Connected Minds

How It All Started

2 years ago, I read a book.

It was called How God Changes Your Brain

It was written by a neuroscientist and a therapist who had been studying the effects of spiritual activity on the brain.

The research studies and the authors’ conclusions led me to believe that if I prayed or meditated, I could change my brain and make a transformative change in my life.

The Man With The Memory Loss

The authors gave the example of a middle-aged man who came to them seeking help with memory loss.

They got him to meditate 12 minutes a day for 6 weeks.

After just those 6 weeks of meditation, he performed 50% better on memory tests.

Meditation had changed the neural connections in his brain.

Wow, if only I could change my brain

There would be so much to gain.

Perhaps I could pray or meditate away anger, judgmentalism, criticism, self-centeredness, anxiety, guilt and other bad mental habits?

I had to give it a try.

Meditation 101

There are many ways to meditate.

My brother-in-law Arun prefers Twin-Heart Meditation and for Candy Crowley, the mediator of the 2012 VP debate, it is some form of TM.

I used a technique right out of the book How God Changes Your Brain.

I set aside 12 minutes a day, during which I would

• Repeat a simple mantra
• Keep time with my fingers
• Focus my thoughts on what I wanted to change
• Ride a stationary bike at the apartment gym 

And so I began meditating.

From Small Beginnings

At first, 12 minutes was tough - I’d keep checking the time on my cell phone.

But after a week of keeping at it, I was able to go for 20 minutes.

20 minutes then became an hour.

Soon I found I could meditate at will.

I was meditating before going to bed…when I woke up in the morning…when I was stuck in traffic…when I was waiting at the end of a phone line.

And I abandoned the fingers and the mantra. I had learned to focus my mind without those.

Intrinsic Satisfaction

I discovered an intrinsic satisfaction in meditating itself.

I did not care if the meditation was succeeding or failing, if I was doing it right, or if indeed my mind was changing.

It just felt like the right thing to do – a worthwhile use of my time.

Harvesting the Fruits

And slowly, but surely, I began to harvest the fruits…

Peace

One of the first fruits was peace.

I began to feel more peaceful than I had ever felt before in my life.

Even if I got shook up by something, I found that all I had to do was meditate for 15 minutes and I would become peaceful again.

What Was Bad Was Now Good

Dark moments became light moments.

For example, if I woke up in the middle of the night, instead of worrying and getting anxious, I would have flashes of insight, inspirations for my writing and solutions to problems.

Living In the Moment

More and more, I found myself living, not in the past, nor in the future, but in the moment.

An unintended consequence of being fully present in the moment was I became a better listener – completely available to anyone who was speaking to me.

Calmness

My response to provocations and problems changed.  Where before I used to get riled, criticize, become defensive, blame, issue ultimatums, or adopt a stony silence, more and more, I was able to watch those negative emotions and words bubble up and then subside; they would come and go, and I was able to just observe them with compassion.

Acceptance and Patience

I learned to accept and move on from things I could not change.

I gave up being stuck on ideas, rules, and my own perfectionism, replacing expectations with expectancy.

In time, it would transform my relationship with my daughter as I went from Tiger Mom to Helicopter Mom to Hippie Mom – a change you can read about in my post It's Called Motherhood - 2.

Synchronicity

And whether because I was liberated from the self-centeredness and preoccupation that had previously characterized my consciousness - or whether because the universe is just plain darn magical - I started experiencing what one might call “marvelous consciousness coincidences”.

Such as getting a sudden flash of inspiration - only to discover that around the same time, I was having my flash of inspiration, someone connected to me was doing something amazingly closely related.

Here are 3 recent consciousness coincidences….

The 3 Benches Post

A few months ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea for a blog post about 3 benches.

There was nothing I could think of that might have triggered the idea.

But it was a wonderfully original idea and I toyed with how to develop it all week long.

At the end of the week, I called my friend Nadya who lives in another state. We were neighbors once and remain close friends, keeping in touch through regular phone calls.

When she picked up and I said “Hi, Nadya, what are you up to?", you’ll never believe her reply ….

“Building a bench for my backyard”

Building a bench for her backyard? Nadya is not a carpenter or a professional furniture maker; she runs an assisted living facility. Occasionally, she will do house projects like replace her carpet.

But here I was listening to her tell me she had been building a bench all week in the very same week when I inexplicably get an out of the blue idea for a blog post involving 3 benches, an idea that I had been thinking about all week….wouldn’t you be stunned?

