What is "Mind?"

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jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Feb 8, 2017 - 09:43pm PT
I think awareness is designed to be coupled with an object of awareness. The meditative state you have described in which awareness has no object is a condition that, apart from the pleasure of your experience, has no meaning. Therefore it should be irrelevant to a study of mind.

You and PSP differ in your descriptions of emptiness. Paul has commented on the mind being cleared for action. I.e., prolonging the pure existence of empty awareness is of no importance as it is seen as an initial step in focusing and moving forward in thought and deed. You, on the other hand, believe awareness has a kind of separate abstract existence that possibly can be investigated. The fact that there seems to have been very little if any progress in this direction over the span of human existence should caution you to be wary of wandering down that path. (yes, I know, for millennia monks have practiced this feat. Where has it taken them but deeper into themselves and not upward to the stars?)
MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Feb 8, 2017 - 10:14pm PT
Everyone’s view is valid.


If you work as a historian this is a difficult position to justify.

Let's take a look at an early historian's approach.


Against pseudo-history he applied a free, inquiring mind, unwilling to give any greater weight to Greek tradition, simply because he was a Greek, than to that of another race.

An awakening consciousness of the distinction between myth and fact is shown by his own words: “I write what I believe to be true; for the various stories of the Greeks are, in my opinion, ridiculous.”

Hecataeus of Miletus
ca. 500 B.C.

from
Hellenic History
George Willis Botsford
Charles Alexander Robinson, Jr.
Fourth Edition, Macmillan, 1956
WBraun

climber
Feb 8, 2017 - 10:24pm PT
The meditative state you have described in which awareness has no object is a condition that, apart from the pleasure of your experience, has no meaning.

I agree as that is just pure impersonalism.

Everything including the absolute has personality and variegatedness ......

Everyone’s view is valid.

Yep ...... difficult position to justify.
PSP also PP

Trad climber
Berkeley
Feb 8, 2017 - 11:09pm PT
"So you may be stuck with a conundrum. Being stuck in a dual view is the the source of the conundrum.
jogill

climber
Colorado
Feb 9, 2017 - 10:52am PT
^^^. And that's what I'm getting at. To perceive raw awareness as somehow separate from objects of awareness is an artificial duality. Good point.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Feb 9, 2017 - 09:42pm PT
And John, I think you might want to use another word other than "illusory"

Yes, I meant like an illusion rather than an actual illusion. But some would recognize no difference, I suppose. Anti-duality in this context means one cannot separate awareness from its object in any real sense. But I've been wrong before. Let us know if you can get a grip on raw awareness.
PSP also PP

Trad climber
Berkeley
Feb 9, 2017 - 09:59pm PT
J gill said"You and PSP differ in your descriptions of emptiness. Paul has commented on the mind being cleared for action. I.e., prolonging the pure existence of empty awareness is of no importance as it is seen as an initial step in focusing and moving forward in thought and deed. You, on the other hand, believe awareness has a kind of separate abstract existence that possibly can be investigated. The fact that there seems to have been very little if any progress in this direction over the span of human existence should caution you to be wary of wandering down that path. (yes, I know, for millennia monks have practiced this feat. Where has it taken them but deeper into themselves and not upward to the stars?)"

John you are insightful but it is much more subtle than your dualistic POV attempting to define awareness and mind. It's a slippery slope because " it "is mind not attached to thinking or feeling but at the same time mind that can observe thinking and feeling. "It" is not devoid of thinking and feeling as some ducks think we are talking about.

This is not an easy thing to write about and I am probably not really qualified to do it . I generally have poor writing skills, a limited vocabulary and most of all observe I have many attachments skewing my POV. Similar to when Ed said scientists know they are bias
; we have very strong conditioning that tends to bias our POV.

So the zen style meditation practice is to perceive the conditioning and to let it go; it is so deep there are many layers to let go and they can be very subtle. If you are trying to get something (some special super feeling)it is the antithesis of letting go. As you let go of more conditioning the awareness becomes more raw, more experience less theoretical.

At some point in the practice you arrive to perceiving the dualistic POV; that is the main thing that separates us from experiencing an unconditioned awareness. That's why in Zen a key questions is ; what is this "I" that wants things to be different than the way they are?



P.S. I had supertopo blocked a work so am not able to get as much access or respond quicker.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Feb 9, 2017 - 10:07pm PT
Nice reply. But raw awareness still sounds like a very slippery quality of mind, ungraspable except as pure meditative experience and therefore not an accessible subject for scientific or intellectual investigation. Deeper neuroscientific studies might shed light on its physical basis, however.

Or some topologist out on the fringes of abstraction will develop the open sets of an awareness topology. The snowball effect is that bad in mathematics.
PSP also PP

Trad climber
Berkeley
Feb 9, 2017 - 10:22pm PT
It is acessable as a scientific or intellectual investigation. You just have to do it; as opposed to analyzing something we have not done. Back to the map is not the territory.
MikeL

Social climber
Southern Arizona
Feb 9, 2017 - 11:10pm PT
JG:

I don’t believe in much of anything anymore. I’m just trying to stay open to what’s in front of me.

Sure there’s emptiness. All that stuff about what things are, how we know them, what’s going on, . . . I’m sure that’s important in some universe. It doesn’t much seem to matter. Living is such a full time affair. It’s difficult to find the time for these conceptual machinations sometimes,

It’s always good spending time with one another. I’m sure that’s whatever important will get ironed out among us. We are all good people.

I like the conversation between you and PSP.

There is no saying what objectless awareness is. I can’t say what that is anymore than I can say what the taste of sugar is to someone who has never tasted it. Pfffftttt! There is not a shared language for such things. (Much more research is needed to develop standards of performance.)

