NY Times article Is Buddhism Good for Your Health? (registeration necessary) is a good read.  It talks about the efforts by U of Wisconsin neuroscientists to study effects of meditation scientifically with help from Tibetan Buddhist monks.

The Wisconsin researchers, for example, are focusing on three common forms of Buddhist meditation.

One is focused attention, where they specifically train themselves to focus on a single object for long periods of time.

The second area is where they voluntarily cultivate compassion. It's something they do every day, and they have special exercises where they envision negative events, something that causes anger or irritability, and then transform it and infuse it with an antidote, which is compassion.

The third is called 'open presence.'  It is a state of being acutely aware of whatever thought, emotion or sensation is present, without reacting to it.  They describe it as pure awareness.

I have done all three types of meditations in the past but found some problems in practicing them everyday.

First problem is the lack of compelling need to create the necessary discipline.  Being deeply hurt emotionally and release from the pain is a good enough, but I am no serious wounds like that, just minor half-healed scars.  Lacking why makes it difficult to keep doing it.

Second problem is the detachement from life that results.  For example, I can look at a baby and, with an effort, erase all effects of my vision such as warmth and love.  It's not an easy effort and maintaining the state takes a lot of practice like trying to balance oneself on a razor's edge.  Still, doing it leaves me empty, not happy, like one feels after reading a stack of Existentialism books.

Process is different from desensitization, but the effect is similar.  It's like shattering a vase, erasing the essense of the vase and emptying its content.  I think the voluntary cultivation of compassion is the attempt to glue the vase back.  Maybe the professional monks know better, but I am not sure if the result is as good as new.

Another thing is that mind and body sometimes acts separately.  When my dog died, I felt emotional pain so I shut part of my mind down.  Meditation is great for emergencies.  But I found tears running down my calm stony face.  Cocooned, I felt no sadness but tears ran like river.  Yes, that was a weird experience.

The last problem was the mentioned in the article.

The fact that the brain can learn, adapt and molecularly resculpture itself on the basis of experience and training suggests that meditation may leave a biological residue in the brain — a residue that, with the increasing sophistication of new technology, might be captured and measured.

No kidding.  I believe that every action one takes, everything one sees, hear, smell and touch, every word one utters, and every thought one has changes us in body and mind.  Hit someone in the face once, you change.  Read Koran or Bible, you change.  Look at a flower, you change.  Everything changes us, but meditation can affect one as strongly as trauma or life long abuse can.  Powerful stuff.

I think the research is a Good Thing because people will finally learn the real benefits as well as dangers of meditation.

When I first heard of Eolas being awarded half a billion dollars against Microsoft over some idiotically obvious plugin embedding patent, I thought the case had no merit and would eventually go away.  Well, it hasn't to my surprise.  Even worse, it's going to affect browser users as well as developers.

Ray Ozzie wades into the fight with his Saving the Browser post in which he demostrates convincingly and meticulously why he thinks Lotus Notes R3 is a prior art that voids Eolas's patent.  I am convinced and appreciate Ray's considerable effort in foiling Eolas.  While Eolas is not a patent troll in the strictest sense, it sure is starting to stink like one with this silly patent.

I thought about 9/11, wars, and religions for most of today, playing with perspectives that will allow me to get a better grip or understanding of what is going on.  [ Actually I was working all day on crypto code of all things, wrestling with PKCS#11 and hand-parsing ASN.1.  No wonder I had a background train of thought running… ]

Most interesting one I came up with was seeing Islam as an immune system, designed to defend the body, Islamic nations, against invaders whether the invader is an army or a meme.  From this perspective, a call for Jihad is a signal to increase production of antibodies (terrorists).  Now the questions I raised in my Understanding Jihad post makes a lot of sense.

I googled to see if anyone else had similar views and found Our Wonderful Immune System in which the writer, apparently Islamic, links immune system to the Creator.  Not exactly what I was looking for, but eery nonetheless.

If enemy members are more than the currently fighting macrophages (immune cells) can handle, a special substance is secreted. The name of this substance is "pyrogen" and it is a kind of alarm call.

Is Jihad a Pyrogen?  I am not sure.  There is also an entire book on the subject, The Miracle of the Immune System by Harun Yahya.

If Islam is an immune system, neither violent nor peaceful approaches to the Middle-East problems make sense.  But then I have three gas guzzlers: an old Cadillac, a mini-van, and a SUV.  Damn.  I guess we have to mess with their immune system.

"Dave" is going all out to turn BloggerCon 2003 into a major event for not only bloggers, but also politicians.  Check out his plan for a monster BOF on blog tools in Day 2 of BloggerCon.  Maybe even Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw will make a surprise audience to see how bloggers are impacting 2004 Presidential Election.

Yesterday, I had the urge to hop on the Howard Dean wagon.  It's not that I like Howard Dean.  I hardly know the man and what he stands for.  I just want Bush out of the White House and Howard Dean looks like best bet at this point.  Thankfully, I stopped myself by banging my head against the wall.

Besides, I feel that I already contributed with the Virtual Protest Ring Tone idea.  I doubt Bush will use the idea but I can see people sharing "Bush, You are Outta There!" ring tones.