Thursday, January 3, 2008 at 2:02am
If this is normal, I'll take abnormal
Column: Spiritual Psychology
This column originally was published on Jan. 18, 2007.
Who wouldn't choose to be normal rather than abnormal? Normal, though, has a number of different meanings. In the popular mind, normal is good, adaptive, grounded — in other words, something positive, and abnormal is akin to "off the wall."
In the statistical sense, normal means the norm or average — it reflects the mid range of what most in a population are doing.
Problem is, the norm is not what you might consider "normal" in the sense of desirable, or behavior you would want to embrace.
Consider, for example, the norm in a cannibalistic society. Everybody's munching on their species, so it's normal for that society — if you objected or declined to partake, you would be a strange fringe outsider. Then there are societies in which wife-beating is the norm. On that score, most of us would choose to be abnormal. According to history of childhood researcher Lloyd de Mause, in classical Rome and throughout Europe up to the Middle Ages, one of the chief methods (norm?) of "birth control" was infanticide; unwanted, disabled and often female newborns were routinely discarded.
I bring up this subject because recently I was discussing meditation with someone who commented that meditation seemed odd to her — a passive, self-serving withdrawal from the "real" world. She added that for people with barely the time to manage their frenzied balancing-act lives, there are more useful things to do. "Isn't it better to do something productive rather than meditating?"
Pondering this, I concluded, yes, meditation is surely abnormal — statistically speaking. After all, relatively few people do it — and even fewer practice meditation regularly — and the numbers dwindle for lengthier periods of meditation.
When I describe a typical Zen sitting consisting of three half-hour meditations with walking meditation in between, it raises eyebrows — "sitting for that long?" I hesitate to describe to these people the more abnormal behavior of all-day sits — or even more outrageous, week-long or month-long retreats.
What, then, is normal behavior for most people today? Television viewing is one good example of a popular norm — most people not only do it, they do it for long stretches of time.
According to a Nielsen survey, the average American watches more than four hours of television per day, adding up to 28 hours per week or two months of continuous television viewing per year (some surveys say average television viewing is as much as six hours per day). More alarming, over a 77-year lifespan — the average today in the United States — that translates into a whopping 12 years of nonstop boob-tube watching.
Television viewing is not entirely passive. What goes along with it is eating — often sloshing down sugary, high-carb, and fat-laden junk food, contributing to the obesity epidemic.
This couch potato lifestyle is also a factor in the "sedentary death syndrome" that reportedly kills as many as 300,000 Americans each year by ratcheting up a variety of debilitating ailments including diabetes, osteoporosis and heart disease, to mention a few.
This behavior is nothing short of bizarre. Yet it's the norm. These couch potatoes are in a numbed trance state in which little of value is going on most of the time.
How does television stack up against meditation? In contrast, sit in meditation and you can transcend mind, finding a higher liberating inner power that can energize and free you from suffering and conflict, bringing you in touch with reality for, perhaps, the first time in your life. It also has a number of health benefits. And meditation may not be as passive as it looks to the outside view.
Spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti believed that meditation may actually grow the brain. It's well known that we use only about 10 percent of our brainpower — and that's on a good day. Most of our narrow, repetitive behaviors use only a small portion of the same neural pathways that keep "digging" their limited grooves deeper. The meditative state of awareness activates the entirety of the brain, which brings to life parts of the brain that have been dormant, says Krishnamurti.
His intuition has now been confirmed by research on Tibetan Buddhist monks by neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin. Longtime Tibetan meditation practitioners showed an astonishingly high level of gamma wave brain activity that Davidson said he had never seen before. He added that meditation could change the circuitry of the brain.
That we call meditation strange and our daily mesmerized states normal is a serious problem.
Call me crazy, call me nutso, I think I prefer abnormal. What about you?
— — —
Bernard Starr, Ph.D., formerly professor of developmental and educational psychology at the City University of New York, now teaches "Spirituality in Film" and leads "The Spiritual Forum" at Marymount Manhattan College. In addition to his work in radio, he is a longtime contributor of commentary and opinion articles to numerous major publications. He is also the main United Nations representative for the Institute of Global Education that founded the Mucherla Global School in Mucherla, India. His book "Escape Your Own Prison: Why We Need Spirituality and Psychology to be Truly Free" has been published by Rowman & Littlefield. He can be reached at {email OmniCns@aol.com}OmniCns@aol.com{/email}. © Copyright 2008 by Bernard Starr.
