A new study by University of British Columbia scientists has determined that too much contemplation on the subject of one’s religious conviction could actually work to diminish it. Published last week in the esteemed journal Science, the study was undertaken to determine the psychological origins of spirituality. Its results expose a decidedly inverse relationship between the level of a person’s faith and the amount of time they actually spend speculating on it. The revealing conclusion of the research? That religious belief is intuitive. You feel your spirituality.

The study, titled, “Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief,” is founded on the premise that all humans employ two primary types of thinking: intuitive and analytical. For this work, the latest in a six-year string of religion-based research projects undertaken by the UBC pair, it was accepted that a person’s dominant style of thinking has a significant role to play in how religious he or she is. People who are highly intuitive, study coauthors Ara Norenzayan and Will Gervais contend, tend to be more religious.

The researchers asked more than 650 Canadians and Americans a series of questions designed to unearth the depth of their belief in such ethereal concepts as God and angels, and to rate how important to them they are. Next, having established a baseline of religious devotion, the social scientists asked participants to view various pieces of artwork. Some of the images were clearly designed to stimulate analytical thinking — Rodin’s The Thinker prominent among this batch. Others were not. All participants were then asked to perform mathematical computations and to answer questions posed in hard-to-read fonts before being required once more to gauge their level of piety. Even the most devout among the first group — the one primed for analytical thinking — expressed a decrease in their religious belief at this point. Those people whose stimuli had not been designed to spur analytical contemplation, on the other hand, did not experience the same shrinking fervor.

Analytical thinking, it seems, takes a serious run at the passion of our religious conviction.

“When people are encouraged to think analytically,” the study’s coauthor Ara Norenzayan told the media, “it can block intuitive thinking. There’s much more instability to religious belief than we recognize.”

Where intuitive thinking helps people recognize the difference between the physical body and the thoughtful mind, and to imagine such high-flown concepts as life after death and what our purpose in the universe is, analytical thinking decreases a person’s intuitions of such things.

Norenzayan was quick to clarify that analytical thinking alone does not necessarily lead to a decrease in religious belief. “This is only one piece of the puzzle,” he said. He does speculate, however, that if we all consistently engaged in analytical thinking, like scientists or lawyers do, the lot of us would likely suffer dwindling religious faith in the long run.

Interestingly, a previous study drawing from the same triggers showed that exposure to the first group’s images actually improved people’s performance on tests that require analytical thinking.

The takeaway? Be ever mindful of the kinds of pictures you let drift in front of your impressionable gaze — there’s no telling what kind of impact they might have on your spiritual life.

It was with this perspective in mind that author Shirley Scott tackled the subject in her new book, Religion vs. Spirituality — One Psychic’s Point of View.

Inside such big-topic chapter titles as “Life” and “What we discover when we die,” Scott seeks to untangle the ever-more-layered subject from the angle of a clairvoyant. It’s a view in from an unexpected place, to be sure, but a valuable one for the stripped-down insight it offers an audience.

“Religion is like a club or a group,” Scott says. “If you don’t believe like the rest of the group, you can’t be in that group. Spirituality, however, is a way of living and knowing that everyone else is here living their life and they don’t have to believe like you do to be your friend or in your life.”

What’s more, the rules that govern organized religion are the product of our own invention. It was man, the author points out, who assigned the right- and wrongness labels to our behavior. And it was man who outlined the ultimate punishments to which the lot of us are subject if we take a step wrong.

“The concept of being born in sin doesn’t make sense to me,” Scott says. “If we are part of a perfect God, and we are considered his children whom he loves with unconditional love, why would he want us to be born in sin and have to suffer all our lives? No parent wants that for their children.”

Often, she says, religion makes us feel dirty, isolated and ashamed. Its efforts to control us create feelings of guilt and disappointment — not, scoffs Scott, “what we are here to experience.”

And so enter spirituality, a big, generous approach to life whose laws are dictated, says Scott, by the constraints of the universe alone.

