Letters to the Editor
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Me too!
So I guess that makes us both walking chemical experience factories?
Now what?
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Kindness
... maybe it doesn't matter how one gets there; kindness is the main teaching of mysticism. If somebody is trying to claim their mystical experience makes them better than you, caveat emptor!
If they're kind, wise, and have a sense of humor, then what proof of higher consciousness do you need?
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Now what? Enjoy!
As I say, my policy is go with the flow until I die, at which point I will begin an intensive program of no-thought.
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@Fool
Just chiming in here...
You found meditation boring? Man, if only you'd realized that there really wasn't anyone there to be bored!! Then you would have enjoyed it. Well, until you realized that there was no one there to enjoy it. ;)
All humor aside, but I think this goes to show that there is a kind of knowledge to be derived from meditation. While it may seem that what I jotted down above is a bunch of nonesense, the truth is experienced meditators will know exactly what I'm talking about. And while you can read about what that statement might mean, you aren't going to know it in the same sense as someone who's experienced it.
"If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
Now that I think of it, arguing the virtues of meditation doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Point is, unless you are called to it, and unless you really practice and discover the benefits for yourself, you're going to think this stuff is a whole lot of hooey. You are entitled to your opinion although I would say your perspective is somewhat provincial. Still, just don't think for a minute that the benefits aren't real. The falling tree falls in our own minds. We need to look for it there if we are to comment on it's sound.
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@Fool
my policy is go with the flow until I die, at which point I will begin an intensive program of no-thought.
I'm with you!
A Zen master visiting New York City goes up to a hot dog vendor and says, "Make me one with everything."
The hot dog vendor fixes a hot dog and hands it to the Zen master, who pays with a $20 bill.
The vendor puts the bill in the cash box and closes it. "Excuse me, but where’s my change?" asks the Zen master.
The vendor responds, "Change must come from within."
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How meditation gives you higher consciousness
...is really not complicated, though many folks of a rationalist bent may find zen paradoxes hopelessly obscurantist. But such verbal paradoxes were designed to boost the technique of mindfulness practice in its power to put our thoughts in a larger context. Our selfish and confused tendencies, the wisdom teachers say, arise when we identify with our thoughts and mistake them for reality. It's an ancient understanding of reification, or if anyone's ever heard of A.N. Whitehead, "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." Our ongoing groove is continually interrupted by our own mind's clinging to trivial stuff and making it feel important, making unwarranted assumptions about the past and the future, neurotically obsessing on things, making ourselves the center of the universe-- to which the universe quite rightly responds "Ha!"
Unfortunately, our cultural understanding of spirituality has been polluted with theistic concepts of supernaturalism. Contemplative spirituality is as naturalistic as you could want; wisdom, it is said, arises from seeing beyond any particular concepts that might be fleeting through at the moment. An initial glimpse of this might seem like the heavens opening up, it's so radical. By and by things calm down, and one can become curious about the nature of this mind that sees its thoughts in perspective. Beyond just seeing things in perspective, being able to recognize multiple points of view, and being able to identify with others, one starts to look at this consciousness as a consciousness. Then things really get interesting. What is this odd product of our brains anyway, and what's it doing in this universe where any perception of solid matter we might have is really just a matrix-like display created by our sense organs and neural processors?
Have fun, Fool-- at least try not to hurt anyone, help them if you can. And take it easy on us mutants, we're just trying to get by.
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Nonsense words do not a science make.
In simple terms, the self is a learned concept. It identifies a conviction of self by identifying anything not confirmed emotionally as self to be other. This is the presumption of ego. Humans are not fully evolved. We are Homo credibilis, not Homo sapiens. We are Believing man. not Wise man. We have an imagination, an unlimited associative ability that is far beyond our capacity to understand within the meager perceptions on which base our reason. We rely on emotional attachments to pain and pleasure experiences to get us from one moment to another.
Our preconscious senses respond to more environment than our consciousness can accept and respond to. Decisions are made by analyses and comparisons with similar experiences, and actions are instituted milliseconds before we are aware of our decisions.
Any pseudoscience that attributes reason to rationalization does not understand the biological imperative of human thought processes.
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What Tripe
What we will say we believe to get each other's attention - and you know what? It works :)
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Introspection
Response to Chaoswhisperer Monday, April 28, 2008 12:27 AM
Introspection:
Language as a means of accessing consciousness is introspection. Introspection is unreliable precisely because of the gap between an objective observable network of electro-chemical matter of the brain and the subjective nature of consciousness. The efforts of Titchner whose lab found 45,000 discriminately different sensations, while Kulpe's lab found only 12,000 indicates the difficulty of constructing reliable categories for objective knowledge claims about the characteristics of subjective reality by introspection. The failure of introspection prepared the way for behaviorism and the removal of consciousness as a legitimate target of inquiry which lasted until the cognitive revolution. However, the present acceptance of verbal reports in cognitive studies of consciousness involves the same difficulty of ignoring issues of introspection.
Consciousness is scientifically nothing and this is legitimate.Scientists can even ignore the reality of their own consciousness, that is take it for granted, and still practice good science. But this doesn't mean consciousness is nothing, that it is an empty word. But we won't be able to have a science of consciousness. We can still study it, and talk about it, and come to have an agreed on understanding of it, but it won't be in the reliable terms of objective science. Language itself should be the primary focus in this effort because it is in language symbols that the objective and subjective unite. A word is the lived experience of the objective and subjective as one. My thoughts, Bill