Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
It can be a good thing to learn from the past. (“Must remember to look behind when backing up car.”) It can be a good thing to look around the room and mentally rewind everything you see to its source. (“Where did that bag of Tostitos come from and would I want to see how they were made?”) The past is embedded everywhere.
The novelist William Faulkner once said, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”
But what if the past wasn’t serving you – would you be able to unlearn it? Let’s see.
As part of pre-production for a documentary series we’re working on, I recently went to see a researcher named John D. Riley. At his Zero Point Research lab, I sat in front of a Lifestream Generator, a device pumping out millions of volts of DC electrical energy. 
If you’ve ever seen a Tesla coil, you’ll get an idea of what this is like. He told me that as the energy passed through me I’d experience where I was emotionally blocked. Well, I sure was feeling something around my neck and left shoulder – it jerked up and back, pulled by an unseen force. In that very second, an indelible image burst on the movie screen in my mind. I saw my 40-year-old father pulling my arm as I, at age 10, tried to run away. Was this some of my past somehow embedded in me, now released? Faulkner had it right. The past wasn’t even past. I was carrying some of it around in my shoulder.
Lots of people wanting to heal themselves are looking to reprogram the embedded past. 
Go to a yoga class and see if twisting your torso will release mental crud and create more space. Maybe a hypno-therapist can rewire your mind. Maybe an acupuncturist can get life force flowing in a more balanced pattern. Stored memory is powerful, whether it involves language, images, or even body postures. Manipulating it might be the key to healing on both the macro and micro levels… perhaps right down to the level of individual cells.
That’s the focus of some promising research at Children’s Hospital Boston that suggests we will be able to press reset on a cell’s developmental clock. If disease scarred your heart or damaged your nerves or knocked out your immune system, scientists could reboot. In successful experiments, they’ve already reverted ordinary skin cells to their embryonic state. Called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) these cells can become whatever kind of cell required – blood cells, brain cells, lung cells or heart cells. That means the body would have a chance to start over. The cell’s “memory” of being sick would be erased.
Emotionally positive memories play a role in healing, but even negative memories have their usefulness. If you happen to remember that snakes with a triangular head are poisonous, you might think to back away when you see one. Still, the prospect of rewinding time, being able to reprogram ourselves, or rebooting a sick cell makes me believe that we have a shot of taking charge of our past in order to shape the future.
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Red coffee cup. Book review in New York Times. It bleeds, it leads.
The usual way I write this blog is by scribbling things at random, whatever comes to mind, to get myself into the flow. It might be a funny way to start, but I learned to write in newsrooms and it always worked there, too. Those newsrooms were populated by angry, gesticulating screamers, a few colorful drunks and people with dark circles under their eyes chanting “if it bleeds, it leads.” Concentration was required if anything was going to get written on my shift.
We all have our concentration rituals. My mother, who was a sculptor, would always begin a new project by drinking coffee out of a red mug. After she died, her yoga teacher asked to have that red mug, so we gave it to her. 
To get myself in the flow I turn on the Universe Machine. It’s an electronic practice tool for players of classical Indian music and it sends out a quiet, subtly drifting drone note.
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According to current research, concentration results when we get some neurons in the prefrontal cortex of the brain to oscillate in unison. The oscillations are called gamma waves. Scientists believe you can get them pumping together by looking at flashing pulses of light. Such neural harmonizing is probably what’s happening when people meditate and find that their powers of concentration have increased. They are putting the brain into a state of greater synchrony.
If you want to get into the flow you also have to cut down on distractions, particularly those coming in through your ears – like your iPod or the TV. According to Winifred Gallagher, author of Rapt, a book recently reviewed in the New York Times, it’s hard for the brain to avoid paying attention to sounds, particularly voices. That’s why the vibration of the Universe Machine helps – it simplifies the sonic environment.
To get in the flow you also have to drop any self-consciousness. (“That little yellow ball’s coming at me really fast. With my limited tennis skills, do I really think I can hit it? Hey, I missed it. I am so bummed out and I suck at tennis.”) To win at tennis you somehow have to merge action and awareness and silence your inner critic. That’s been the focus of a sports coach named W. Timothy Gallwey, a meditation practitioner who wrote “The Inner Game of Tennis.” When you mentally hit reset after every point you get in the groove and get on your game.
