A second basic fact that characterizes nonviolence is that it does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that these are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent … The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.

A third characteristic of this method is that the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil … We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust.

A fourth point that characterizes nonviolent resistance is a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back. ‘Rivers of blood may have to flow before we gain our freedom, but it must be our blood,’ Gandhi said to his countrymen. The nonviolent resister … does not seek to dodge jail. If going to jail is necessary, he enters it ‘as a bridegroom enters the bride’s chamber…’  “What is the nonviolent resister’s justification for this ordeal to which he invites men, for this mass political application of the ancient doctrine of turning the other cheek?” The answer is found in the realization that unearned suffering is redemptive. Suffering, the nonviolent resister realizes, has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities.

A fifth point concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him. At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love …

A sixth basic fact about nonviolent resistance is that it is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. Consequently, the believer in nonviolence has deep faith in the future. This faith is another reason why the nonviolent resister can accept suffering without retaliation. For he knows that in his struggle for justice he has cosmic companionship… a creative force in this universe that works to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole.

–Martin Luther King. Jr., in

Stride Towards Freedom

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq3BYw4xjxE

We Are The Many

Ye come here, gather ’round the stage
The time has come for us to voice our rage
Against the ones who’ve trapped us in a cage
To steal from us the value of our wage

From underneath the vestiture of law
The lobbyists at Washington do gnaw
At liberty, the bureaucrats guffaw
And until they are purged, we won’t withdraw

We’ll occupy the streets
We’ll occupy the courts
We’ll occupy the offices of you
Till you do
The bidding of the many, not the few

Our nation was built upon the right
Of every person to improve their plight
But laws of this Republic they rewrite
And now a few own everything in sight

They own it free of liability
They own, but they are not like you and me
Their influence dictates legality
And until they are stopped we are not free

We’ll occupy the streets
We’ll occupy the courts
We’ll occupy the offices of you
Till you do
The bidding of the many, not the few

You enforce your monopolies with guns
While sacrificing our daughters and sons
But certain things belong to everyone
Your thievery has left the people none

So take heed of our notice to redress
We have little to lose, we must confess
Your empty words do leave us unimpressed
A growing number join us in protest

We occupy the streets
We occupy the courts
We occupy the offices of you
Till you do
The bidding of the many, not the few

You can’t divide us into sides
And from our gaze, you cannot hide
Denial serves to amplify
And our allegiance you can’t buy

Our government is not for sale
The banks do not deserve a bail
We will not reward those who fail
We will not move till we prevail

We’ll occupy the streets
We’ll occupy the courts
We’ll occupy the offices of you
Till you do
The bidding of the many, not the few

We’ll occupy the streets
We’ll occupy the courts
We’ll occupy the offices of you
Till you do
The bidding of the many, not the few

We are the many
You are the few

Credits:
Directed & Edited by Kamuela Vance
Filmed by Tom Hackett & Kamuela Vance
Creative Consultant: Evan Tector
Thanks to ‘Olelo Community Television
All images Fair Use.
Our heartfelt gratitude to the Artists and Photographers.

- Groups show solidarity with indigenous people, call for halt to mining
- A group of marchers in Australia are trying to prevent any new uranium mines from opening.
- Anti-nuclear marchers in Australia.
- By Summit Voice

SUMMIT COUNTY — After nine weeks walking through rain, wind and dust across a big chunk of Australia, 50 protest marchers arrived in Perth to call for an end to uranium mining in Australia.

“Footprints for Peace have organized international walks against uranium mining for seven years. On each walk we hear the same stories about the broken promises from the nuclear industry“, said march coordinator Marcus Atkinson. “This industry … divides communities and leaves people uncertain and afraid about the future.”

The group has been walking in solidarity with the Traditional Custodians of the Wiluna and Yeelirrie areas where uranium mines have been proposed; many are opposed to the mines but have no legal recourse.

Bilbo Taylor, spokesperson for Walk Away from Uranium Mining, said,

Although we are walking into the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, this is not about the Queen or any other heads of government, this is about common people from around the world who have walked together with the indigenous peoples of this land in respect for their sovereign rights, and with a simple message ‘Irati Wanti – uranium’, leave it in the ground.