Where sin “makes life more complicated,” forever encouraging us to question our actions and ponder whether they’re sinful for being different from everyone else, karma says do what you want just so long as you remember that you’ll get it back. “It’s very clear and we don’t have to question our thoughts or actions,” Scott says in her book. “We know right from the start what is going to happen to us. It can happen behind closed doors, too. You don’t have to tell anyone what you did or didn’t do. The universe knows what energy you put out or didn’t put out and the intent behind it. It will bring back whatever you put out even if no one else knows about it.”

Ultimately, Scott’s aim is to encourage people to contemplate their belief systems, and to determine if they’re “eating” or “feeding” them. Above all, says Scott, an animal communicator and clairvoyant who’s studied the difference between religion and spirituality for two decades, people need to keep it simple. No belief system, she stresses, should be too complicated.

So the budget’s dropped, the feds have spoken and the rest of us are left to pluck the pieces off the dance floor. So goes the political paso-doble with which we should all be miserably familiar by now. But how much easier the moves would be if we were partnered with a quick-stepping grasp of spirituality.

Things are crappy right now and everybody knows it. The world’s economy is coming apart like a flaky pastry and there ain’t a baker in the place with a recipe for repair.

News report after news report clocks in with the latest devastation: more job losses, more company shutdowns, more austerity measures, more destitute souls.

Spirituality and economics are inexorably linked. In her book, A History of God, British historian Karen Armstrong wrote that all religion “starts with the perception that something is wrong.” In 2009, the Dalai Lama went so far as to directly tie the recession to the absence of spirituality among the souls most suffering it. “Lack of spirituality and culture is the main cause behind the rampant corruption in the world,” he told followers at a religious seminar in India. “People have become selfish and materialistic, which has led to the economic slowdown.”

So there it is. A chapter of life is all. An admittedly unfortunate and arguably self-inflicted chapter — but a chapter just the same. Kabbalists tell us that it’s entirely normal to experience yemai sinah, or days of hate. Same, too, with yeridah — periods of spiritual dearth, when we drag our Manolo Blahniks, existentially speaking. They are to be expected. And it is arrogant to imagine we could ever sidestep them.

Because willing such uncomfortable encounters away doesn’t make them disappear anyway. Best to save your dancing feet and face the music. Suck it up. Draw strength from its fierce proximity, even. There’s something awfully cathartic, after all, about meeting the monster’s gaze head on. Contemplating bad things brings the stuff into focus. “Know thy self,” said Sun Tzu in The Art of War, “know thy enemy.”

There’s no shortage of the enemy that is economic ugliness in our space these days. So invite it in. Stare it down. Ask questions of it and see if you’ve got any more of that flavoured gin it likes in your cabinet.

And then take your leave.

The intersection of spirituality and struggle is significant. How we behave when we find ourselves standing at it will go some distance to predicting how we’ll emerge from it. “Crisis reveals,” goes the old proverb, “and absolute crisis reveals absolutely.” If we handle ourselves properly during these days of spiritual recession, if we man up to the ickiness rather than run screaming from its menacing presence, we actually stand a decent chance of getting back on track with the grander goals that we set for ourselves when the days of love and passion return.

“The Internet is the future of spirituality.”

So declared Rainn Wilson, the charismatic American actor best known for his fierce and oblivious portrayal of Dwight Schrute on The Office. The statement, and the heartfelt sentiment he applied to it, apparently caught his audience at a recent public-speaking event a little off guard. Presumably, they had convened at this Austin, Texas, celebrity-flavoured engagement to hear the quirky thespian riff in his characteristic acerbic manner. Instead, they were confronted with the deeply earnest expression of Wilson’s interest in a spiritual life.

To that end, the surprisingly solemn guy actually launched a website as “a place for [folks] to chew on life’s big questions.”

Soul Pancake (www.soulpancake.com), which Wilson cofounded in 2003, is “an expression of who I am as a human being.” Here, followers are invited to engage in conversations, participate in activities and lob their points of view at sacred cows — all with a view to encourage some fresh introspection into a culture in danger of becoming swept away by the superficial and insincere.

