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WBraun
climber
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Aug 31, 2011 - 01:35pm PT
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This is a purport from the Bhagavad-gita:
The symptoms of the self-realized person are given herein.
The first symptom is that he is not illusioned by the false identification of the body with his true self.
He knows perfectly well that he is not this body, but is the fragmental part of the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
He is therefore not joyful in achieving something, nor does he lament in losing anything which is related to his body.
This steadiness of mind is called sthira-buddhi, or self-intelligence.
He is therefore never bewildered by mistaking the gross body for the soul, nor does he accept the body as permanent and disregard the existence of the soul.
This knowledge elevates him to the station of knowing the complete science of the Absolute Truth, namely Brahman, Paramatma and Bhagavan.
He thus knows his constitutional position perfectly well, without falsely trying to become one with the Supreme in all respects.
This is called Brahman realization, or self-realization.
Temporary relief of the external body and the mind is not satisfactory.
For man, mind is the cause of bondage and mind is the cause of liberation.
Mind absorbed in sense objects is the cause of bondage, and mind detached from the sense objects is the cause of liberation.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Aug 31, 2011 - 02:02pm PT
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Werner, Kicking Mule Records summed all that up a bit shorter with:
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Norwegian
Trad climber
Placerville, California
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Aug 31, 2011 - 02:07pm PT
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man is beast, evolved.
no more, and probably less.
the mind of a tree
could coach well every human zen wannabe.
to stand forever,
stout and beautiful;
playing well with all worldly forces.
that's my role model.
all this complex bullshit trying to summarize
our disgusting beauty impresses me less
than,
the wooden splinter in my palm.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Aug 31, 2011 - 02:21pm PT
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I think the material world around us is an incredibly complex and fascinating place. I think people often underestimate it and sell it short.
I consider attitudes and beliefs which attempt to disassociate 'mind' from meat as chauvinist forms of human exceptionalism held by people who on one hand grossly underestimate meat (or don't trust it) and on the other cannot bear the reality that 'they' are wholly at the mercy of the quality of their meat.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Aug 31, 2011 - 02:29pm PT
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The Chief: ...meat brain has nothing to do with it at all.
Why bother with meat at all? Is this ethereal and eternal life intrinsically exhibitionist by nature in that it needs the [material] world as a stage? Seems a pointless rubric at best and a bizarre form of eternal ritualistic torture at worst. Why bother? Why wouldn't all 'souls' just be 'perfect' from the get go? Who's trying to prove what to whom? Or maybe it's all just a cruel virtualization...
DMT: Its hard to be a filet mignon when all you got is chuck.
I think the idea (if you buy into it) is you start with flank and as you work through your sh#t and then become worthy of better grades and cuts.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Aug 31, 2011 - 02:54pm PT
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An interesting blog with a good roll of allied blogs in the side bar:
neurophilosophy
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FredC
Boulder climber
Santa Cruz, CA
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Aug 31, 2011 - 03:56pm PT
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Werner, I agree that we are all stuck in our "I's". That seems to be where we live (myself for sure. There might be value in trying to wrestle with this intellectually.
As someone mentioned somewhere up the thread, there are some mostly eastern based systems that suggest they might offer a way to climb past the intellect.
Before someone starts that ascent they need to have some kind of logical framework that supports roping up and putting on those different shoes.
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FredC
Boulder climber
Santa Cruz, CA
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Aug 31, 2011 - 04:05pm PT
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It is true that most of the countries in the east don't have the material system thing together. No doubt about it.
Happiness though is another thing. It would be cool to get a good measurement of "gross national happiness" as they are working on in Bhutan. I wonder how they average US person with all the high tech and good medical care would rate? I don't have the data.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Aug 31, 2011 - 04:09pm PT
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A perspective on thinking traps and the masters of the soul and consciousness
"There was once a fox who was so utterly without cunning that he not only constantly fell into traps but could not even distinguish a trap from what was not a trap.
After this fox had spent his entire youth in other peoples traps
he decided to completely withdraw from the fox world, and began to build a den [Fuchsbau].
He built himself a trap as a den, sat down in it, pretended it was a normal den (not out of cunning, but because he had always taken the traps of others for their dens).
This trap was only big enough for him.
Nobody could fall into his trap, because he was sitting in it himself.
If one wanted to visit him in the den where he was at home, one had to go into his trap. Of course everybody could walk right out of it, except him.
The fox living in the trap said proudly: so many fall into my trap; I have become the best of all foxes. And there was even something true in that: nobody knows the trap business [das Fallenwesen] better than he who has been sitting in a trap all his life."
Some even become gurus.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 31, 2011 - 04:30pm PT
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"people... cannot bear the reality that 'they' are wholly at the mercy of the quality of their meat."
Yes, now we're getting somewhere.
Actually, you're at the same place you started, and where you'll end up.
The obsession to investigate what will only confirm or bolster your extant beliefs is that no learning is not only possible. After all, materialism is as predictable as the rigid determinism its espouses. But is this so, incontrovertibably? Nope. Not even close.
You might want to investigate the idea of "contrary action" to get another POV on being "wholly at the mercy" of our meat impulses and imperatives. What's more, this all is once again the knee jerk retreat back into quantifying, which is not the drill. It's like watching a climber who only knows how to mantle, then when he flounders, hearing how mantling alone is the valid technique, and how all of us lybackers and face climbers can't bear the stress of the really grim mantleshelf. Caramba. Pull a jam or an arm bar here and again, dood. You're wearing us out . . .