The state of “flow” itself has been studied by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the seminal book, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.” Time flies when you’re having fun, and time becomes elastic when you are in the creative flow. Completely losing track of time is one of the nine factors, according to Csikszentmihalyi, that are the hallmarks of flow. If you want to find your flow it’s best to try only while undertaking a task that is rewarding all by itself – pleasure in accomplishment helps flow happen.
Getting your groove on is not magic. You just have to set up the right conditions for it to happen: minimize distractions, cultivate a sense of focus (meditation would work) and sometimes you need to use the red coffee cup.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Disclosure: I like doing yoga. I don’t go for the workout. (I have running for that.) I don’t go for the women. (Though I met a woman in yoga whom I have married.) I go to explore the mindscape and the soulscape. That said, I have a request for all yoga teachers: Can you stop telling us to throw away the mind? You might know the type, the teacher who cranks up the volume on their shallow pop music and shouts over it, “You don’t need your brain – just listen to your feelings!” This instruction makes me want to puke, but I would have to use my brain to do that, so I guess it’s not allowed.
I’m thinking about this because I just saw a new documentary called “Enlighten Up!” It’s the story of a skeptic who tries to find out if yoga can change him. I experienced the story very much through the skeptic’s eyes because he wanted tangible proof of how yoga was working. 
I like that, because it speaks to the existential engineer in me. Seeking such proof involves the brain in the process of healing the body and the spirit. That’s good. Here’s why: You might already know that there are two parts of the brain and they work together. The left brain takes care of the sequential, analytical, logical stuff like doing your taxes and complaining about it. The right brain is non-linear, intuitive and big picture. It’s what we use to connect to the soul, interpret people’s facial expressions, dance with abandon and heal ourselves.
“The brain? That’s my second favorite organ.”
-Woody Allen
As Daniel H. Pink writes in A Whole New Mind, the left brain is bossy and tends to bully the right brain. This is why in meditation we’re asked to “quiet the mind.” It’s an oversimplified instruction – you really want to quiet the left brain — it’s analyzing how annoying it is to sit still — and try to listen to the right brain as it tells its subtle story. One great technique for this is to sit and hum loudly. It gets everything vibrating, clears the mind of extra thoughts and if you don’t go insane first or get evicted, you might discover something new.
I was amazed to learn from Daniel Pink’s book that for years scientists believed it was the left brain alone that “made us human” – our logical, analytical selves vaulted us above dumb animals who have never even attempted to write a novel. The mute, mysterious right brain was thought to be a vestige of a more primitive form of human. But as Pink points out, “We need both approaches in order to craft fulfilling lives and build productive, just societies.”
Works for me. Even when I gaze into my own past I see that my father is a lawyer whose default mode is analytical left brain rationality while my mother, who was an artist, was a devotedly holistic right brain person. Genetically, that’s my recipe. Whatever I am pursuing or pursued by these days is orchestrated by biology, biography and those two halves of the brain playing their symphony together.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Do blogs have too many links? Links are someone interrupting when you’re trying to talk or worse, your own thoughts interrupting you when you think. Something like this happens when you sit cross-legged in yoga and the aching knees start talking to the mind. Your consciousness loops back upon itself and you work to quiet what is known as the “monkey mind.”
But I digress.
In 1960 Ted Nelson, a graduate student at Harvard, created Project Xanadu. The project was going to be a word processor capable of creating nonlinear documents. Every quotation would be linked to its original source and every thought annotated. Funny thing, Ted Nelson never finished the project. That tells you something right there about nonlinear thinking. Ted Nelson would have liked Yogi Berra, who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Links dare me to click to see where they’ll go. If I don’t have time to write about the British post office employee who developed the technology of the link you’re using now, I just link to him. Links are an intellectual weapon. If I write about differential calculus and you have to click, you prove you don’t know what kind of calculus that is. By linking to special relativity I can seem really smart. But I’m not so smart if I link to Wikipedia. Here’s why.