“Can people live without an ego?” someone named SaintRudrick inquires. Burnabymike asks, “What were some of the lies you told your parents?” And skyboydragon ponders, “Does religion need to be destroyed for spirituality to flourish?”

Soul Pancake activities include solicitations for users to upload photos of “what the Internet has stolen from you,” describe “in 10 words or less, what you have done to break the mold” and write an essay about “a time when a passion became an obsession.”

In the Perspectives section of the site, Wilson et al encourage participants to inject their points of view into thoughtful considerations. “What do you want to protest?” one option challenges, “and can you think of any creative ways to make your voice heard?” In a forum dedicated to the subject of how a holiday in your honour might be observed, a fellow named Zach suggests that St. Zach Day would include a breakfast of boneless Buffalo wings and Cool Ranch Doritos, a session of deleting ex-lovers’ phone numbers from your cellphone and an afternoon spent listening to “vinyl records of your choosing.”

“Soul Pancake is very important to me,” Wilson told the crowd at this seminar, that was entitled, “The View from Inside Rainn Wilson’s Brainstem.” “It’s very personal.”

The site, which attracts a modest following of about a million page views a month, is the physical manifestation of Wilson’s conviction that the inherent community focus of the Web has extraordinary powers to inspire. And no activity undertaken in cyberspace, no matter its apparent superficiality or silliness, he believes, should be disparaged. “It’s a spiritual act to share a beautiful photo on Instagram,” he insisted. “It’s a spiritual act to sell something beautiful you’ve crafted on Etsy.”

At the end of the day, “we need connection, we need compassion, we need nurturing,” the funny man told his audience. And if we can find such salvation in the ubiquity of cyberspace, then we’re all the luckier for it.

If something momentous happens to you in your life and you fail to write it down, did it really happen?

It’s a metaphysical contemplation that is as riveting as it is rhetorical.

The act of committing to paper the thoughts and activities of one’s day can be traced back to the age of the papyrus and reed combo. But unlike traditional diary writing, where someone describes their quotidien events in a fairly narrative and expository format, journaling asks the writer to reflect on internal interpretations of her experiences, with the ultimate objective of securing an enhanced understanding of them.

If something happens to you in your life and you fail to document your experience 

Done correctly, journaling is an outpouring of emotions in an unchecked fashion, with the scribe not getting hung up on the flow of the words or their grammatical correctness. This is private writing of the highest order; never intended for public consumption.

Journal therapy has been used to help people cope with everything from grief, disease and addiction to relationship woes. In addition to increasing the participant’s communication skills, the practice is thought to cultivate a healthier self-esteem and to help clarify life goals.

More than that, the relief from tension that results from putting pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard) is believed to shower significant benefits on the partaker’s physical health.

Skeptical? Don’t be. This stuff has been scientifically documented. Research by a Texas scientist named Dr. James Pennebaker, for one, reveals that when people write about emotionally difficult events or feelings for just 20 minutes at a go over three or four days, the functioning of their immune systems improves.

According to the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mind-Body Medicine, the therapeutic potential of journaling was not well understood until the 1960′s. A New York City psychologist named Dr. Ira Progoff introduced what he called “the intensive journal method” to his patients  as a means of achieving a deeper appreciation of one’s life and reaching some emotional and mental clarity with its more confusing aspects. Since then, the concept has exploded, with at least a quarter million people coming into contact with its powers through the network of “journal consultants” Progoff and his staff established.

The practice developed further through the publication of a series of books on the topic in the 1970s and, later still, the adoption of the method by various public school curricula in a bid to develop students’ independent thinking skills.

Today, journal therapy is well accepted as a legitimate means of achieving relief from the discomfort of certain of life’s trickier issues. Some jails in the United Kingdom use journaling as a rehabilitative tool, to allow inmates to express their emotions in a constructive way, and to set them up to survive in the world outside of the penal system.

