The English Victorian novelist George Eliot was famous for her ability to hit the psychological nail on the head with an apposite sentence. Here’s one of them :

We walk about “well-wadded with stupidity. … If we had but keen vision and feeling … it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence”.

A very happy New Year to all our readers.

Jason Zweig believes that “the more you look at stock prices, the more illusory ‘trends’ you see.” His thesis is that Neuro-Economics “can help you understand your reactions and get richer”.

All this appears in his book, Your Money and Your Brain — Become a Smarter, More Successful Investor the Neuroscience Way, published in the UK by Souvenir Press.

Neuro-Economics is a blend of neuroscience, economics and psychology designed to interpret the brain’s reaction to economic stimuli like falling stock prices. Apparently, within 12 milliseconds (one-25th of the time it takes to blink an eye), the news activates the amygdala, a part of the brain that initiates fear and anger. Falling stock prices incite the same brain circuits as the roar of a wild beast.

In those moments, if you make a snap decision, the likelihood is that you will sell your shares. You will also believe you have made a rational decision because the process happens so fast you are unaware of it.

However, all data shows that if you hang onto your shares, you will do much better in the long run. So what’s happening here?

The conclusion is that, the impulse to stay continuously informed about your shares in times of market turmoil leads to nothing but trouble — not to mention high blood pressure and pulse rate.

“Furthermore, the more often you update the prices of your stocks, the more often you will perceive ‘trends’ that are most likely to be just illusions.”

Neuroscience shows that it takes only two iterations of a stimulus for your brain to form an automatic and uncontrollable anticipation of another repetition. However, it’s more likely than not that the “news” was just noise.

Zweig’s advice to investors is : “Stop clicking on market websites. Stay away from the Bloomberg terminal. If you read the FT, pass over the market news and spend your time on the opinion pages instead. You will surely be happier — and almost certainly end up richer.”

Now that sage advice applies not only to economics and investments, but it can also be extrapolated into other areas as well.

It’s generally agreed that 90 percent of what we worry about never happens. It follows that 90 percent of speculation and prognoses never happen either. Keeping up with news, current affairs, politics, and many other topics, will prove to be nothing but hot air and a lot of bothersome timewasting. We should save our equanimity for the actuality of our own lives and never make decisions on the basis of incoming “news”.

Staying on the theme of recent posts : mind expansion and extended mind, let’s take a look at former Glasgow barber, Gordon Smith. He’s not to everyone’s taste and it requires some belief, or direct experience of his work, to get into the swing of it.

I usually buy Gordon Smith’s latest books as they are published, because they always contain rich nuggets of wisdom on all aspects of the spiritual and the afterlife.

Gordon Smith is generally held to be the most accurate spiritual medium in Britain. He started life in a lowly part of Glasgow, ran his own hairdressing business for a while, and now makes his living as a TV presenter and an author of books.

The following passage occurs in his latest volume : Stories From The Other Side.

“Our consciousness keeps expanding but because we live in a world where there are linear thought and time and space we are restricted by what we can describe and what we can understand.

“The very nature of our existence is about ripening our consciousness. So often people restrict themselves by thinking that everything has to be achieved or got over in this life. It is such an unburdening process to come to the realision that there is no beginning and no end.

“Eventually we learn to mistrust the material world because everything we hold on to ages and dies, including our bodies — a process we monitor daily. As that happens, we become dimly aware of a realm above the bodily which, strangely, a part of us already inhabits.”

Gordon Smith’s strength is that he is acutely aware of the thin veil which prevents many of us seeing beyond the linear aspects of our daily lives.

One of the great psychologists of the 20th century was Dr. D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966). He’s not generally known as a mind man because he introduced Zen to the West. But he was often accused by his Japanese countrymen of over-stressing the intellect in a distinctly western way.

As he was writing for the West he obviously found it easier to slip into Western ways. His dialogue with C.G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who was covering the same ground is highly informative.

Suzuki has this to say on the matter of the Buddhist Enlightenment, “The idea is to express the unconscious working of the mind, but this unconscious is not to be interpreted psychologically, but on the spiritual plane where all ‘traces’ of discursive or analytical understanding vanish.”

Jung’s view, was “One cannot grasp anything metaphysically, but it can be done psychologically. Therefore I strip things of their metaphysical wrappings in order to make them objects of psychology … if finally there should still be an ineffable metaphysical element, it would have the best opportunity of revealing itself.”

The difference here is no-difference. Suzuki uses “psychological” to describe objects of rational thinking — all else, by implication, is metaphysical. Jung, however, takes a western approach and calls anything capable of being experienced, psychological. Of course, anything which cannot be experienced is of no concern to man, since he could not possibly ever know of its existence. This is not the case with the Buddhist “unborn mind” which is clearly experienced from moment to moment by those attuned to it.

Jung uses “psyche” to embrace all experience, normal and trancendental. Suzuki draws a line at the limits of the intellect, thus creating an enormous “spiritual” domain. Here the divisive nature of words manufactures an East/West chasm that does not really exist. Both are constantly aware of the non-dual totality of things — its “suchness”.

Suzuki’s gave us a graphic description of his own enlightenment. After a period of intense concentration and “samadhi”, Suzuki attains satori: “…this Samadhi alone is not enough. You must come out of that state, be awakened from it, and that awakening is Prajna. That moment of coming out of Samadhi, and seeing it for what it is, that is satori. When I came out of that state of Samadhi I said, ‘I see. This is it.’”

The next day, after the enlightenment was approved by his master, he walked home from the monastery and saw the trees in the moonlight. “They looked transparent, and I was transparent too.” From that moment he was able to answer the apparently nonsensical questions of his master out of a profound insight.

He later wrote that at that point he was not fully conscious of his experience. There was still an element of dream clinging to his consciousness. While working in America a greater depth of realization dawned when contemplating the Zen phrase “the elbow does not bend outwards.” He suddenly saw that the restriction itself was the true freedom.

Later still, and back in Japan working on the records of Bankei, he felt a huge mass of stones “that I had piled up through many years fall away in a moment. I found myself in the unconditionally restful state of mind of…as-it-is-ness (suchness).”

Suzuki compares man with a geometrical point where three dimensions intersect: physical-natural, intellectual-moral and spiritual. Very roughly, the outer world, the inner personal world, and the world where concepts like “outer” and “inner” have vanished.

We may be conscious of all these lines, but usually not to the same extent. Normally, the intellectual-moral is given emphasis over the spiritual. This results in an inability fully to grasp the spiritual side of life — “Doubting” Thomas arises here, as does the “God is dead” tendency of 19th Century materialism.

The intellectual-moral line delivers a dualistic view of life. It carves its way into the soft substance of existence, setting up categories and divisions in the way a sharp stone shatters a car windscreen — the whole view disappears and one is only aware of a spidery network of frosty fragments. However, despite this, there is a “persistent urge impelling the intellect to transcend itself.”

For the intellect to leave its own line and transfer to the spiritual is a kind of suicide, a “losing of life in order to gain it.” Suzuki stresses that there is no gradation here. It is a leap, a letting go as Jung discovered — for the moment one gives up the intellectual, one finds oneself on the spiritual.

This is the point at which one becomes aware that, “what is before you is it!” For western man, the jump has to be made from his intellect instantly to the spiritual; that is the moment of enlightenment. From then on the spiritual world lights up the physical-natural with a numinous glow that transforms everything, as Jung himself found when he let himself go on the 12th of December 1913. However, there is only one world, and when the faculties lose their distinctiveness they are seen to be illusory.