small change: Sutra Readings - 13

"The techniques of yoga," says Shearer, "are methods of purifying the nervous system so that it can reflect a greater degree of consciousness and our lives can become an increasingly positive force in the world." (Patanjali, 1982). So why not just circumvent all that practicing and go straight for the effect of a settled nervous system by taking one of the myriad pills Big Pharma has been pumping out regularly? Ativan may be more effective in averting our fear of death than years of headstands… Zoloft, I hear, has cured many of the suffering they endured because of issues of attachment.

Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating against medication here. A damaged nervous system can hardly be rendered whole by practices of purification, be they headstands, breathing exercises, or meditation, alone. But these practices, along with the proper medical intervention at the right time, can bolster an experience of wholeness – which is what health is, after all. In our rush to cure suffering through the shortcuts offered by fixing the brain, we forget that the mind is something more than the sum of neural networks.

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In this case, the tradeoff involves creativity. Some of my friends who relied on crushed Ritalin during college used to joke about how the drugs were great for late-night cramming sessions, but that they seemed to suppress any kind of originality. In other words, increased focus came at the expense of the imagination. It makes perfect sense that such a cognitive trade-off would exist. Paying attention to a particular task - like writing an article - requires the brain to ignore all sorts of seemingly unrelated thoughts and stimuli bubbling up from below. (The unconscious brain is full of potential distractions.) However, the same thoughts that can be such annoying interruptions are also the engine of creativity, since they allow us to come up with new connections between previously unrelated ideas. (This might be why schizotypal subjects score higher on tests of creativity. They are less able to ignore those distracting thoughts, which largely arise from the right hemisphere.)

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