And there’s no shortage of application for those of us on the other side of the bars who are interested in giving the journaling thang a whirl. One needs only a pen and paper, or the electronically evolved version of same. And you might give yourself a headstart with a visit to www. mytherapyjournal.com, an online journaling program that facilitates users’ “voyage of discovery.”

Enjoy the journey.

It’s an idea whose time has come.

Timebanks, having languished in anticipation of the world’s resounding and grateful acknowledgement for too long, may just be the answer to our current spate of financial woes. Through them, we might redefine our understanding of currency to better reflect the value of those goods and services it purports to represent.

And if we introduce a new economic model for a population profoundly weary of capitalism along the way, well, so much the better.

The concept of timebanking is deliciously simple. Participants deposit time to, and withdraw time from, an online bank that manages the transactions on their behalf. The time in question is attached to a particular talent or preference that individuals nominate, and from which others draw, when looking for help. Person A, for example, might pony up an hour of driving time, or typing, or dogwalking. Person B, in turn, might cash in on these offerings for his benefit. Person A’s contributions to Person B are thus noted on the ledger, with the former’s account accordingly credited, and the latter’s accordingly debited.

Comparable to the ancient system of bartering, timebanking is more efficient for its electronic management. The records of all transactions are handled by a third party, as is the essential matchmaking that hooks giver with receiver. And the logic is sound: The more you do for others, the more you’re eligible for in return.

Along with the warm fuzzies that come with such socially minded do-goodery, timebanking is smart for both its networking potential and its ability to knit members of a community together. Better yet, the contributions of every last soul are valued equally in this model. The time the Parkdale housekeeper spends sweeping the floor is considered every bit as precious as the time the Bay St. lawyer spends litigating a case.

In this way, the notion of timebanking is pleasantly pleasing. It’s an old-fashioned throwback to a day when neighbours got up on each other’s roofs to lay shingles, or dropped their children in each other’s living rooms for a hairdresser visit’s worth of care.

There’s said to be more than 300 timebanks in 23 countries in current operation. Through them, thousands of members exchange website design for tutoring, solar panel installation for home organization, resume writing for aromatherapy. The concept enjoys much more prevalence south of the border than in Canada, but this country’s tightening economics make conditions ripe for the advent of more timebanking activity here.

The first forays into this approach to linking untapped community capacity with unmet needs is said to derive from a fellow named Edgar Cahn who fought against poverty during the Reagan years. “If we can’t have more of that kind of money,” he famously wrote in his book, No More Useless People, “why can’t we create a new kind of money to put people and problems together?”

Why indeed?

For more timebanking data points, check out the American mother site, timebanks.org.

In 2006, just a month after getting married, Walker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In the period to follow, this LA author, only 35, succumbed to bouts of anxiety, depression and drug addiction that left her reeling. She felt, she recounts, useless, and doomed to live a life in which she had no contributions to offer the world.

Devastated, Walker eventually sought solace with an African medicine woman who gave her an unusual prescription for healing: Give of yourself.

The simple act of being generous can have a dramatic impact on how a person views the world, the woman told her desperate patient. And so it was that Walker pledged to give a gift to someone else, every day, for 29 days. The experience was transformative.

After the morning Walker gave her first gift — a supportive phonecall to a fellow MS sufferer — the dye was cast. “I woke up the next day and the next day after that feeling excited about what I might give away,” Walker enthuses. “And I began to notice that the more I gave away, the more abundance I was experiencing for myself.”

By the 29^th day of her experiment — which saw such humble offerings as a Kleenex and a handful of change to feed someone’s parking meter — Walker’s health and happiness had both improved.

“I found myself smiling and laughing more,” she remembers, on her website. “My body got stronger and I was able to stop walking with my cane by Day 14.”

And in perhaps the ultimate act of generosity, Walker has shared this valuable lesson with the rest of us.

In 2010, she chronicled the experience in a book, 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life. In it, she draws deeply from her trials with this chronic neurological condition, and takes readers on a journey of enlightenment that concludes with her conviction that giving and receiving are two sides of the same precious coin.

