Do you ever get lost in thought during meditation? Does your mind wander or get caught up with the details of your day?
If so, you’re not alone.
One of the most common challenges most meditators face is our tendency to get distracted and lose focus.
As we do the practice, we often get caught up with the thoughts that arise in our heads. We fixate on certain ideas or try to work out problems.
And sooner or later, we find that we’ve gotten on board a particular train of thought and are now more focused on our minds than on the meditation itself.
The good news is that there’s a remedy for a distracted mind in meditation.
In this 15-minute guided meditation, I guide you through a simple practice of relinquishing your fixation on the mind so that the easeful awakeness that is your natural state can come to the foreground of your attention.
Big ThinkBig Think Michio Kaku: 3 mind-blowing predictions about the future Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo Learn skills from the world’s top minds at Big Think Edge: https://bigth.ink/Edge ——————————–
Carl Sagan believed humanity needed to become a multi-planet species as an insurance policy against the next huge catastrophe on Earth. Now, Elon Musk is working to see that mission through, starting with a colony of a million humans on Mars. Where will our species go next? Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku looks decades into the future and makes three bold predictions about human space travel, the potential of ‘brain net’, and our coming victory over cancer. “[I]n the future, the word ‘tumor’ will disappear from the English language,” says Kaku. “We will have years of warning that there is a colony of cancer cells growing in our body. And our descendants will wonder: How could we fear cancer so much?” —-
MICHIO KAKU: Dr. Michio Kaku is the co-founder of string field theory, and is one of the most widely recognized scientists in the world today. He has written 4 New York Times Best Sellers, is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and has hosted numerous science specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery/Science Channel. His radio show broadcasts to 100 radio stations every week. Dr. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study as well as New York University (NYU). Read Michio Kaku’s latest book “The Future of Humanity: Our Destiny in the Universe” at http://amzn.to/2X9RRNE
Retrocausality, or backwards causation, is a concept of cause and effect in which an effect precedes its cause in time and so a later event affects an earlier one.[1][2] In quantum physics, the distinction between cause and effect is not made at the most fundamental level and so time-symmetric systems can be viewed as causal or retrocausal.[3][page needed] Philosophical considerations of time travel often address the same issues as retrocausality, as do treatments of the subject in fiction, but the two phenomena are distinct.[1]
Philosophical efforts to understand causality extend back at least to Aristotle‘s discussions of the four causes. It was long considered that an effect preceding its cause is an inherent self-contradiction because, as 18th century philosopher David Hume discussed, when examining two related events, the cause, by definition, is the one that precedes the effect.[4][page needed]
In the 1950’s, Michael Dummett wrote in opposition to such definitions, stating that there was no philosophical objection to effects preceding their causes.[5] This argument was rebutted by fellow philosopher Antony Flew and, later, by Max Black.[5] Black’s “bilking argument” held that retrocausality is impossible because the observer of an effect could act to prevent its future cause from ever occurring.[6] A more complex discussion of how free will relates to the issues Black raised is summarized by Newcomb’s paradox. Essentialist philosophers have proposed other theories, such as the existence of “genuine causal powers in nature” or by raising concerns about the role of induction in theories of causality.[7][page needed][8][page needed]
Physics
The ability to affect the past is sometimes taken to suggest that causes could be negated by their own effects, creating a logical contradiction such as the grandfather paradox.[9] This contradiction is not necessarily inherent to retrocausality or time travel; by limiting the initial conditions of time travel with consistency constraints, such paradoxes and others are avoided.[10]
Aspects of modern physics, such as the hypothetical tachyonparticle and certain time-independent aspects of quantum mechanics, may allow particles or information to travel backward in time. Logical objections to macroscopic time travel may not necessarily prevent retrocausality at other scales of interaction.[11][page needed] Even if such effects are possible, however, they may not be capable of producing effects different from those that would have resulted from normal causal relationships.[12][page needed]
Retrocausality is associated with the Double Inferential state-Vector Formalism (DIVF), later known as the two-state vector formalism (TSVF) in quantum mechanics, where the present is characterised by quantum states of the past and the future taken in combination.[17][18]Time runs left to right in this Feynman diagram of electron–positron annihilation. When interpreted to include retrocausality, the electron (marked e−) was not destroyed, instead becoming the positron (e+) and moving backward in time.
Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory, proposed by John Archibald Wheeler and Richard Feynman, uses retrocausality and a temporal form of destructive interference to explain the absence of a type of converging concentric wave suggested by certain solutions to Maxwell’s equations.[19] These advanced waves have nothing to do with cause and effect: they are simply a different mathematical way to describe normal waves. The reason they were proposed is that a charged particle would not have to act on itself, which, in normal classical electromagnetism, leads to an infinite self-force.[20][page needed]
Ernst Stueckelberg, and later Richard Feynman, proposed an interpretation of the positron as an electron moving backward in time, reinterpreting the negative-energy solutions of the Dirac equation. Electrons moving backward in time would have a positive electric charge.[21] Wheeler invoked this concept to explain the identical properties shared by all electrons, suggesting that “they are all the same electron” with a complex, self-intersecting world line.[22]Yoichiro Nambu later applied it to all production and annihilation of particle-antiparticle pairs, stating that “the eventual creation and annihilation of pairs that may occur now and then is no creation or annihilation, but only a change of direction of moving particles, from past to future, or from future to past.”[23] The backwards-in-time point of view is nowadays accepted as completely equivalent to other pictures,[24] but it has nothing to do with the macroscopic terms “cause” and “effect”, which do not appear in a microscopic physical description.
Retrocausality is sometimes associated with the nonlocal correlations that generically arise from quantum entanglement, including for example the delayed choice quantum eraser.[25][26] However accounts of quantum entanglement can be given which do not involve retrocausality. They treat the experiments demonstrating these correlations as being described from different reference frames that disagree on which measurement is a “cause” versus an “effect”, as necessary to be consistent with special relativity.[27][28] That is to say, the choice of which event is the cause and which the effect is not absolute but is relative to the observer. The description of such nonlocal quantum entanglements can be described in a way that is free of retrocausality if the states of the system are considered.[29] Physicist John G. Cramer has explored various proposed methods for nonlocal or retrocausal quantum communication and found them all flawed and, consistent with the no communication theorem, unable to transmit nonlocal signals.[30]
Even if retrocausality exists at a quantum level, it cannot be used for communication because verifying any nonlocal correlation requires ordinary subluminal communication between observers at the source and destination: the no communication theorem prevents the superluminal transfer of information. Fundamental descriptions of matter and forces require the full framework of quantum field theory in which spacelike-separated operators commute.[clarification needed]
Quantum gravity
Quantum gravity requires a reconciliation of both relativity and quantum physics. It has been suggested that “A classical notion of a causal structure is … untenable in any framework compatible with the basic principles of quantum mechanics and classical general relativity,” along with a Bell-type theorem providing a basis by which this could in principle be experimentally tested.[31] The approach seeks to derive effects of quantum gravity around massive planets, leading to the suggestion that around such objects cause and effect could be reversed, with a certain degree of predictability.
Tachyons
Hypothetical superluminal particles called tachyons have a spacelike trajectory, and thus can appear to move backward in time, according to an observer in a conventional reference frame. Despite frequent depiction in science fiction as a method to send messages back in time, tachyons do not interact with normal tardyonic matter in a way that would violate standard causality. Specifically, the Feinberg reinterpretation principle means that ordinary matter cannot be used to make a tachyon detector capable of receiving information.[32]
Efforts to associate retrocausality with prayer healing have been similarly rejected.[39][40]
From 1994 Psychologist Daryl J. Bem has argued for precognition. He subsequently showed experimental subjects two sets of curtains and instructed them to guess which one had a picture behind it, but did not display the picture behind the curtain until after the subject made their guess. Some results showed a higher margin of success (p. 17) for a subset of erotic images, with subjects who identified as “stimulus-seeking” in the pre-screening questionnaire scoring even higher. However, like his predecessors, his methodology has been strongly criticised and his results discounted.[41]
[And Releasing the Hidden Splendour (RHS) is another form of retrocausality, that is, rethinking the cause and therefore changing the effect as well. –m.z.]
(in Anglo-Saxon England) a man who held land granted by the king or by a military nobleman, ranking between an ordinary freeman and a hereditary noble.
(in Scotland) a man, often the chief of a clan, who held land from a Scottish king and ranked with an earl’s son.”the Thane of Cawdor”
Origin
Old English theg(e)n ‘servant, soldier’, of Germanic origin; related to German Degen ‘warrior’, from an Indo-European root shared by Greek teknon ‘child’, tokeus ‘parent’.
“You have got a boy mixed of most kindly elements, as perhaps Shakespeare might say. His rapidly and clearly working mind has not in the least spoiled his character,” a school principal wrote at the end of the nineteenth century to the mother of a lanky quiet teenager who would grow up to be the great English astronomer Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (December 28, 1882–November 22, 1944) and who would catapult Albert Einstein into celebrity by confirming his relativity theory in his historic eclipse expedition of May 29, 1919.
