Tokens of sanity

I repeat my September 29, 2024 "Tokens of sanity" post with a few edits: 

  

-Being the calm space in which nothing can hurry

-A animal body that can dissociate itself from the word cloud and emotional reactivities of self and other selves.

-A courteous guest in its own body and when with others, owning its own experience and letting others own theirs.

-Favoring reflectivity over reactivity, caressing novelty

-Clinging to nothing, the current self being a passing fantasy

-Letting each moment be what it is, not what it should be

-A blip in the flow of cosmic time

Awe as a Pathway to Mental and Physical Health

Reading this open source review from Maria Monroy and Dacher Keltner leaves me feeling substantially more mellow! Their abstract, followed by a quote from Emerson, and then a summary graphic...

How do experiences in nature or in spiritual contemplation or in being moved by music or with psychedelics promote mental and physical health? Our proposal in this article is awe. To make this argument, we first review recent advances in the scientific study of awe, an emotion often considered ineffable and beyond measurement. Awe engages five processes—shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning—that benefit well-being. We then apply this model to illuminate how experiences of awe that arise in nature, spirituality, music, collective movement, and psychedelics strengthen the mind and body.

and,

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental; to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

-from Emerson R. W. (1836). Nature. Reprinted in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Other Essays (2009). Dover.

Fig. 1. Model for awe as a pathway to mental and physical health. This model shows that awe experiences will lead to the mediators that will lead to better mental and physical-health outcomes. Note that the relationships between awe experiences and mediators, and mediators and outcomes have been empirically identified; the entire pathways have only recently begun to be tested. One-headed arrows suggest directional relationships, and two-headed arrows suggest bidirectionality. DMN = default-mode network; PTSD = posttraumatic stress disorder.

 

 

(The above  text) is a re-post.

A human machine writes...

I think the spookily impersonal paragraph I pass on below - composed while getting back to sleep after a 2 a.m. pee-wake - is the way things work. Dry and mundane mechanical processes underlie the rich experienced emotions and feelings that make us human. 

Machinery here, pushing down keys of another machine, generating words, just like a human does. Much simpler than pretending to be one. Just nerves, muscles, and energy fluxes in and out. Curatorial rather than aspirational. Cooperating with other similar machines to make larger ensembles more effective at survival and replication. Generating a word cloud stored in higher brain areas to fabricate the value, purpose, and meaning myths that sometimes strengthen and sometimes diminish the downstairs animal presence generating them.