]]> http://annkaplan.ca/blog/?feed=rss2&p=463 7 http://annkaplan.ca/blog/?p=451 http://annkaplan.ca/blog/?p=451#comments Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:49:39 +0000 Ann Kaplan http://annkaplan.ca/blog/?p=451 Read full article]]>

There are many paths to spirituality. While some might find the solace they seek by adopting a map that travels the most conventional of routes, others discover their truest selves in a pottery class. Or between the pages of an Oprah magazine. Or at the mall.

One of the coolest ways in is shamanism, an ancient pseudo-religious phenomenon that folks have been trying to explain for a couple of hundred years.

The term “shaman” began with the Tungus people in Siberia, and was later coined by the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade, in 1951. As it was taken up by other scholars, a shaman came to stand for what we modern folk might call a “medicine man.” When a contemporary adaptation of the practice emerged in the 1970s, some Native Americans regarded it to be a misappropriation of sacred spiritual practices, and chalked it up as yet another form of cultural assault by the white folk.

Shamanism devotees believe our ancestors did the legwork in mastering the trick to applying the limited human resources of mind and body to maximum effect in healing and problem-solving. By understanding that our physical selves function best when they’re in harmony with all the life that swirls around them, we capitalize on the potential of this much-misunderstood worldview.

More than that, shamanism embraces a philosophy that says man can gain control over the natural world via certain magical principles. Here, a human — generally the shaman, who acts as a medium for a group of individuals — serves as a vessel of communication with those magical spirits whose energies might speed the mortal processes of healing, divination and control over natural events. Shamanism focuses on a human’s entry into an ecstatic trance state in which the soul, with the aid of various spirit helpers, leaves the body and ascends to the sky (the heavens) or descends into the earth (the underworld).

Here’s a how-to for getting your inner shaman on.

• Appreciate that all of us are walking, breathing stores of energy. And before we get too high on ourselves over this remarkable distinction, remember, too, that all of the natural world shares the same extraordinary trait. By first honouring the truth of this universality, we can work toward the ideal: i.e., getting the works in perfect alignment.

• As opposed to blindly following established doctrines that require unquestioned allegiance to be a part of the club, shamanism offers followers utter autonomy. Adherents need only learn the concepts and test them in their own lives.

• Shamanism endorses animism, a notion that sees the world as populated by an abundance of spiritual forces. In this way of thinking, goblins, fairies, ghosts and demons wreak havoc while man stands helplessly by. The magic of shamanism, however, can shield us from their damage.

• The Institute for Contemporary Shamanic Studies (www1.icss.org/Toronto) is a Canadian multi-disciplinary spiritual centre that offers workshops, teachings and ceremonies in sacred spaces in Toronto and Calgary. Programs focus on different aspects of self-growth and healing, including weeklong ceremonies, various rites of passage and year-long shamanic training.

• The Canadian Centre for Shamanic Studies (www.shamanismcanada.com) is a resource dedicated to helping people rediscover their own indigenous spirit and restore their spiritual connection with the earth. The CCSS regularly hosts shamanism retreats, shamanic circles, and shamanism conferences and ceremonies at an Algonquin nature retreat in Ontario.

New years are gifts from the gods, granted to harried mortals who’ve burned through the previous 12 months and are hungry for a do-over. The ceremonial turning of the calendar offers as close to that as any of us is likely to get.

It’s why the dawning of 2012, across a landscape that’s pocked with more battle scars and brewing despair than most of us can remember in our lifetime, could not be more welcome.

Best to exploit this next annual stretch by starting with a plan for renewal you might actually have a chance of achieving. In other words, rather than loading your January-stoked psyche with an ambitious schedule for transformation that your April-weary brain will consider too demanding, be realistic.

Enter the 60-second meditation.

Here, even in the midst of swirling economic chaos and unnerving global political turmoil (to say nothing of squalling children and impatient bosses), you insist upon a pocket of peace in your day.