The centennial of that landmark event, which revolutionized science and united a war-torn humanity under one sky of cosmic truth, was the subject of the third Universe in Verse — the charitable celebration of science through poetry I host each spring at Pioneer Works — and as has been our annual tradition, we had the great honor of an original poem for the occasion by one of the great storytellers of our time: Neil Gaiman.
Arthur Eddington
Born into a family descended from the first Quakers and stretching back four generations of farmers, Stanley — as his mother and sister always called him — learned the multiplication table before he could read and tasked himself with counting the letters of the Bible. By the age of ten, this unusual child who was and would remain very much his own person had observed most of the sky with a 3-inch telescope his headmaster had loaned him.
At twenty, after winning a series of mathematics competitions and scholarships, Eddington entered Trinity College, where he was immediately immersed in the cult of Newton. His peers would later remember him as extremely quiet and reserved, exuding formidable powers of concentration. (Later in life, his awkwardness and aloofness would make some of his students perceive him as arrogant.) In 1904, while Einstein was finalizing his special relativity, the 22-year-old Eddington became the first second-year Trinity student to rise to the top of the undergraduate student body in mathematics — a position known as Senior Wrangler and regarded at the time as “the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain.”
At Trinity, Eddington met Charles Trimble. A classmate who also came from a working-class background, this pensive-looking youth with gentle features and neatly combed black hair soon became his most intimate friend. Eddington was an avid cyclist and usually rode alone, but he began going on long rides with Charles, talking about mathematics and literature. Only in Charles’s company, he deviated from his Quaker discipline and took the occasional cheerful drink, smoked the occasional cigarette, went to the theater and the newborn cinema.
Charles eventually took a mathematics post and spiraled into mental illness. Eddington never married, never had another intimate bond. He lived out his days with his sister, Winifred, who also never married. I picture him Turing-like — in his genius, in his misapprehended awkwardness, in his loneliness and heartbreak.
That invisible private side to the public genius is what Gaiman takes up with empathic perceptiveness and great tenderness in his poem, celebrating what he calls these “twin suns” of Eddington’s life and, through the diffraction that is all great art, celebrating the twin suns of the public self and the private self, of genius and loneliness, of intellectual heroism and emotional heartbreak, that shine in varying degrees on every human life.
IN TRANSIT (for Arthur Eddington) by Neil Gaiman
1.
To find the many in the one he sweated under foreign skies to see the stars behind the sun.
So space and time were now undone reality was undisguised. We found the many in the one.
There is no photograph, not one, that shows the mind behind the eyes. He saw the stars behind the sun.
Not with a sword, or knife, or gun, a simple picture severed ties. He found the many in the one.
Light bends around us. So we run, as gravity reclassifies the stars we saw behind the sun.
To see the world beyond the skies, to know the mind behind the eyes, To find the many in the one he showed us stars behind the sun.
2.
Unfucked, or anyway retiring, in the awkward sense. Retirement will never be an option. The gruff gentleman with the cap who understands what the numbers mean remembers a bicycle ride when he was younger.
The smoke of the cigarettes he does not smoke kicks at his lungs mixing with the buzz of the booze he doesn’t ever drink a convivial pint after the ride into the country gave him such a thirst. And afterwards they lay on their back in the stubble staring up at the stars. Together. All the stars
Countable as the words in a Bible, countable as the hairs on his friend’s head, all accountable, and that is why they never truly touched. The shadow of prison or disgrace perhaps moving between them like the shadow of an eclipse.
And, in another life, at another time, to see the stars behind the sun, he takes his photographs fighting the cloud cover. Becoming the thing that happened in Principe. when he proved that the German was right, that light had weight, half a year after the Armistice. A populariser, but not courting popularity.
Somewhen a boy is counting stars. Somewhen a man is photographing light. Somewhen his finger strokes the stubble on another’s cheek, and for a moment everything is relative.
Complement with Gaiman’s superb original poems from the first two years of The Universe in Verse — “The Mushroom Hunters” (2017), a subversive celebration of the history of women in science, which won the Rhysling Award for Best Long Poem; and “After Silence” (2018), a tribute to the life and legacy of Rachel Carson — then revisit the touching, improbable story of how Eddington confirmed relativity.