Who wouldn't choose to be normal rather than abnormal? Normal, though, has a number of different meanings. In the popular mind, normal is good, adaptive, grounded — in other words, something positive, and abnormal is akin to "off the wall."
In the statistical sense, normal means the norm or average — it reflects the mid range of what most in a population are doing.
Problem is, the norm is not what you might consider "normal" in the sense of desirable, or behavior you would want to embrace.
Consider, for example, the norm in a cannibalistic society. Everybody's munching on their species, so it's normal for that society — if you objected or declined to partake, you would be a strange fringe outsider. Then there are societies in which wife-beating is the norm. On that score, most of us would choose to be abnormal. According to history of childhood researcher Lloyd de Mause, in classical Rome and throughout Europe up to the Middle Ages, one of the chief methods (norm?) of "birth control" was infanticide; unwanted, disabled and often female newborns were routinely discarded.
I bring up this subject because recently I was discussing meditation with someone who commented that meditation seemed odd to her — a passive, self-serving withdrawal from the "real" world. She added that for people with barely the time to manage their frenzied balancing-act lives, there are more useful things to do. "Isn't it better to do something productive rather than meditating?"
Pondering this, I concluded, yes, meditation is surely abnormal — statistically speaking. After all, relatively few people do it — and even fewer practice meditation regularly — and the numbers dwindle for lengthier periods of meditation.
When I describe a typical Zen sitting consisting of three half-hour meditations with walking meditation in between, it raises eyebrows — "sitting for that long?" I hesitate to describe to these people the more abnormal behavior of all-day sits — or even more outrageous, week-long or month-long retreats.
What, then, is normal behavior for most people today? Television viewing is one good example of a popular norm — most people not only do it, they do it for long stretches of time.
According to a Nielsen survey, the average American watches more than four hours of television per day, adding up to 28 hours per week or two months of continuous television viewing per year (some surveys say average television viewing is as much as six hours per day). More alarming, over a 77-year lifespan — the average today in the United States — that translates into a whopping 12 years of nonstop boob-tube watching.
Television viewing is not entirely passive. What goes along with it is eating — often sloshing down sugary, high-carb, and fat-laden junk food, contributing to the obesity epidemic.
This couch potato lifestyle is also a factor in the "sedentary death syndrome" that reportedly kills as many as 300,000 Americans each year by ratcheting up a variety of debilitating ailments including diabetes, osteoporosis and heart disease, to mention a few.
This behavior is nothing short of bizarre. Yet it's the norm. These couch potatoes are in a numbed trance state in which little of value is going on most of the time.
How does television stack up against meditation? In contrast, sit in meditation and you can transcend mind, finding a higher liberating inner power that can energize and free you from suffering and conflict, bringing you in touch with reality for, perhaps, the first time in your life. It also has a number of health benefits. And meditation may not be as passive as it looks to the outside view.
Spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti believed that meditation may actually grow the brain. It's well known that we use only about 10 percent of our brainpower — and that's on a good day. Most of our narrow, repetitive behaviors use only a small portion of the same neural pathways that keep "digging" their limited grooves deeper. The meditative state of awareness activates the entirety of the brain, which brings to life parts of the brain that have been dormant, says Krishnamurti.
His intuition has now been confirmed by research on Tibetan Buddhist monks by neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin. Longtime Tibetan meditation practitioners showed an astonishingly high level of gamma wave brain activity that Davidson said he had never seen before. He added that meditation could change the circuitry of the brain.
That we call meditation strange and our daily mesmerized states normal is a serious problem.
Call me crazy, call me nutso, I think I prefer abnormal. What about you?
— — —
Bernard Starr, Ph.D., formerly professor of developmental and educational psychology at the City University of New York, now teaches "Spirituality in Film" and leads "The Spiritual Forum" at Marymount Manhattan College. In addition to his work in radio, he is a longtime contributor of commentary and opinion articles to numerous major publications. He is also the main United Nations representative for the Institute of Global Education that founded the Mucherla Global School in Mucherla, India. His book "Escape Your Own Prison: Why We Need Spirituality and Psychology to be Truly Free" has been published by Rowman & Littlefield. He can be reached at {email OmniCns@aol.com}OmniCns@aol.com{/email}. © Copyright 2008 by Bernard Starr.