Remember, most people with no mental training believe that only through narrow focusing and discursive thinking can insight be had. In fact when your mind relaxes (your focus opens up) in the bathroom or on a drive or just walking to the store, thinking about nothing, the most remarkable things often pop up. That's the whole point of staying with raw experience, with nothing. Its the opposite of going where you need language and so forth to know the terrain, and terra incognito to most folks.
Unfortunately I am getting no takers here so I'm not getting any consensus on the questions and terms John S. asked early on, which was my hope. I gave a brief run down of what I found - an awareness field, qual/stuff floating past, a flow or process of subjective experience, et al, but no one else has ponied up any first-person insights, just more looking at the brain and experience as a thing and rendering one more third person functional analysis, including the mistaken belief that anything else is priestcraft. Arrrrrrrrg.
It's almost as if people are afraid of getting intimate with their own minds. If you treated a friend like you treated your own mind - with these deadly, 3rd person objectifications and so forth, said friend would think you were insane, or an alien. And no, I'm not suggesting you approach your mind with a Hallmark card - but a ruler won't do neither. Not this time.
Just some thoughts . . .
JL
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Aug 31, 2011 - 04:50pm PT
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Ok, let's try a little 'subjective experience' and 'empty the mind' experiment: do eight shots of the high test alcohol of your choice in ten minute intervals and then report back to us about about your 'experience', what just comes up, and the constancy of your consciousness.
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Evel
Trad climber
Nedsterdam CO
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Aug 31, 2011 - 04:50pm PT
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I think there's a possible answer in some of Richard Feynman's writing. Looking for it now. May take a while though. This is a bit much for me.
May have found it: Feynman's Joy of Not Knowing/The Thinking Mind
Or not (knott)
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Aug 31, 2011 - 04:53pm PT
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Largo,
"just more looking at the brain and experience as a thing".
Whatever floats through your consciousness - what materialises and is seen by us, are things. Your words are things you know. There is no way around things when you argue. Even if you should insist on them being non-things.
And feelings are certainly material in nature. You can measure brain activity, hormones and so on.
Why is it important to you to cling to a fragile and low probability hypothesis about a non-thing consiousness and non-thing mind?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 31, 2011 - 05:08pm PT
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Why is it important to you to cling to a fragile and low probability hypothesis about a non-thing consiousness and non-thing mind?
Your narrow focusing again, dood. That's not the drill here.
But to answer your question anyhow, the simple fact is, experience, as it unfolds inside your awareness, does not stop. You can pause and freeze frame various qual, and the evaluating mind can get hold of them as things - fo sho. The flow of experience itself is not a thing in the same qualitative way that a billiard ball or a starfish is a thing. And most of all, the awareness field itself, raw awareness - also experienced as 1st person "presence" - is most assuredly not a measurable thing in and of itself (no reverting to the mechanism you believe "creates" same - that's jumping out of the 1st person process).
JL
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Aug 31, 2011 - 05:33pm PT
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It could be that Hartouni and Largo's inability to share a common view of the world is nothing more than an expression of the strengths of certain areas of their brains.
It seems to me that Ed is speaking about a highly refined use of the discursive conscious mind and Largo about a highly refined use of the awareness- only subconscious or unconscious mind.
They are also probably focussing on different historical periods of the evolved meat brain. Awareness is common to all animals and discursive thought only to recent humans. Discursive thought is highly useful in modern times. However, our most basic autonomic and emotional responses long preceded our use of language which Ed and others define as consciousness. A fully developed (enlightened) brain would be able to utilize both at will.
Of course most people do not really utilize even that portion of the brain they have chosen to specialize in. There are so many levels of consciousness that our mind/brains look like maps in an atlas. We see individual maps easily but flounder when trying to describe the book as a whole.
From the realm of consciousness, some of these include:
-Language (with sub maps for different languages and different experiences of consciousness depending on which language
-Mathematics as a form of language
 aesthetic consciousness which combines language with emotion as in poetry, literature, and music, as described by Patrick Oliver
From the higher realms of the subconscious:
-Intuitive consciousness
-social consciousness
-messages and Innovations through dreams
-art
-dance
-climbing
-From the lower realms of the unconscious
-Sex
-swimming
-massage
Spirituality is the result of positive intentionality which involves discipline and sacrifice. Anger becomes compassion, sex becomes tantra, ego becomes unselfishness, climbing becomes art form, by raising the unconscious to the conscious, understanding it, and imposing rules and limitations.
What is so far little known in the West are the techniques for transforming raw emotions to higher thought processes with intentionality
-regulating hormones (endocrine glands, dopamine, serotonin) with meditation, acupuncture, yoga, kum nye, martial arts
-raising or lowering heartbeat, breathing, and blood pressure with meditation, yoga, kum nye, martial arts)
Whether one sees this as the glorious potential of the evolved meat brain or raising one's consciousness to be in synch with a universal consciousness is a personal choice.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Aug 31, 2011 - 05:37pm PT
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Largo.
You like to use the word narrow when you address my perspective, where I would use the word clear. There is a great scientific depth to the perspective if you want to get deeper.
Then if my perspective is narrow, I guess you would think your own perspective is broad and I will add that your perspective is also speculatively mentalistic and scientifically superficial.
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Aug 31, 2011 - 05:42pm PT
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You spend too much time thinking about what your mind is thinking about and you're missing some of the pure experience too...
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Aug 31, 2011 - 05:50pm PT
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The flow of experience itself is not a thing in the same qualitative way that a billiard ball or a starfish is a thing
You're right, it's a electro-chemical cascade which is highly dependent on the quality of your meat. Drugs or alcohol have almost immediate corrupting effects on that flow of experience - how could that possibly be? I know you don't want to talk about it, but those, and other meat impairments, highlight how dependent consciousness is on the health of the meat.
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