness. I haven’t found anybody who can draw a really clear distinction between the two but it seems that in self-hypnosis the focus is more often on something external like a hypnotist’s voice and there’s a specific goal in mind, like smoking cessation. Meditation on the other hand often turns the focus inward without any specific goal, except to keep returning to the point of focus as a way of clearing the mind.

Hypnosis seeks to change behaviors through suggestions made to the subconscious while in the altered state of consciousness.

Meditation seeks to silence all the mind-chatter to achieve a deeper awareness.

I see a lot of overlap in the two techniques, however. The important thing is the focus.

Even though I’ve only done it a short time, it’s been such a powerful experience that I don’t have any plans to quit any time soon. My mind is usually going a mile a minute with thoughts and ideas raining down like the snowfall outside my window right now. Unless I’m working on a specific problem, however, the barrage is quite chaotic and at times a little overwhelming.

My reading took me to many accounts of people describing the same kind of non-stop mind-chatter and I was captivated by their claims of learning to quite it and control it. For thousands of years people have touted the same benefit.

I have no desire to lose my active, rich mental life, nor do I aspire to spend hours each day sitting in the lotus position chanting a mantra. But I can certainly see benefits to having more control over my own mind-body. Ayn Rand said there is no dualism between the mind and the body and meditation seems a great tool for better understanding the unity or oneness of mind-body.

Practicing the continual return to focus is what I mostly seek from meditation, not any supernatural or religious experience. If you’ve been reading my blog you know that I don’t think that any altered state of consciousness is supernatural, it is merely changing the state of the mind-body, a totally natural phenomenon. Noting and acknowledging the thoughts and feelings that pull you away from the focus is also an essential part of the process. All the clutter you’ve been storing in your attic takes up a lot of space that could be better used for other mental processes. Meditation opens those boxes and allows you to choose what to keep and what to discard.

Being able to change the state of the mind-body in a way that provides more enjoyment and/or makes me more productive and healthy is just the next step toward becoming the most rational person I can be.

It sometimes snows in the middle of the Spring.

The Dalai Lama is in Seattle and there are several big events scheduled while he’s here. The biggest event took place yesterday afternoon at Qwest Field.

When most people think about being compassionate they run straight for their emotions, looking to help somebody that they feel pity for.

For me, compassion is nice but it doesn’t solve a lot of problems, it doesn’t cure diseases or eradicate poverty. It might make us feel better and it may assist in the healing process, but holding rational premises does much more to solve individual and global problems than just feeling compassionate.

If you want to be compassionate, fill your mind with rational ideas that are supported by evidence. All the ideas that you hold that are not supported by evidence will ultimately create problems for yourself and many others as well.

Knowledge is the seed of compassion.

There is nothing to be known about things that aren’t there, so stop wasting your time and your brain cycles thinking about ideas and concepts that are not connected to reality. Religious delusions prevent people from solving problems because they require that the mind disconnect from reality. In order to solve problems you must connect to reality. That is where the solutions lie.

…In Ayurvedic terms, space is the principle of unbounded choice-making potential–and it is literally everywhere, though our senses may deceive us on this point. For example, modern physics asserts that more than 99.99 percent of the material world is actually empty space, despite its apparent solidity. Even subatomic particles are only localized probabilities, and the vast emptiness between the electrons and nucleus of an atom in proportionately far greater than the distances between the planets of our solar system. –The Wisdom of Healing by David Simon M.D. pg.35