Jocelyn Peyret, from the Resau Sortir du Nucleaire- an anti-nuclear federation of 915 organisation and 54,109 individual members, has been with the walk since the beginning. He has witnessed the way the nuclear industry works both in France and Australia.

We support the indigenous people in their fight because it’s the same in France. They arrive with a lot of money and promises of jobs, but when they’re done, they just leave problems. It’s the same fight. The nuclear industry take’s your land and your future

“For an indigenous person of North America, it simply means no more exploitation and colonization,” said Ammon Russell, an indigenous person from the Dine/Navajo reservation in Arizona. “Australians can begin by simply respecting what the original caretakers of this land maintained in culture, language and belief systems.”

“Combustible” is a web video, created as part of a campaign, for the Global Climate Initiative, an organization that was borne to raise awareness of the fact, that we as human beings, are actually having a negative impact on the global ecology, and we shouldn’t wait until it’s too late to see this truth, and act.
You’ll see why in a min…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5iS7BL1tDA

Afin d’approfondir le projet local et de mieux connaître les autres expériences menées en France et à l’étranger, l’association SOL et la ville de Nanterre organisent conjointement un séminaire international sur les monnaies complémentaires qui se déroulera du 2 au 4 décembre 2009
www.sol-nanterre.org

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHbwL5vYOIo

Nous apprécierons des nouvelles de cette initiative !

The draft report, released by Japan’s Atomic Energy Commission of the Cabinet Office on Friday, said the removal of debris — or nuclear fuel — should begin by the end of 2021.

We set a goal to start taking out the debris within a 10-year period, and it is estimated that it would take 30 years or more (after the cold shutdown) to finish decommissioning because the process at Fukushima would be complicated, the report states.

Last month, the plant’s owner — Tokyo Electric Power Company — said engineers might be able to complete the cold shutdown of damaged reactors by the end of the year.

Yukiya Amano, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday that operators of the plant “are now confident that the so-called cold shutdown will be achieved by the end of the year.”
TEPCO compensation rules criticized
Japan’s new energy reality
Life after Japan’s nuclear crisis

Temperatures in the three reactors where meltdowns occurred in the wake of the historic March 11 earthquake and tsunami have already been brought down below 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit), but the company has to maintain those conditions for some time before declaring the reactors in cold shutdown, Tokyo Electric spokesman Yoshikazu Nagai said.

Experts have said it will take years — perhaps decades — to fully clean up the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Hydrogen explosions blew apart the No. 1 and No. 3 reactor housings, while another hydrogen blast is suspected to have damaged the No. 2 reactor. Fires believed caused by heat from the No. 4 spent fuel pool damaged that unit’s reactor building.

The atomic energy commission’s report noted it took 10 years to remove nuclear fuel after the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster in the United States. The commission predicted removing fuel at Fukushima would require more time because the situation is more severe.

At its heart is one region of the world, one of the last areas of the world to be brought into the nation-state system. “Zomia is a new name for virtually all the lands at altitudes above roughly three hundred meters all the way from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India and traversing five Southeast Asian nations (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma) and four provinces of China (Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, and parts of Sichuan). It is an expanse of 2.5 million square kilometres containing about one hundred million minority peoples of truly bewildering ethnic and linguistic variety.”

And there’s huge amounts of fascinating detail there – from the role of the New World crops of maize and sweet potato in allowing what I was taught of at school as “traditional” slash and burn (what Scott calls swidden) agriculture, to the egalitarian politics of the Lahu, which on Scott’s account is strongly anti-authority and built around many stories of the felling of over-mighty, over-ambitious headmen.

But it’s the overarching frame of this book that really makes it a must-read for those who like finding new ways of looking at history and the shape of the modern world. Scott points out (unarguably) that the state is a very recent arrival on the human scene, and that most humans, through almost all of our history, have lived in far smaller, freer, often anarchic and flexible units.

We can’t now, however, know what they were like, for contrary to the view (established by people writing from within, and usually in support of the nation state) the usually independent, often anarchical groups in Zomia are not some historical hangover, “primitive” people who couldn’t manage for one reason or another to “modernise”, but groups who chose to avoid the restrictions of the state, the “discipline” of padi farming, and choose the freer (and almost invariably better nourished) life of the forest and hill. (Scott comprehensive rebuffs the traditional tale of Malaysia’s orang asli “original people” once thought to have been descendents of earlier waves of migration less technically developed than the Austronesian populations who followed. They are not genetically different, he says, but part of a “political series”.