International Coffee Day

And then there was International Coffee Day.

This one involves Helen, whom I had to work closely with on my Dublin assignment. In fact, we were so joined at the hip, I used to joke to everyone we were Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

The marvelous coincidence happened during my last week at work.

The day was Thursday, September 27, 2012.

I had already written my “What’s Next for You?” post about my cousin Vinitha’s brave entrepreneurial plunge and had planned to publish it on Saturday, September 29.  

But on the evening of September 27, my eyes briefly lit on a Yahoo headline about Saturday, September 29 being International Coffee Day.

And for some reason, I woke up in the middle of the night that night and the makings of a coffee post came to my mind to publish on International Coffee Day.   

And for some reason again, it couldn’t wait till Friday evening, but I had to get up at 5 a.m. the next morning to research and finish this International Coffee Day post.

When I got into office, a farewell gift bag from Helen was waiting for me on my desk.

Inside was a card and a Starbucks coffee mug.

This meant that at the time my eyes fell on the Yahoo headline about International Coffee Day, Helen was probably at a Starbucks store shopping for a coffee mug for me. A few days earlier, she had said to me, “I want to buy a coffee mug for someone.  Where do you think I should get it from? “and I said “How about Starbucks?”.

And at the time, I was writing and researching the coffee post on the morning of Friday, September 28, Helen was probably gift-wrapping the coffee mug for me and writing out a card to go with it.

This is why The Unsocratic Coffee Quiz will forever be magical to me.

3 Words

Completing the hat-trick of “marvelous consciousness coincidences” is my 3 Words post, and more specifically the last line of it, which was – “As always thanks for reading and have an awesome, stupendous, amazing day”.

I added this line as an afterthought – just before I hit the publish button.

Then comes this comment from reader Aarathi about that line:

 “Landline was out of order for a week. Probably it was Divine intervention to keep me away from being online. While reading the post I was flabbergasted, because last week I was trying my best to substitute ‘excellent’ and played around with 'stupendous' and 'amazing’ the same words found in your post. Remember I was not even looking for them online”

Wouldn't you say the “marvelous consciousness coincidences” spigot is still on?

To think that this happened even with Aarathi being on the other side of the globe!

And with us having never met or spoken, but just because we share a special author-reader bond.

Wow!

It points to a greater interconnectedness between all our minds and souls than we assume.

But then, people have been getting excited about telepathic communication for a long time.

Mark Twain's telepathic experience

Mark Twain tells of a coincidence when he and his friend Wright came up with the exact same idea for a book at the exact same time. It you want to read about it, you can do so here.

Twain called it Mental Telegraphy, or distant communication between minds that are keyed to similar wavelengths.

Upton Sinclair's telepathic experience

And then there are the recordings of Upton Sinclair in his book Mental Radio - which documents the telepathic communication between him and his psychic wife.

Harold Sherman's telepathic experience

Finally, author Harold Sherman carried out a five and a half months telepathic experiment with his explorer friend Hubert Wilkins, while Hubert was in the Arctic and Sherman in New York. They each faithfully wrote diaries during that time. When they compared their entries after Hubert returned, they found them to be 75% synchronous – worthwhile material for a book which they published called Thoughts Through Space.

So there you have it.

P.S. 1: What are the favorite "marvelous consciousness coincidences" in your life?  If you can’t think of any, how about novels, tv episodes or movie scenes that come to mind? I would love to hear.

P.S. 2:  I was inspired to write this post after reading Aarathi’s comment on my post 3 Words. Thank you, Aarathi.

P.S. 3: I plan to publish the 3 Benches post as soon as that is ready.

P.S. 4: For one of my daughter’s AP Lit assignments, she was asked to request a few different people to give her a few words of advice for the future.  One of the pieces of advice I gave her was this: “Be imaginative.  Only in our imaginations is the world truly limitless - we can go anywhere and do anything.  Reality may catch up later, or not at all.". So even if it’s only in my imagination, I would like to believe that what occurred between Nadya and me, Helen and me and Aarathi and me (or Nadya and I, Helen and I and Aarathi and I if that’s the correct usage) was indeed a connecting of minds.

P.S. 5: As always, thanks for reading and have a great day! And keep an open mind to all the possibilities in your life, including the possibilities for "marvelous consciousness coincidences”.