You seem to think that an empty stage means that nothing will go on. I suggest that a naked stage offers the greatest opportunity for anything to happen. I suppose that you might think that nothing should have the open opportunity to happen. (What kind of world would that be??)

For those people (liberals) who want to achieve the absolute freedom possible, I suggest a practice in emptiness. When nothing is concrete or serious, magical things will happen. It’s safe to say that when things are concrete and serious, then predictability will arise, and now a lot of pain a suffering will show up. Things WILL get ugly.

If one suspends all beliefs for just a moment (for argument sake), one can see (will face?) a much different event horizon. (Do you grok “event horizon?”) One will not know what one faces until that thing / event show up in the *now.* Only then will a thing’s “potential” will become realized: the dharmakaya will transform to the nirmanakaya. On other words, things become reified. Then everything becomes serious and concrete. (Didn’t Niels Bohr talk about this?)


I”m sorry that I encouraged folks to go to the Physics-for-Regular-Folk lecture series online at the U of A. Aside from atrocious self-aggrandizement and hawking for donations, I found the first two poorly presented and not exactly inspiring. The U of A makes cool telescopes underground (below the football stadium) and all, but if good science needs to be hawked, then we’ve really lost our way.

Be well.

MikeL

Social climber
Southern Arizona
Feb 9, 2017 - 11:14pm PT
^^^^^^^

DMT, In so many ways, I see the need for some basic business skills just about everywhere.
MikeL

Social climber
Southern Arizona
Feb 10, 2017 - 08:00am PT
^^^^^^^^

So, dude, who's the woman that seem to constantly show up in the picture posted in your avatar? I keep wondering.

You might be right about business being show business. There is so much to say for / about mission, vision, getting people focused on a single value proposition, getting everyone to pull those oars at the same time.

EDIT: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-people-power-of-transformations?
messnerrocks

Mountain climber
Bozeman
Feb 10, 2017 - 09:58am PT
Wow, this thread goes on and on. I think you all are over thinking this topic. Mostly verbose semantics arguing definitions of words that make it seem like there is some mystical, higher thing going on in your brain. What is mind? A bunch of neurons firing in your brain making connections with other neurons in the brain. What is mind in an amoeba? Same for us but more complicated because we have more neurons. The idea of consciousness is just knowledge that you exist and will die. It's not that complicated. There is nothing special about the human brain that elevates it above other living organisms except it's complexity. You will probably disagree, but I haven't seen this idea expressed here, so I thought I would give an alternative perspective.
paul roehl

Boulder climber
california
Feb 10, 2017 - 11:43am PT
Well, glad that problem's solved. Back to the religion thread I suppose.
Wayno

Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
Feb 10, 2017 - 12:10pm PT
Wow, this thread goes on and on. I think you all are over thinking this topic. Mostly verbose semantics arguing definitions of words that make it seem like there is some mystical, higher thing going on in your brain. What is mind?

Funny how that works. If you add in that definitions are also morphing as we speak then you wonder if perhaps Werner is correct in that we are all basically bat-shit crazy.

There is something glaringly missing in all this. the proverbial elephant standing there.

Gee, what the hell is that?
MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Feb 10, 2017 - 01:12pm PT
There is something glaringly missing in all this. the proverbial elephant standing there.

Gee, what the hell is that?


Hermeneutics?


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/
Wayno

Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
Feb 10, 2017 - 02:49pm PT
We have forgotten more than we know.


Hermeneutics?

Oh yeah, I forgot about that.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Feb 10, 2017 - 03:14pm PT
It is acessable as a scientific or intellectual investigation. You just have to do it

The problem here is categorization of "intellectual investigation". Regarding the mind, one can participate in community investigation or indulge in internal investigation. The former includes all the scientific progress and can be communicated from person to person. The latter is entirely internal and takes one deep inside one's self and is poorly communicated if at all to others. There is no way to bring these two modes together other than neuroscientific investigations into the underlying brain processes related to these inner experiences.

Attempts to correlate raw awareness to quantum phenomena and other noetic efforts have gone nowhere, apart from producing the wildest metaphysical speculations.
Jan

Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
Feb 10, 2017 - 03:21pm PT
Awareness is the realization that death is a possibility. Awareness, is therefore, a tool for survival and has evolved in all living things. So yes. Oysters are aware.

It is not clear whether those believing some part of them will live forever, are aware. That belief is not a tool for survival.


Believing one will live forever definitely is a survival tool, but one that only helps when the holder of those beliefs is at a much higher level than an oyster. Humans being social animals with higher level intelligence, create problems for themselves that oysters never thought of. These problems - failed love affairs, not living up to parental expectations, seeing innocent children suffer and die, and from a woman's perspective seeing otherwise sensible men slaughter each other in hideous ways for obtuse ideologies - are but a few of these.

Smart enough to see these absurdities, it is tempting to just end it all but the idea of an eternal life and bad consequences for those who seek to escape their responsibilities is but one way a belief in an eternal life a survival mechanism for both individuals and groups.

With groups who suffer great injustice and many tragic experiences, the idea that this life is a testing ground and all will be evened out in the future is a survival method for a whole tribe or nation.

Witness what happens when people begin to suspect that there is no long term survival and no justice. People turn to hero worship of politicians and sports figures and numb their senses with drugs. In the case of widespread chaos such as drastic climate change, mass migrations, worldwide famine and epidemics, I'm betting that those with strong belief systems will survive and the doubters will simply give up and not survive.
Wayno

Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
Feb 10, 2017 - 03:26pm PT
There is no way to bring these two modes together other than neuroscientific investigations into the underlying brain processes leading to these inner experiences.

I'll bet the Wizard would beg to differ. He said he is working on a model. Wait for it. But first he will tell you where you went wrong.
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