Netflix From award-winning director Kornél Mundruczó (WHITE GOD) and executive producer Martin Scorsese, PIECES OF A WOMAN is a deeply personal, searing, and ultimately transcendent story of a woman (Vanessa Kirby – Best Actress Winner, Venice Film Festival 2020) learning to live alongside her loss. In Select Theaters December 30, 2020. And on Netflix globally January 7, 2021. VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2020 Winner – Best Film – Arca CinemaGiovani Award Winner – Best Actress – Vanessa Kirby Nominee – Best Film – Golden Lion TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2020 Nominee – Best Canadian Feature Film SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/29qBUt7 About Netflix: Netflix is the world’s leading streaming entertainment service with over 195 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can watch as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on any internet-connected screen. Members can play, pause and resume watching, all without commercials or commitments. Pieces of a Woman | Official Trailer | Netflix https://youtube.com/Netflix
China’s “Zhurong” rover successfully landed on Mars Saturday, state media reported, a triumph for Beijing’s increasingly bold space ambitions.ADVERTISING
The lander carrying Zhurong completed the treacherous descent through the Martian atmosphere using a parachute to navigate the “seven minutes of terror” as it is known, aiming for a vast northern lava plain known as the Utopia Planitia.
The mission “successfully landed in the pre-selected area”, state broadcaster CCTV said, while the official Xinhua news agency cited the China National Space Administration (CNSA) in confirming the touchdown.
It makes China the first country to carry out an orbiting, landing and roving operation during its first mission to Mars — a feat unmatched by the only other two nations to reach the Red Planet, the US and Russia.
Zhurong, named after a Chinese mythical fire god, arrives a few months behind America’s latest probe to Mars — Perseverance — as the show of technological might between the two superpowers plays out beyond the bounds of Earth.
Six-wheeled, solar-powered and roughly 240 kilograms, the Chinese rover is on a quest to collect and analyse rock samples from Mars’ surface.
It is expected to spend around three months there.
The launch of China’s Tianwen-1 Mars probe which carried the rover last July marked a major milestone in China’s space programme.
The spacecraft entered Mars’ orbit in February and after days of silence state media announced it had reached the “crucial touchdown stage” on Friday.
The complicated landing process has been called the “seven minutes of terror” because it happens faster than radio signals can reach Earth from Mars, meaning communications are limited.
Several US, Russian and European attempts to land rovers on Mars have failed in the past, most recently in 2016 with the crash-landing of the Schiaparelli joint Russian-European spacecraft.
The latest successful arrival came in February, when US space agency NASA landed its rover Perseverance, which has since been exploring the planet.
The US rover launched a small robotic helicopter on Mars which was the first ever powered flight on another planet.
The country has come a long way in its race to catch up with the United States and Russia, whose astronauts and cosmonauts have decades of experience in space exploration.
China successfully launched the first module of its new space station last month with hopes of having it crewed by 2022 and eventually sending humans to the Moon.
Last week a segment of the Chinese Long March 5B rocket disintegrated over the Indian Ocean in an uncontrolled landing back to Earth.
That drew criticism from the United States and other nations for a breach of etiquette governing the return of space debris to earth, with officials saying the remnants had the potential to endanger life and property.
Meghan Woolleyis a historian of law and culture in the Middle Ages and a PhD candidate at Duke University in North Carolina, where she teaches academic writing and medieval history. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Edited by Sam Haselby
(Psyche.co) 9 DECEMBER 2020
In the final scene of Legally Blonde (2001), Elle Woods quotes Aristotle as part of her graduation speech: ‘The law is reason free from passion.’ ‘No offence to Aristotle,’ she continues, but ‘I have come to find that passion is a key ingredient to the study and practice of law.’ Elle captures a contradiction between a common conception of law as emotionless, and the practice of law as something that in reality always involves emotions. This tension between the theory and experience of law is one that goes back centuries, even millennia.
The history of law challenges any assumption that law should, by its nature, be isolated from human feeling. Instead, it reveals nuanced ways in which emotions impact legal processes and enable law to carry more social power. Law isn’t simply about the application of abstract principles; it’s about shaping relationships between real people. Emotions are one way that law, whether in a murder trial or a contract signing, connects to the broader social reality of its participants.
An early 12th-century English law book called TheLaws of Henry I (Leges Henrici Primi in the original Latin) highlights the role of informal agreements between litigants, which draw on emotional bonds to create peace. When discussing different ways of solving a dispute, the Laws state: ‘An agreement supersedes law, and love supersedes judgment’ (‘pactum enim legem vincit et amor iudicium’). This means that a voluntary agreement is preferable to a sentence given by an official justice. Love, or amor in Latin, could provide a more effective resolution than a legal sentence. The author describes agreements based on love and friendship as legally binding. They share many of the same trappings as court settlements, including being made in the presence of witnesses and potentially overseen by a justice.