And they’re not tightknit “tribes”, but highly flexible groupings that can change identity for practical advantage almost at will, and absorb a huge range of disparate incomers, from runaway slaves, peasants and soldiers to adventurous traders and general malcontents.

It doesn’t quite deliver, but hints at an alternative world history in which the nation state, rather than its traditional portrayal as “civiliser”, “developer”, “stabiliser” is in fact a destroyer of rights, a deliverer of poor health and nutrition, a veritable Kali of woes. And one where the non-state societies are the defenders of functionality, freedom and hope.

There are critical things you can say about this book – definitely overlong and annnoyingly repetitive, and also frustrating in that it begs at least a brief exploration of more small-scale, modern attempts to create “new Zomias” – and an exploration of what this might mean to, say, the Occupy movement (although perhaps being published in 2009 it was a little early to see the desperate hunger for new ideas so evident today.)

But it’s generally highly readable, and absolutely fascinating in detail. And great at debunking well-established myths.
So tribes aren’t some pre-existing, fixed genetic entity (at least in most cases), but very often a creation of states trying to control their non-state peripheries, by creating “chiefs” and “sub-chiefs” that can mimic – and they eventually hope become – state structures. He quotes Leach on an event in the Shan hills of Burma in 1836: “All my example really shows is that the Burmese, the Shans, and the Kachins of the Hukawng Valley … shared a common language of ritual expression; they all knew how to make themselves understood in this common ‘language’. It doesn’t mean that what was said in this ‘language’ was ‘true’ in political reality. The statements of the ritual in question were made in terms of the supposition that there existed an ideal, stable, Shan state with the

soahpa (ruler) of Mogaing at the head of it and all the Kachin and Shan chiefs of the Hukawng Valley his loyal liege servants. We have no real evidence that any real aopa of Mogaing ever wielded such authority, and we know for a fact that when this particular ritual took place there had been no genuine soahpa of Mogaing at all for nearly 80 years.”

People, even large groups of people, choosing to opt out of “civilisation” and run for the freedom of the hills was common. So much so that the Han Chinese empire had a term for them – “Han-traitors” (Hanjian). In times of dynastic decline, natural disasters, wars, epidemics, and exceptional tyranny, what was a steady flow of adventurers, traders, criminals and pioneers might become a population hemorrhage.”

Scott skips around the world to look at parallel examples, citing Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrain’s Regions of Refuge on Latin America and regions that evaded control by the Spanish colonisers, and subsequent research which showed these were almost all not “indigenous”, but once cultivators living in highly stratified societies that had chosen to flee the Spanish (and/or their epidemics) and re-form their societies in forms emphasising mobility and adaptation. He also cites the Marsh Arabs of Iraq, the sea gypsies of much of Southeast Asia (for whom mangroves were a refuge), and the nomads of central Asia.

So what did such societies look like? Scott admits there are many variations, but is clearly drawn to the relatively egalitarian ones, citing the words of a forestry officer visiting the Tengger Highlands (“the major redoubt on Java of an explicitly non-Islamic, Hindu-Shaivite priesthood, the only such piresthood to have escaped the wave of Islamicization that followed the collapse of the last major Hindu-Buddhist kingdom (Majapahit) in the early 16th century”): “You couldn’t tell the rich from poor. everyone spoke in the same way to everyone else too, no matter what their position. Children talked to their parents and even to the village chief using the ordinary ngoko. No one bent and bowed before others.”

And, after Geoffrey Benjamin, he sees these societies as often practicing dissimilation – positioning themselves ecologically, economically and culturally as oppose to the state societies. e.g. “We are the foragers; we do not touch the plough.” And the Akha (now some 2.5m strong across southern Yunnan, Laos, Burma and Thailand): “A key figure in their legends is the would-be Akha king of the 13th century, Dzjawbang, who instituted a census (the iconic tax and state-making move!) and was slain by his own people. His son Bang Dhzui is an Icarus figure whose shamanic horse with wings mended with beeswax flies too close to the sun and is killed. Both stories are cautionary tales about hierarchy and state formation.”