Some ideas for seeing this modest — but extremely worthwhile — plan through:

• Drawing on the Zen Buddhist concept of “no-mind,” introduce a practice to your life of just being. For no more than a minute every day (or several times a day, if you can pull it off), stop everything. Shove the buzzing guilt and anxiety and worry that percolate in your brain into a vat and seal the lid for 60 seconds. Fill your head with nothing. Experience your surroundings, but don’t engage with them. Breathe. Observe. Repeat. It’s amazing the wonders a small dose of engineered silence can have on an overworked brain.

• An American doctor who writes about spirituality and health has developed a series of short videos designed to remind people of what really counts in life. Fresh off the publication of her new book, What Really Matters: 7 Lessons for Living from the Stories of the Dying, Dr. Karen Wyatt offers brief bursts of spiritual wisdom that people anxious for a new perspective can fold into their frenzied lives. She has released two “videobooks” at this point, and has plans to release another each month with eight in total. “Suffering” deals with the presence of misery in our everyday existence and posits that anguish is actually part of the path to transformation, and should therefore be embraced. The videos are each between one and two minutes in length. “While genuine spiritual growth can take a lifetime to accomplish,” Wyatt says, “transformation actually occurs in an instant.” Check out: http://www.karenwyattmd.com/videobook.htm.

• One-Minute Mindfulness: 50 Simple Ways to Find Peace, Clarity and New Possibilities in a Stressed-Out World is a new book by American psychotherapist Donald Altman. Alarmed by the overwhelming and ever-encroaching presence of technology in our lives and the way it keeps us from focusing on the present, Altman offers a prescription for quick-hit meditative escapes. His tome — part guidebook and part workbook — offers practical advice to help people learn how to build and sustain the essential awareness that will help them cope with the challenges of everyday life. Check out: http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/One-Minute-Mindfulness-Simple-Ways-Donald-Altman

The end of the year looms large, as it does at every end of the year, and the pressure is on for the annual stock-taking to unearth at least some shred of good news. But things are crappy right now and everybody knows it. 2011 is simply not going to be recast as anything remotely pleasant, no matter the number of times we turn it around in our brains.The world’s economy is coming apart like a flaky pastry and there ain’t a baker in the place with a recipe for repair.

News report after news report clocks in with the latest devastation: every day there are more job losses, more company shutdowns, more countries demanding fresh austerity from their citizens, more freak storms that devastated people’s nest eggs, more destitute souls.

So upsetting has been this torrent of economic negativity that even news-junkies among us have taken to avoiding the evening reports and morning paper, opting instead for another Two and a Half Men repeat and the latter few fluff-filled pages of their subway rags.

But as much as these avoiding folks might believe they’re simply relieving themselves of an unnecessary burden, they might actually be doing themselves a serious disservice by ignoring the ugly truth. There is something cathartic, after all, about meeting your enemy’s gaze head on. And not blinking.

Thinking about bad stuff can be good, you see. And what better time than the close of a calendar year to load up on the helpings?

You know how you can feel a cold taking shape on your physical horizon, scratching at your nerve endings, buzzing in your ears? Desperately, you bid the discomfort away. You swallow handfuls of vitamins and gulp boatloads of orange juice and pretend your head isn’t drumming like a timpani. But the cold comes anyway, doesn’t it?

The point is this: willing an uncomfortable encounter away doesn’t make it disappear. Meditating on it, on the other hand, will bring it into focus. “Know thy self,” said Sun Tzu in The Art of War, “know thy enemy.”

Economic ugliness is all around us. Bad news is the rule now (good news the exception). That there’s no shortage of unpleasantness about these days is a revelation to no one. So invite it in. Stare it down. Ask questions of it and see if you’ve got any more of that flavoured gin it likes in your cabinet.

And then take your leave.  

A recessive, Euro-failing, dictator-dancing, debt-laden bad patch, in all its horrible, belt-tightening, innocents-abusing glory, is here and holding tight. But meditating on the year that was dulls its edges and renders it as much a part of the fabric of life as dinnertime and garbage day. Make the bad guy your friend and soon you won’t be able to remember who your enemies are.And when you’re done all that, well, bring on 2012.