Love wasn’t simply a personal feeling; it could be both a forceful passion and a public expression of status
Love-based settlements and formal judgments differed in the amount of flexibility they offered. The former enabled disputants to choose their own terms and create an agreement that fit their social reality. TheLaws of Henry I, for example, stipulates that, in a dispute between two neighbours, their lord ‘shall bring them together by friendship or shall give a judgment’ (‘amicitia congreget aut sequestret iudicium’). If, as was common, these neighbours had a border dispute, an official judgment might simply dictate where the border should lie. An informal agreement designed by the neighbours themselves might take other concerns into account, such as past grievances or rights to other property nearby. By focusing on creating friendship, this kind of agreement could encompass more of what mattered to the participants and prevent future disputes.
Often, modern translations of medieval legal texts use language that de-emphasises the emotional content of the original. L J Downer, the translator of The Laws of Henry I, for example, renders the Latin terms amor, dilectione and amicitia into English using phrases such as ‘friendly agreement’ or ‘amicable settlement’, when a more direct translation would use ‘love’ and ‘friendship’. Downer’s translation captures some of the social power of love and friendship in the Middle Ages, but it also obscures the emotional power of these terms. Love wasn’t simply a quality describing informal settlements; love itself was the basis of the settlement.
Men and women of the 12th century placed a high value on love and friendship, which could publicly reinforce virtue and honour. These social and emotional layers of agreements based on amor, dilectione and amicitia were central to how they could sustain peace. Anglo-Norman law shows us how cultural ideas about emotional bonds could shape the practice of law.
In the 12th century, love wasn’t simply a personal feeling; it could be both a forceful passion and a public expression of status. Letters from aristocratic men to their king could be so affectionate as to resemble modern love letters. To seal peace agreements, kings gave each other the kiss of peace. Emotional gestures added power to political rituals, enabling lords and royalty to reinforce alliances and connect political relationships to the spiritual obligations of Christian love. The language of love could signal personal feelings of friendship and affection, while at the same time formalising a political alliance through a publicly displayed bond. These layered meanings made love an ideal symbol for resolving disputes.
Jurors who express sympathy for a defendant are likely to be taken less seriously
As English common law developed in the second half of the 12th century, law clerks and justices envisioned it more as a self-contained system, with its own rules discrete from social practice outside of the courts. This development involved distancing law from emotions. However, even when the relationship between law and social norms becomes less direct, there is always a relationship, with influence travelling in both directions. Law is practised and theorised by living people, whether justices, administrators, lawyers or litigants, who carry their cultural values into the courtroom with them.
Today, emotions have a complicated, often contradictory role in law. Victim impact statements, for example, provide space for victims of crime to describe their emotional suffering, with the potential to influence sentencing. The case of the former Olympic doctor Larry Nassar perhaps best encapsulates this practice, as the judge Rosemarie Aquilina allowed more than 150 women to make statements as an outlet for emotional processing. Articles in Time and Vox magazines, however, criticised Aquilina’s open indignation for undermining the impartiality of justice. For these writers, the justness of law rests on the neutral application of rational rules, without room for emotions.
Juries, too, are often expected to be emotionless. Jurors who express sympathy for a defendant are likely to be criticised and taken less seriously, especially when they are women. However, a number of studies have shown that jurors make decisions based on implicit assumptions about what emotions people should feel. Chillingly, rape victims are less likely to be believed if they appear calm rather than hysterical. Defendants in capital cases are more likely to be sentenced to death if they don’t visibly show remorse. Cultural norms about emotions have a serious, direct impact on the outcomes of legal cases. Rather than avoiding engagement with these realities about the role of emotions in the legal system, we should analyse them head-on.
TheLaws of Henry I can’t offer us a neat lesson for law today. However, examples from 12th-century law prompt us to consider how emotions should fit into a complete legal system. From the very origins of the Anglo-American legal tradition, emotions have had the potential to influence decisions and support dispute resolutions. If, as Aristotle claimed, law really is ‘reason free from passion’, its impact would be constrained to the direct effects of its sentencing. If a key goal of law is to create social harmony that extends beyond the doors of its courtrooms and lawyers’ offices, it should take the social and emotional lives of its participants into consideration. Judges and jurors often do this already, in ways that we should not leave unexamined.
Perhaps most litigants today aren’t looking to join in love with the people they sue. But strategies that formally enable emotional processing, expression and relationship building are anything but irrational; they could be instrumental to law that works.
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IN TRANSIT (for Arthur Eddington)