Many societies, he says, maintained some or even extensive knowledge of the settled past – citing for one example the Ganan, now numbering some 8,000 at the head of the Mu River in Sagaing Division in Burma.”They were, or had become, it seems a lowland people and an integral part of the Pyu paid state until its centers were sacked and destroyed by Mon, Burman and Nan Chao state forces between the 9th and 14th centuries. They fled up the Mu river watershed because it was ‘away from the battlefields’; there they became, and remain, swiddeners and foragers.They have no written language and they practice a heterodox variation of Buddhism.”
The choice of crops was important, Scott says. “Cultivars that cannot be stored long without spoiling, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, or that have low value per unit weight and volume, such as most gourds, rootcrops and tubers, will not repay the efforts of a tax gatherer. In general, roots and tubers such as yams, sweet potatoes, potatoes and cassava/manioc/yucca are nearly appropriation-proof. After they ripen, they can be safely left in the ground for up to two years and dug up piecemeal as needed. There is thus no granary to plunder. If the army or the taxman wants your potatoes, for example, they will have to dig them up one by one.”

And the arrival of New World crops in the 16th-century – most notably maize and cassava – created many new opportunities, making hill areas previously untenable possible homes. “The opportunity was seized by so any people that it prompted a significant redistribution of population. .. The reasons for moving away from state space could vary dramatically – religious division, war, corvee, forced cultivation under colonial schemes, epidemics, flight from bondage – but the availability of maize was a new and valuable tool for potential runaways.”

And when under most pressure, some groups chose to resort to a wholly foraging lifestyle – as did the Semang of the Malay Peninsula – was a sensible adaptation for a small, militarily weak minority group that did not wish to join a strong group of agriculturalists. Scott cites the historical case of the Siriono of eastern Bolivia, who have been written up as Paleolithic survivors lacking the ability to make fire or cloth, living in rude shelters, innumerate, having no domestic animals or developed cosmology. Actually “we now know beyond all reasonable doubt that the Siriono had been crop-growing villagers until roughly 1920, when influenza and smallpox swept through their villages, killing many of them. Attached by numerically superior peoples and fleeing potential slavery, the Siriono apparently abandoned their crops, which, in any event, they did not have the numbers to defend. Their independence and survival in this case required them to divide into smaller bands, foraging and moving whenever threatened. They would occasionally raid a settlement to take axes, hatchets and machetes, but at the same time they dreaded the illnesses the raiders often brought back with them. They had become non-sedentary by choice – to avoid both disease and capture.”

It make sense of an early manual of Chinese statecraft which urged the king to prohibit subsistence activities in the mountains and wetlands “in order to increase the involvement of the people in the production of grain.” Otherwise “the common people who detest farming, are lazy, and want doubled profits, will have nowhere to find something to eat.” Scott adds “the shrill tone of the advice suggests that the policy was not a complete success.”

Sounds familiar today!

Article Author: Natalie Bennett

Natalie is the editor of My London Your London, an independent cultural guide featuring theatre, gallery and museum reviews, and also blogs at Philobiblon, on history, culture, Green politics and all things feminist.

Did you ever wonder, somewhat apprehensively, whether your true inner Command Center rests in the complex bio­mechanics of your brain or the vast reaches of your mind? It always seemed to me as inscrutable as asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. But the study of neuroplasticity is changing the way scientists think about the mind/brain connection. While they’ve known for years that the brain is the physical substrate for the mind, the central mystery of neuroscience is how the mind influences the physical structure of the brain. In the last few decades, thanks to PET and MRI imaging techniques, scientists can observe what’s actually going on in the brain while people sleep, work, make decisions, or attempt to function under limitations caused by illness, accident, or war.

