"The primary focus of this path of choosing wisely is learning to stay present. Pausing very briefly, frequently throughout the day, is an almost effortless way to do this. For just a few seconds we can be right here. Meditation is another way to train in learning to stay or learning to come back, to return to the present over and over again." ~ Pema Chödrön, from Taking the Leap
"Because of your unique history, you have evolved a series of stories that you repeatedly return to throughout your life. These stories determine how you see yourself and how you interpret what is happening to you. You may well be overidentified with your stories and not see that they represent only one view of your circumstances. Your stories can limit what you believe to be your choices and define what happens to you in your day. They may not have even come from you but may have been suggested by someone else. You may not even recognize them as stories; to you they may seem like worries or just the way you are."
There were so many moments, I think, where I wanted to back away from it for all of the sane reasons why someone would, and not the least of which was [while] many documentaries people make about their families or personal documentaries are fantastic and enlightening and insightful, so many of them are totally narcissistic and self-indulgent and I felt that this film was absolutely in danger of those same problems.
I think, for me, what kept me going was I was so actually fascinated myself in like What is it about us as human beings that needs to tell stories? Why are we so desperate to have narrative? Why is it so impossible for us to live in the mess?
We have to create this kind of neat arc of storytelling around the events in our lives, otherwise it's just too much. It's just too bewildering.
A man about my age recently discovered he was not kidnapped at birth, but simply abandoned and substituted for a wanted boy.
Rolling the genetic dice can really unravel a personal narrative.
It can free you from injustice or convince you that you were robbed of an unwritten version of your life.
Any autobiography can feel like an overdoomed library book while it’s really never more than a constantly revised draft that will only be considered for publication posthumously.
Most of the dialogue is poorly written. Most of the characters are one dimensional.
It will have to be edited considerably before the grandchildren will even bother to skim it, but not even shared DNA will be enough to goad them into slogging through all the mundane details that are better experienced than described.
Children live; adults narrate.
It’s more difficult for adults to fall in love with the ordinary play of the senses, but children yield to it without hesitation or analysis,
until we teach them to grow up.
We say that we love resolution, but we can’t resist returning to the beginning and starting over.
"The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis]. You will see this story over and over again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted. The story is ‘Man in Hole,’ but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It’s: somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again [draws line A].
It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers."
Farb and his colleagues worked out a way to study how human beings experience their own moment-to-moment experience. They discovered that people have two distinct ways of interacting with the world, using two different sets of networks. One network for experiencing your experience involves what is called the "default network", which includes regions of the medial prefrontal cortex, along with memory regions such as the hippocampus. This network is called default because it becomes active when not much else is happening, and you think about yourself. If you are sitting on the edge of a jetty in summer, a nice breeze blowing in your hair and a cold beer in your hand, instead of taking in the beautiful day you might find yourself thinking about what to cook for dinner tonight, and whether you will make a mess of the meal to the amusement of your partner. This is your default network in action. It's the network involved in planning, daydreaming and ruminating.
This default network also become active when you think about yourself or other people, it holds together a "narrative". A narrative is a story line with characters interacting with each other over time. The brain holds vast stores of information about your own and other people's history. When the default network is active, you are thinking about your history and future and all the people you know, including yourself, and how this giant tapestry of information weaves together. In this way, in the Farb study they like to call the default network the 'narrative' circuitry. (I like the 'narrative circuit' term for every-day usage as it's easier to remember and a bit more elegant than 'default' when talking about mindfulness.)
When you experience the world using this narrative network, you take in information from the outside world, process it through a filter of what everything means, and add your interpretations. Sitting on the dock with your narrative circuit active, a cool breeze isn't a cool breeze, it's a sign than summer will be over soon, which starts you thinking about where to go skiing, and whether your ski suit needs a dry clean.
The default network is active for most of your waking moments and doesn't take much effort to operate.
There's nothing wrong with this network, the point here is you don't want to limit yourself to only experiencing the world through this network.
The Farb study shows there is a whole other way of experiencing experience. Scientists call this type of experience one of direct experience. When the direct experience network is active, several different brain regions become more active. This includes the insula, a region that relates to perceiving bodily sensations. The anterior cingulate cortex is also activated, which is a region central to switching your attention. When this direct experience network is activated, you are not thinking intently about the past or future, other people, or yourself, or considering much at all. Rather, you are experiencing information coming into your senses in real time. Sitting on the jetty, your attention is on the warmth of the sun on your skin, the cool breeze in your hair, and the cold beer in your hand.
Thursday, December 26, 2013 at 10:33PM 
Biblios by Guy Laramée
