I've been away for awhile, and haven't posted.  Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!

Outside of my own practice, I've been one of the watchers of the Integral Wiki. 

What this means is occasionally adding something, and then also occasionally reverting pages. when the wiki version of spam hits the site.

Because of my involvement with Integral Wiki, I have now registered with the main Wikipedia. 

After doing this, I've now come across a couple of cool WikiProjects. 

One I will point to now, is the Wikiproject for Spirituality and also the Wikiportal for Spirituality.

Both of these come with "To Do" lists, places where people can contribute. 

It's interesting to look through, and I will most likely start double posting anything that I do to the IntegralWiki, back to the main Wiki portal.

Since I've posted some about meditation, it's effects, and a few days ago pointed to some research showing changes in the brain for meditation, I thought it would be worthwhile for those who have both a spiritual and research bent, to mention a good place to start regarding these investigations.

The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation, published by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, is as good a place as any to start.  You'll find a lot more references from here, to other sources and places that are continuing research now.

Michael Murphy is co-writer of this article, which makes sense to me, since as a book, The Future of The Body is as good a place as any to start as a reference book for studies on meditation, or studies of human potential in general.

The two main tomes in my library during the 90's, were SES, and The Future of the Body.

For myself, I thought for awhile that I would have loved to get paid to do the type of research that is investigated by the Institute of Noetic Sciences.  I entertained getting a PhD there, but I couldn't imagine being on the hook for 80K to 100K at the end of it.

For the spiritual research crowd, is there another comprehensive reference work that is just as important? 

Let me know! 

Also, this TYPE of research, or at least the analysis and recommendation of this type of research, can be forwarded by the blogosphere.  We are starting to do some of this with IntegralWiki, and the framework of Michael Bauwens. 

But, it goes slowly, since the demands of life interfere.

Saw this article on the New York Times, about LIME, "Healthy Living With a Twist".

Called a "New Age" channel - and it does have Deepak Chopra - what I notice is the full multi-media platform.  Like Integral Naked, or like Noetic Institute's Shift In Action, the platform includes video, audio - and in the case of LIME, blogging.   Probably some other stuff I haven't run across...

Also, from a simple marketing perspective - I notice that there will be a radio channel on Sirius, for LIME. 

Given the amount of material at Integral Naked now, I wonder if anyone over there has thought of arranging alternative distributions of some of the multimedia content on Integral Naked?

Lastly - given the explosion of content - video, audio, text, blogging, that now inundates anyone who is "connected", the last remaining puzzle which isn't present is community programs and participation.

Here are the five basic modules that are the foundation of an integral life -

Module 1 - Spiritual Practice

Module 2 - Health and Exercise

Module 3 - Interpersonal Relationships

Module 4 - Career and Money

Module 5 - Psychological Health, Stability, Motivation, Meaning

These 5 modules form the basis and foundation for an Integral Practitioner.

It's important to note that most authentic spiritual paths and communities, in some way, address all five. 

I'll be posting (or re-posting, in some cases) evaluations that exist online - and next steps offered from those evaluations - for each of these modules.

So make sure to stop by!

Now that Google Base has been release, it's time to talk about how Google Base can contribute to the open source accumulation of spiritual realization.  This builds on yesterday's post, about data collection to evaluate and build models of behavior and practice which can be confirmed or disconfirmed.

Take a look at Google Base, for the moment.  I'll have much more to say later. 

Saw this article on the Google process. 

It's a fascinating article, for a few reasons -

One, they hire the best of the best, and they make sure to get people who not only are smart, but who are also easy to work with, by insisting on like-minded cooperation, and not "personal".  A few examples:

a. No one can call an idea "stupid".
b. An emphasis on teamwork:  "Some brilliant prospects don't get hired, flaming out when background checks show they are difficult to work with. "It takes discipline not to hire some of these people, they are so smart," says engineering chief Alan Eustace. "But it also doesn't take much for a single person to subtract 10% from everyone else. Very quickly, that reduces your total output.""
c. "In some meetings people aren't allowed to say "I think … " but instead must say "The data suggest … "

So the social and interpersonal aspects of a person, are just as important as the intelligence of that person.  You can see that this minimizes the ego clashes, between otherwise brilliant people.  In integral language, good development lines in both social, cooperative, and of course technical skills.