The breakthrough in imaging techniques led Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, now a research psychiatrist at the School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of The Mind & The Brain, to wonder two decades ago,

What kind of internal experience is generated by the neuronal activity captured on a brain scan? Even more important, how can we use scientific discoveries linking inner experience with brain function to effect constructive changes in everyday life? [1]

As student of Buddhist meditation, he developed a form of therapy to change the faulty chemistry of a well-identified brain circuit: that of the patient with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. (OCD is a prime example of pathological brain processes in which negative thoughts can be traced on an MRI). He told his patients:

The feeling of doubt … is a false message, due to a jammed transmission in the brain. [2]

They learned to change the way they thought about their thoughts through regular refocusing, which engaged them in intentional rather than automatic behavior, activating a different brain circuitry. Not only did he introduce a new treatment for mental illness, he also ­provided hard evidence that the mind can control the brain’s chemistry as he demonstrated how refocusing literally reprograms the brain, and mindfulness gives people more control over their lives.

On another front, the millennial inner science of meditation became the focus of experiments by Dr. Richard Davidson, a pioneer in contemplative neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. With the cooperation of the Dalai Lama, he made MRIs of Tibetan monks in such meditative states as visualization, one-pointed concentration, and the generation of compassion. According to Davidson,

The brain can be transformed through engagement with purely mental practices derived from the world’s great religious traditions…. The brain, more than any other organ in our body, is the organ built to change in response to experience. [3]

When the Dalai Lama was asked what greater benefit he hoped for from this line of research, His Holiness replied:

Through training the mind, people can become more calm—especially those who suffer from too many ups and downs. That’s the conclusion from these studies of Buddhist mind training. And that’s my main end: I’m not thinking how to further Buddhism, but how the Buddhist tradition can make some contribution to the benefit of society. Of course, as Buddhists, we always pray for all sentient beings. But we’re only human beings; the main thing you can do is train your own mind. [4]

Relationships change the brain

I asked Dr. Daniel Siegel, founder of the emerging field of interpersonal neurobiology: How does the brain change as we influence each other? He has spent more than twenty years investigating the profound influence on us of those around us, or what he calls “the neurobiology of ‘we.’” [5] Siegel is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center, and director of the Mindsight Institute. He’s convinced that the “we” connection is a little-understood, but powerful means for individual and societal transformation that should be taught in schools and churches, and even enter into politics.

“Interpersonal neurobiology isn’t a form of therapy,” he told me,

… but a form of integrating a range of scientific research into a picture of the nature of human reality. It’s a phrase I invented to account for the human effort to understand truth. We can define the mind. We can define mental health. We can base everything on science, but I want to base it on all the sciences. We’re looking for what we call ‘consilience.’ If you think of the neuroscientist as a blind man looking at only one part of an elephant, we are trying to discover the ‘whole-elephant’ view of reality. [6]

In a tele-class on Clinical Applications of Interpersonal Neurobiology, he explained that “For a person to change, the mind must change.” He added that

We now know ‘mind’ is coming both from interpersonal processes and from brain structure or neurobiology. The brain is the social organ of the body, where one hundred billion neurons reach out to other neurons. The release of neurotransmitters will excite or inhibit, fire or not fire. It’s the firing patterns that lead, in part, to the experience of mind. [7]

Here’s an example he gave of how neural firing leads to mental experience and how mental experience creates neural firing. When someone says the words, “Eiffel Tower,” you have an immediate visual experience because when you hear the word, an electrical current running through the acoustic nerve fires, sending a message to the left brain, where it is decoded. A visual image is then created in other parts of the brain. [8]
As Siegel further explained at a recent conference,

… the neural representation of the Eiffel Tower, or what’s called its neural net profile, is created by experience as the mind links past, present, and anticipation of the future. No one on the planet knows how a neural firing turns into a mental image but we know where it happens and that it somehow leads to a subjective mental process. The mind emerges at the interface of neurobiology and the interpersonal transactions of experience between minds. [9]

The good news is that while our earliest interpersonal experiences may have created detrimental repetitive patterns, new patterns are formed all through our life span. We can liberate ourselves from those old patterns through new neural connections. And Siegel believes interpersonal relationships are key to new forms of mental flow that shape the focus of our attention and what we envision.

