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  CONGRATULATIONS ON THE NEW WEBSITE – SEPTEMBER 7, 2022

  Posted by Don Salmon on September 7, 2022 at 5:43 pm

  CONGRATULATIONS ON THE NEW WEBSITE – SEPTEMBER 7, 2022

  Hi folks,

  I thought I’d introduce myself here. Don Salmon, I live with my wife Jan and our two black cats, Misu and Amie, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina, the US.

  Pianist/composer in the 1970s and 80s, clinical psychologist since the 1990s. Discovered Iain’s TMAHE in 2010 and have followed and admired his work since.

  Some suggestions for upcoming discussions;

  1. Brain lateralization – literal or metaphorical?

  I’ll put my cards on the table right away. If it turned out every word about neurological correlations in both of Iain’s books was wrong, and detached, linear, literal, quantitative attention was mediated by the toenails of the left foot, and immersed, non-linear, metaphorical qualitative attention was mediated by the aura associated with the 5th chakra in the higher levels of the astral planes, it wouldn’t matter to me one bit in terms of my interest in his work. I find his writing to be without exception, the most profound in recent history regarding these two forms of attention.

  2. Practical vs philosophic/psychologica/theoretical

  To the best of my knowledge, Iain has either avoided providing practical means of integrating the two forms of attention, suggesting the idea of practice is one associated with detached (Ok, I’ll use the metaphor – LH) attention. This leaves out millennia of contemplative practices, North, South, East and West, ALL of which involved – at least partially – recognizing these different ways of attending (basically, it’s the old philosophic issue of reconciling unity and mulitiplicity, the One and the many).

  I would STRONGLY suggest the following as providing a powerful bridge between the ancient and medieval contemplative disciplines and modern psychology and neuroscience:

  1. Loch Kelly, Shift Into Freedom

  2. Les Fehmi, Open Focus Attention

  3. Dan Siegel, Mindsight

  4. B. Alan Wallace, The Attention Revolution.

  Alan’s book, is, to my mind, the single best, and he lays out in a stunningly brief set of chapters the entire Tibetan Buddhist path to supreme enlightenment. Iain’s writings provide, I think, an excellent bridge to understanding what for so many seems to be a foreign, esoteric concept.

  And congratulations again to the staff for creating this new website.

  Don Salmon replied 2 years, 3 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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