Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: chanting actually does something
Author: David McCusker Posted: 9/12/2000; 11:25:33 AM Topic: fork Msg #: 21250 (In response to 21234) Prev/Next: 21249 / 21251
Christoph Pingel: Talking about buddhism, is there anyone in the DG familiar with Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo?Yes, my wife and I briefly hooked up with that in Berkeley in the early 80's, and I noticed an interesting connection with something I had practiced before (and still do now and then).
I recite Lewis Carroll's The Jabberwocky to myself in a loop, over and over again, at high speed. It mostly paralyzes the verbal centers in my mind, and lets me think differently. In particular, it seems to free up the creative part of my mind that solves problems and considers much larger kinds of context. This is especially useful whenever my mind seems preoccupied with an obsessive verbal exchange in some imagined verbal conversation. So chanting is a good way to tell those voices to shut the hell up.
I only practice this every few months, especially when I'm rather unhappy and need to goose myself out of a gloomy mind set. It's not useful to do it more than an hour or two, because that's enough to break any log jam, and after that it's more useful to apply the extra working memory being wasted to actual problem solving.
When folks told me they chanted in order to get their wishes granted, I alway assumed they were interpreting their experience with an odd misapprehension of cause and effect. I was sure they tuned out their nagging and useless internal voices long enough to figure the ways to solve their problems and reach the goals they wanted. In other words, they granted their own wishes after making themselves temporarily smarter by practicing a formal cognitive enhancing exercise.
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