Since the mental processes of attention and imagination change the firing in the brain, the brain can be changed by the mind. [10]

Siegel is convinced that the development of attention through meditative exercises is a crucial aspect of inner balance. He recommends it to his patients, telling them mindfulness helps people regulate their internal states, including their immune system, their emotions, their attention, and even their interpersonal interactions. He adds,

Now, for me, that’s not a surprise. Because mindfulness promotes the growth of integrative fibers in the brain, which are what’s needed for regulation across all these domains. Integration is the fundamental mechanism of self-regulation. [11]

I asked him how meditation could help a soldier returning from Iraq deal with traumatic experiences. Wouldn’t a deeply troubled or traumatized person who tries to sit in meditation feel more pain, even with an effort at “I am here”? He said,

With mindfulness you’re not trying to get beyond the pain. It’s just the opposite. You’re trying to deeply accept the pain. So the resistance when you try to get ‘beyond’ the pain is actually creating more suffering. If pain is there, your job is to accept it, and the relief from the desire and drive and urgency to get rid of it actually powerfully reduces the suffering, even though the pain remains. [12]

“We is what me is!”

Our nervous system has two basic modes: it fires up or quiets down. When we’re in a reactive state, our brainstem signals the need for fight or flight. This means we’re unable to open ourselves to another person, and even neutral comments may be taken as fighting words. On the other hand, an attitude of receptivity activates a different branch of the brainstem as it sends messages to relax the muscles of the face and vocal chords, and normalizes blood pressure and heart rate.

A receptive state turns on the social engagement system that connects us to others,” Siegel explains in his recent book, Mindsight. “Receptivity is our experience of being safe and seen; reactivity is our fight-flight-freeze survival reflex. [13]

He describes the brain as part of “an embodied nervous system, a physical mechanism through which both energy and information flow to influence relationship and the mind.” He defines relationship as “the flow of energy and information between people.” Mind is,

… An embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information, consciousness included. Mind is shared between people. It isn’t something you own; we are profoundly interconnected. We need to make maps of we because we is what me is! [14]

Although some neuroscientists insist the mind is just the output of the brain, Siegel points out that in the world of mental health, neither mind nor health have been adequately defined: “‘Mental health’ for many only means you don’t have any of the symptoms listed in the DSM IV [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], so you must be healthy!” he says.

We now know that integration leads to health and harmony. We can re-envision the DSM symptoms as examples of syndromes filled with chaos and rigidity, conditions created when integration is impaired. So we can define mental health as the ability to monitor ourselves and modify our states so that we integrate our lives. Then things that appeared unchangeable can actually be changed. [15]

Integration, the vital connection with all our parts that leads to balance, is composed of both differentiation and linkage, he says, and the absence of either impairs it:

Relationships, mind and brain aren’t different domains of reality—they are each about energy and information flow. The mechanism is the brain; subjective impressions and consciousness are mind. The regulation of energy and information flow is a function of mind as an emergent process emanating from both relationships and brain. Relationships are the way we share this flow. In this view, the emergent process we are calling ‘mind’ is located in the body (nervous system) and in our relationships. Interpersonal relationships that are attuned promote the growth of integrative fibers in the brain. It is these regulatory fibers that enable the embodied brain to function well and for the mind to have a deep sense of coherence and well-being. Such a state also creates the possibility of a sense of being connected to a larger world. The natural outcome of integration is compassion, kindness, and resilience. [16]

If mind is what flows through the mechanism of the brain, does that make neuroplasticity a process or a fact? “It’s a fact of a process,” he told me.

Process is a verb not a noun. It’s not a hypothesis, it’s a fact of science, a real entity, but a process—something moving, happening, and dynamic. Take running. It’s a noun but it’s about a moving process. [17]

He touched on the same subject at the conference:

Everything we experience, memory or emotion or thought, is part of a process, not a place in the brain! Energy is the capacity to do stuff. There’s nothing that’s not energy, even ‘mass.’ Remember E=MC squared? Information is literally a swirl of energy in a certain pattern that has a symbolic meaning; it stands for something other than itself. Information should be a verb; mind, too—as in minding or informationing. And the mind is an embodied and relational emergent process that regulates the flow of energy and information. [18]

“We can be both an ‘I’ and part of an ‘us’”

One of the most exciting new discoveries in neuroscience is the system of mirror neurons, which help us connect with each other. Siegel, who has a talent for explaining the complex workings of the brain and nervous system, tells about them in simple terms for the uninitiated:

