It is commonplace yet rare, unremarkable yet a source of vibrant health, free, yet to discriminating shoppers, dear. It is to the poetic and liberated mind embellished in metaphor, and its image soothes the mind as one imagines it coursing down in icy streams, pure, cool, and crystalline in beauty. But to the rest of us, it's the stuff that comes out of our tap. It is of course, water. Like a fine wine, it can be graded in taste, purity, and aroma, and as our palate goes so goes our health. so the epicure in us all buys the fancy bottle of H2O with the picaresque label, and with pleasure imbibes the elixir of life.
Bottled water is a sure thing. After all, those pure mountain streams helped our ancestors live to a ripe old age, and recalls a simpler time when people relied on simpler pleasures. So if the stuff comes from an exotic and unpolluted place, odds are it must be better than the chorinated stuff coming from our tap. And of course, we get what we pay for, or do we?
Science has a way of pouring rain on our imaginary mental parades, the self conscious feelings of health, superiority, or even higher consciousness that comes from the odd things we do to ourselves. Drinking water of course is not an odd thing, but given the right metaphors, it can can be downright eccentric.
But just look into it closely, and the stuff of bottled water is hardly different and often less healthy than tap water. But what about the taste, the 'feel' of it? A discriminating palate would know, particularly if guided by marketing poetry. Sadly, discrminating tastes are not particularly discriminating, as blind taste tests give the nod to your water department every time.But alas, water departments do not employ poets. So although science would demur, marketers get the upper hand because they can embrace a tasteless substance with the sutble pleasures inspired and elicited by metaphor.
Bottled water can be a psychological elixer, but there are a score more that trounce science by ignoring science, or worse, falsely assuming its posture. Consider the observation and practice, held since the advent of the written word, that the mere act of attending elicits marvelous, pleasurable, and unique mental states. The concept and practice of 'meditation' is pivotal to the mystical traditions of a score of religions, and of late, is something too that can be bottled and branded.
The Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement understood the game, and made it a matter of reciting special words, little mantras that when repeated just so were a key to a higher consciousness. Of course, the little words had to be paid for, as well as the instruction and practice that made them work. It was all quite lucrative really, and TM practitioners spread the word of its magical benefits, while not quite stressing its concurrent benefits to their bank accounts.
Hebert Benson took note of this, and made it simpler by making it home made. There was no need to use a special word, separate and purchasable like a garden spade. Just repeat any simple mental precept in a quiet place, and a 'relaxation response' would be elicited. With Benson, meditation was transformed from an esoteric specialty to a mental commodity. Naturally though his new wisdom needed a marketing plan and an institute to spread the word, which of course was duly established.
There was of course one little caveat to all this: it wasn't true. The psychologist David S. Holmes noted that if you were focusing on a mantra or simple precept in a quiet place, this was not much different than being alone in a quiet place with nothing on your mind. Were the results the same between such meditating and resting states? Perhaps not. In other words, the 'cognitive focusing' so critical for meditation was maybe not required to acquire the same effect as meditation. So Holmes reviewed hundreds of experiments that compared meditating subjects with subjects who were just instructed to rest, and found that the data revealed no difference physiologically of psychologically. The focusing of attention on a simple precept or word actually elicited nothing. It was mere window dressing, as effective in getting one 'affective' as reading the label of a bottle of Evian spring water while guzzling the stuff.
Of course, when Holmes made his case, there were howls of righteous indignation everywhere, but the point ultimately was missed. Holmes was simply reporting the data, and demonstrated that to sit and rest is no different than to sit and meditate, simply because resting is always part and parcel of meditating. Holmes simply made an appeal for good science. But good science does not necessarily equate with good marketing, as tap water merchants would be first to say.
And so TM gurus and Benson rest secure, and their institutes hum along labeling and embellishing mental tap water, and earning lots of money. Not good science perhaps, but it sure is darn good marketing!
...or putting all this in another way.
It has been well established that the 'body' at rest, namely the relaxation of the musculature comes about whether one is focusing passively on a stimulus (meditating) or simply thinking of nothing with one's eyes closed (resting). Recently, fmri (functional magnetic resonant imaging, or brain scans) studies have demonstrated that the 'brain' at rest during states of no cognitive (i.e. resting with eyes open or closed) or low cognitive demand (i.e., passively focusing, or meditation) is also the same. A key issue is how muscular relaxation and 'resting' brain states operate in tandem. In Benson's view as well as for meditation researchers in general this correlation is due to the presence of some element of 'attention' that activates a 'relaxation response' . However, this position makes no sense if attentional elements are not necessary to elicit the neuro-muscular events that comprise meditative states. A much more likely possibility is that muscular activity is directly implicated in thinking or problem solving, and that when one is not consciously or non-consciously involved with ruminating about problems, the muscles will revert to a relaxed or resting state. This position incorporates the well established idea that the activity of the musculature acts to somatically 'mark' choices so as to expedite decision making. In other words, differential muscular muscular tension is prevalent in non resting states, and generally occurs not as part of a 'flight or fight' response, but rather because it helps us nonconsciously make effective decisions (i.e. the so-called gut reaction). It follows therefore that when we are placed in a position where there are few decisions to make, as when we passively resting, the musculature will relax.
Why this position has not been given the consideration it deserves is due of course to the 'water politics' that gives credibility to blissful and simplistic hype rather than to sound thinking. People just want to believe magic, and where there is magic there is money to be made. The only solution to this not a logical refutation (few will listen anyway), but to build a better mousetrap or procedure that can help people relax. That is the object of my own argument, hyperlinked below, that the reader may pursue.