I was interviewing a pharmacology expert about the stuff voodoo priests use to turn people into zombies. Armed with my Wikipedia fact sheet, I began talking about witch doctors gathering neurotoxins from puffer fish and toads and feeding those chemicals to their victims. But as the professor kindly explained and the camera rolled on my discomfort, no puffer fish are required. He told me, correctly, that you turn somebody into a zombie by feeding them jimson weed, a plant that grows wild in California and has a lot of scopolamine. Huh. If you click on Wikipedia and How Stuff Works the wrong answers are still up there.
Elements of the original Xanadu Project thrive today and its acolytes propose that your documents come alive with an electronic storm of Post-Its.
http://transliterature.org
Some contend that such multi-tasking is great for parallel processing computers, but not so efficient for people. I’m not sure: I haven’t actually read those books. I’m just linking to one of them so it seems like I’ve done the research.
Good writing has its own hypertext. Edgar Allen Poe wrote about “the tintinnabulation that so musically wells … from the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.” With tintinnabulation in the poem, derived from a Latin word for bell-ringer, you get to hear the bells without clicking on anything. James Joyce wrote about “the light music of whiskey falling into a glass,” which makes me want to get a cocktail.
Before I go into the kitchen, let’s stay on track. I believe I am passively using technology but in fact technology is using me. Using a computer to help me think changes the way I think. Clicking on links as I read changes the way I read. I started this with Yogi, yoga and the monkey mind and hyperlinked near and far. I’ve realized that if I want to read a sentence to the end, I might need to do it with a book.
Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Hello and welcome to my blog. This is volume one, number one, paragraph one, sentence two, so you might discover right away that I am writing with assurance or wandering in the wilderness with only a metaphorical flashlight to show the way. Both scenarios are true. That’s the reason I’ve decided to write this. Right now, we’re at a crossroads where the usual definitions melt away. It’s an intersection of science and spirit. There are some curious discussions happening out there. So each week, on Thursday, I’ll offer you 500 words about the questions people are asking.
Can you really think your way into better health? Are there any limits to human consciousness? Does the laying on of hands heal people? Will time ever go in reverse? What is the deep power of chance events? If you do enough yoga, do you go insane? (Probably.) My friends from New York will read this as proof that after twenty years Out West I’ve finally gotten Out There. My Los Angeles friends might wonder why I am holding back. I admit that it’s hard to exactly locate Around the Bend on your GPS, but I see this blog, and my role, as observing and facilitating the connection between two worlds. Can a language be forged that works for both the science talkers and the spirit seekers, without diluting the intent of either?
I’m amazed at the number of organizations springing up to study the connections across the divide. Just a few: The Center for Spirituality and Healing, The Rubin Museum of Art, Bravewell Collective, John Templeton Foundation, Life Science Foundation, Center for Mindfulness, Society for Science and Religion, Columbia University Center for the Study of Science and Religion, the Zygon Center, Adrian Wyard and the Counterbalance Foundation, Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, the Mind & Life Institute, and the Institute for Noetic Sciences. Researchers and scientists like E.O. Wilson, Bruce Lipton, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Ernest Rossi are stretching the boundaries of how we perceive science and spirit, mind and consciousness. Louise Hay and Dr. Mona Lisa make us wonder how we can direct our own wellness by our intention. Two conferences are coming up, one in Washington, DC, the other in Minnesota, to talk about complementary and integrative medicine. That’s a kind of healing practice that can blend East and West and makes mindbody one word. It’s pretty busy out there in the crossroads.
From time to time as a filmmaker and media guy I have the pleasure of meeting science-spirit leaders and I’ll write about those encounters here. I’ll keep you updated on our DocuCinema projects that go to this territory. I promise to veer terribly off course sometimes to rant about Youtube and also India, explain why I’ll never be on Facebook, write about what scares me, reveal who my heroes might be, throw in a movie review and some foodie talk, show why marriage can increase your Google ranking, why there are too many Lee Schneiders already and why videos of cats riding motorcycles are always good.
That’s about 500 words right there. If you’d like to add some, post a comment! Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