Certain neurons can fire when someone communicates with you. They dissolve the border between you and others. These mirror neurons are a hardwired system designed for us to see the mind-state of another person. That means we can learn easily to dance, but also to empathize with another. They automatically and spontaneously pick up information about the intentions and feelings of those around us, creating emotional resonance and behavioral imitation as they connect our internal state with those around us, even without the participation of our conscious mind. [19]

And in Mindsight:

Mirror neurons are the antennae that pick up information about the intentions and feelings of others.… Right hemisphere signals (are those) the mirror neuron system uses to simulate the other within ourselves and to construct a neural map of our interdependent sense of a ‘self.’ It’s how we can be both an ‘I’ and part of an ‘us.’ [20]

So how can we re-shape our brain to become more open and receptive to others? We already know the brain receives input from the senses and gives it meaning, he points out. That’s how blind people find ways to take in information and map out their world. According to Siegel, they do this on secondary pathways rather than the main highways of the brain. That’s a major key to how we can bring about change: “You can take an adult brain in whatever state it’s in and change a person’s life by creating new pathways,” he affirms…

Since the cortex is extremely adaptable and many parts of the brain are plastic, we can unmask dormant pathways we don’t much use and develop them. A neural stem cell is a blob, an undifferentiated cell in the brain that divides into two every twenty-four hours. In eight–ten weeks, it will become established as a specialized neural cell and exist as a part of an interconnected network. How we learn has everything to do with linking wide areas of the brain with each other. [21]

He calls the prefrontal cortex “the portal through which interpersonal relations are established.” He demonstrates, by closing his hand over his thumb, how this little tiny piece of us (the last joint of the two middle fingers) is especially important because it touches all three major parts of our brain: the cortex, limbic area, and brainstem as well as the body-proper. “It’s the middle prefrontal fibers which map out the internal states of others,” he adds…

And they do this not only within one brain, mine, but also between two brains, mine and yours, and even among many brains. The brain is exquisitely social, and emotions are its fundamental language. Through them we become integrated and develop an emergent resonance with the internal state of the other. [22]

In Siegel’s recent books, Mindsight and The Mindful Therapist, he emphasizes the regulatory role of the mind, which can both monitor and modify what’s happening. Step by step he explains how the lens of the mind can be trained to see the mind in oneself and others. “Relationship is key,” he emphasizes…

When we work with relationship, we work with brain structure. Relationship stimulates us and is essential in our development. People rarely mention relationship in brain studies, but it provides vital input to the brain. Every form of psychotherapy that works, works because it creates healthier brain function and structure.… In approaching our lives, we can ask where do we experience the chaos or rigidity that reveal where integration is impaired. We can then use the focus of our attention to integrate both our brain and our relationships. Ultimately we can learn to be open in an authentic way to others, and to ourselves. The outcome of such an integrative presence is not only a sense of deep well-being and compassion for ourselves and others, but also an opening of the doors of awareness to a sense of the interdependence of everything. ‘We’ are indeed a part of an interconnected whole. [23]

Sources

1. Jeffrey M. Schwartz (with Sharon Begley), THE MIND AND THE BRAIN (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 9.

2. Ibid, 80.

3. Davidson, Richard. 2009. “Transform Your Mind, Change Your Brain.” Google Personal Growth Series. Link.

4. Goleman, Daniel. 2003. “The Lama in the Lab.” SHAMBHALA SUN (March).

5. Daniel Siegel, MINDSIGHT (New York: Bantam, 2010), p. 210.

6. Daniel Siegel, interview by P. de Llosa, September 2010.

7. Daniel Siegel, “Clinical Applications of Interpersonal Neurobiology.” Six-hour CD course, November 2003.

8. Ibid.

9. Daniel Siegel, “The Mind that Changes the Brain,” Two-day conference, New York, July 2010.

10. Ibid.

11. MINDSIGHT, p. 215.

12. MINDSIGHT, p. 224.

13. Daniel Siegel, THE MINDFUL THERAPIST(New York: W.W. Norton, 2010). For more information, see www.drdansiegel.com

14. Siegel, “Mind that Changes.”

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Siegel, de Llosa interview.

18. “Mind that Changes.”

19. Siegel, “Clinical Applications.”

20. MINDSIGHT, p. 224.

21. “Mind that Changes.”

22. Ibid.

23. “Mind that Changes.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp5h_PBOQAk