For as long as it lasts, this truly is the "flatter" networked company of the future - much less hierarchy, projects developed and then abandoned if they don't work (no attachment!), tremendous productivity and flexibility.

One last point - the emphasis on data. 

After spending time on the Integral Spirituality draft last night, I got to thinking about what a tremendous proposal Integral Methodological Pluralism is.  To take any aspect of a situation, and INVESTIGATE this situation from one of the eight angles. 

The example uses is Kohlberg, and moral development. 

In this situation, Kohlberg gathered data over YEARS, and then collated this data into a hypothesis of the nature of moral growth and development. (The 3rd person perspective of 1st person values). 

Various integral claims, meditation claims, and practice claims, require similar data sets, in order to move a hypothesis to beyond a pleasing story. 

Otherwise, there simply remain disconnected claims, for various dimensions of life.

Perhaps in the future, there will be applications that allow people to act, in small groups, and submit data.  Here's a process proposal.

Meditation practice for 30 minutes, with a diary submittal. Have a group of 10-100, to however many more, doing this.

a. The person Mark beginning of practice - the person submits that he has practice started on cellphone.
b. Person submits that the practice session has ended.
c. At end of practice, record online diary of experience (or perhaps submit diary by voice to go to online repository).
c. That data can then be collated, analyzed, cross-referenced and compared (perhaps with pre-existing personality evaluations), so that theories such as Kohlberg's are more easily created - or more easily dismissed.

I think the connected internet phone - or some similar unobtrusive gadget - is the only way to get these type of real time, large, datasets recovered.

Any other thoughts on this?

Everyone else has been blogging about this, so I figured I would too.

There is another study showing that, yes, meditation DOES alter the structure of your brain.

Brain imaging of regular working folks who meditate regularly revealed increased thickness in cortical regions related to sensory, auditory and visual perception, as well as internal perception -- the automatic monitoring of heart rate or breathing, for example.

The study also indicates that regular meditation may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex.

"What is most fascinating to me is the suggestion that meditation practice can change anyone's gray matter," said study team member Jeremy Gray, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale. "The study participants were people with jobs and families. They just meditated on average 40 minutes each day, you don't have to be a monk.

Well, that's a good thing, since I'm not a monk! 

This has been a question of debate here in the integral blogosphere - whether the earlier studies actually showed some brain changes.  From what I recall (I've been looking for the study, but I've run out of time, and wanted to get this posted), the brain changes claimed by the other study weren't the same.

Still, it makes sense that changes from meditation happen.  Alterations in brain chemistry come about because of exercise, for an example (in terms of a better mood), so why should meditation be any different?

It will be interesting, in the coming years, to find what parts of the brain are "fixed", and what parts have some malleability.  Especially with more experience in chemistry, and over a decade of targeted smart drugs, who knows what is on the horizon?

From the English edition of Der Spiegel.

Good article, fleshing out all points of view. More in-depth than most other articles I've seen on this.

Saw this article on Wired - the main point -

Twenty-five investment groups, representing about $21 billion in assets in the United States, Europe and Australia, are signatories to a "joint investor statement on freedom of expression and the internet," an initiative spearheaded by the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

While normally this would be Catallaxis's beat (Daniel O'Connor) I thought I would point to it, as this is an example of an "integrated framework".  In this case, stockholders (and theoretically, the officers of a company express stockholders will) wish to invest in companies that have a balanced attitude, that produce profits AND also respect human rights. 

Since I believe there are some studies that show that companies that have these type of values tend to have less corruption, better value over time, it can make financial sense, as well as moral sense.