THE PERIPATETIC
PHILOSOPHER PAYS TRIBUTE
TO RITA TURNER
James
R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 7, 2013
For
the past several years I have had the advantage of the wisdom of a woman in my
hometown of Clinton, Iowa, who has studied the occult, metaphysics, and Eastern
religions and has celebrated the blessings that can be derived from
meditation.
Whatever
I write (books, articles, missives, e-mails) she is likely to remind me from
whence my insights come, and how I have been blessed to have them from that
Universal Source.
There
is not a more kindly person on the face of the earth than Rita
Turner. She teaches, she counsels, she encourages, and she accepts
the vicissitudes of man in stride, as they are a manifestation of the many
faces and perspectives of man at various levels of consciousness, and she isn’t
slowing down as she tip toes through her eighties.
More
than forty years ago, long before I knew Rita existed, coming back from South
Africa essentially a broken man, I found myself inclined towards the occult,
towards the mystics and towards Eastern religions as I found little comfort and
no direction to my conventional Irish Roman Catholicism.
Krishnamurti taught
me the importance of the quiet mind, the mind absent of thought, the mind that
had no direction or aspiration, the mind willing to accept reality “as is,” and
not to rationalize reality into semantic euphemisms or into what it
isn’t.
I
had always found comfort in prayer even during my darkest periods, but never
thought of prayer as meditation, but found that was precisely what prayer
is.
Meditation wasn’t
repeating long ago memorized prayers but prayers that opened my eyes to see the
wonders of nature, the industry of man, the lyrical tempo of the universe
expressed in the frozen music of architecture, in paintings, in a sunset, or a
ship’s crew unloading bananas in the Harbor of Tampa Bay harbor, and yes, even
in the cleansing feeling of summer thunder storm.
When
in pain, when lost in thought, when it appeared all options were spent as well
as passion, when feeling close to being totally alone, two things seemed to
happen almost simultaneously: one my reptilian brain suddenly became activated
urging me to retreat, abandon, escape; and the other, the realization that
there is no exit.
I
played with the fantasy of joining that ship’s crew that was unloading bananas
on the dock, imagining myself in the company of Herman Melville, who actually
did such a thing.
Then
I realized that like everyone else I was stuck with myself, which at that
moment in time, nothing could have been worse. If that should happen to
you, the reader, it might be the first moment in your life forced to take a
“time out,” forced to look at yourself in the mirror, and to realize you have a
spiritual side that has been neglected, a side of you many times stronger than
your material side, a side that is more resilient, more forgiving, but also
more engaging, and blessed with far more energy than you ever thought
you possessed.
Metaphysicians
have been saying this for years, and now we find the science of the brain
essentially concurs with them.
SCIENCE
IS CATCHING UP WITH RITA TURNER
Maria Konnikova,
a doctorate student in psychology at Columbia
University, writes on the power of concentration in the Sunday edition of
the Tampa Bay Times (January 6, 2013). The piece is
on cognitive functions and how vital they are to us, especially as we grow
older.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, she writes,
have demonstrated the benefit to daily meditation, as it shifts activity to the
frontal cortex of the brain where positive emotions reside. The
result is that we are likely to engage the world rather than retreat from it
burying ourselves in such escapes as nostalgia. She verifies this
with experiments conducted at that university.
Participants were
instructed to relax with their eyes closed, focus on their breathing, and
acknowledge and release (quiet the mind) random thoughts that might
arise. They experienced a significant shift in the frontal (brain)
cortex asymmetry, which translated into improved awareness and attention.
This work goes beyond
improving emotions and a more balanced perspective. It also explodes
the myth of multitasking, which plagues modern existence. Look for
Ms. Konnikova’s work
on line, including this piece. Suffice it to say here, people who
pride themselves on doing several things simultaneously have proven to be far
less efficient than those focusing on one task at a time.
This meditative process
advocated by the author is called “mindfulness,”
and it has shown to influence the brain’s so-called “default network,” that is,
the network of connections that remains active when we are in a resting state.
Regular meditation, the
author claims studies have shown, in this resting state, results in increased
functional connectivity. Why? She writes:
“The default network has
greater consistent access to information about our internal states and an
enhanced ability to monitor the surrounding environment.”
In other words,
meditation makes us more alert!
Konnikova has
written a book on the fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes (“Mastermind: How to think like Sherlock Holmes”) to illustrate the
benefit of centering attention on a single element. The mind is
quiet, configured to its ultimate awareness, for Holmes this is a pause, a puff
on his pipe, a pensive withdrawal and then the tap of a finger against his
nose, which is all part of his particular idiosyncratic meditative
process.
Further evidence that
science is coming to understand, what Rita Turner has understood for ages, is
the fallacy to the idea that our I.Q. (intelligence quotient) has reached its
apogee by the time we reach the age of 20. Science now has new
evidence that our brains can continue to learn well into old age, as the
structure of our brain continues to change and develop, that is, if we allow it
to do so.
This is the
kicker. It is never too late. In 2006, a team of psychologists
demonstrated that the neural activation patterns of older adults (specifically,
activation in the prefrontal cortex), began to resemble those of much younger
subjects after just five one-hour training sessions on a task of attention control. Similar
changes have been observed in the default network (i.e., the brain’s resting-state
activity or during meditation). The author concludes:
“Mindfulness may have a
prophylactic effect: it can strengthen the areas that are most susceptible to
cognitive decline. When we learn to unitask,
we may be doing more than increasing our observational prowess. We
may be investing in a sounder mental future, no matter how old we are.”
None of this is news to
Rita Turner. Nor is it likely that she will gloat that science is
catching up with where she has been for years.
So, hurrah, for a grand lady and thinker of our times.
* * *
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