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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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May 25, 2014 - 02:05pm PT
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The following is a talk that ZM SS gave at the Harvard Divinity School; it totally cracked me up because it is so outrageous when he gives them the four choices for freedom from life and death at the high pedestal of HDS.
To be fair I don't think JL brought up Zen. I think I may be the one that brought the smelly fish into the house. Zen is also a construct and only a tool to dig around. Dig in peace and try to keep a sense of humor.
by Zen Master Seung Sahn on Mar 12, 1974Zen Master Seung Sahn
Dharma Speech at Harvard Divinity School
A Dharma Speech given by Seung Sahn Soen-sa at the Harvard Divinity School, on March 12
(Hitting the floor with his stick) Are you alive? Are you dead?
(Hitting the floor) Where does life come from? Where does death go?
(Hitting the floor) If you think life, you go to hell like an arrow. If you think death, your body has no place.
Why?
KATZ!!!
The blue mountain does not move; the white cloud floats back and forth. Life is like a cloud appearing in the sky. Death is like a cloud disappearing in the sky. Originally the cloud doesn’t exist. It is the same with life and death. But there is one thing that is present forever, forever clear and luminous.
What is this one thing?
If you want to understand, listen to these four sentences:
1. Under the sea the running mud cow eats the moon.
2. In front of the rock the stone tiger sleeps, holding a baby in its arms.
3. The steel snake drills into the eye of a diamond.
4. Mount Kan rides on the back of an elephant, pulled by a little bird.
Of these four sentences, there is one that will give you freedom from life and death. Which one is it?
When you can see the horned rabbit sleeping under the tree with no roots, then you will first attain.
What is enlightenment? If you want to understand, you must let your mind become clear like vast space. All thinking and all desire fall away, and you have no hinderance anywhere.
To let your mind become clear like vast space — what does this mean? Do you understand? This is true enlightenment.
All Buddhas and all six realms of existence return to it. All things have it, one by one. It is happening in everything.
So, even if you have never meditated, you already understand.
(Holding up his stick) Do you see this?
(Hitting the floor) Do you hear this?
Already you clearly see and hear.
Then this stick, this sound, and your mind — are they the same or different?
If you say ‘the same,’ I will hit you thirty times. If you say ‘different,’ I will still hit you thrity times.
Why?
KATZ!!!
The willow is green, the floor is red.
Tags death, enlightenment, life
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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May 25, 2014 - 02:37pm PT
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Thank you for the interesting post, PSP. I think I now see with greater clarity where John is coming from.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 25, 2014 - 05:54pm PT
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PPSP: You're going to have to translate that lecture onto an X/Y graph for anyhone to make even the slightest efort to understand it on this thread. It's not literal. Ergo the poor Japanese dood saying it was just some silly poet. Nothing there. Wast of time.
Says TVASH: Consciousness can, and is being, deconstructed. Much, not all mind you, is known about its three components - wakefulness, the mind, and the self (proto, core, and autobiographical)
First, mind is not separate from brain. NOTHING is separate from anything else. It's the yardstick boys who love to posit a separate, "objective" world that is "out there." But what you are proposing as valid info on mind is weak sauce - though it's not surprising that you believe it.
Claims that Demasio and others have "deconstructed" the mind are silly if you understand what is going on here, which is old news in any event.
http://willcov.com/bio-consciousness/sidebars/The%20Self%20%20(Damasio).htm
The self, as it is generally though of, " . . . is the subject of one's own experience of phenomena: perception, emotions, thoughts. In phenomenology, it is conceived as what experiences, and there isn't any experiencing without an experiencer, the self. The self is therefore an "immediate given", an intrinsic dimension of the fact of experiencing phenomena. In some other trends of philosophy, the self is instead seen as requiring a reflexive perception of oneself, the individual person, meaning the self in such a view is an object of consciousness."
Problem is, subjectivity is without a subject - one of the very counterintuitive things you'd never know from studying the brain from the outside. Demasio has simply tried to cobble a bunch of neural functions under the banner of various "self" functions, a concept he pulled straight out of his ass. It is NOT based on any measurement, but is grafting on the common sense (but wrong) idea that there must be a subject and various unifying agents/selves that knit together the temporal, emotive and cognitive elements of consciousness. But the self concept was ran out of town with Cartesian theater - that's totally basic, 101 level mind study.
You can find no self explained by either neuro pop writers like Sam Harris, or in more hard core scientific texts like the New Scientist
(http://www.bushwalkingholidays.com.au/pdf/NS-Self.pdf);.
Or in any Zen text you want. Insisting that there is a stand alone self which experiences life is one of the first things to go with we start looking at the mind from inside. Insisting that you have an inside take on "self" by studying neural firings is to mistake objective for subjective, micro for meta, and to wrongly assume they are the same thing beause they share a common biology.
Another one of Tvash’s blunders is in conflating neural processing with raw awareness, whereby sentience is a posited as a kind of scanning device or function ("self"). Another whiff.
He said: “To state that consciousness is seamless is, of course, alchemy. There is likely nothing in this universe that is seamless - or 'analog', as they say.” What he means to say is that he believes none of the brain’s computational functions are seamless. It would be interesting to sit Tvash down for a few days, pry his awareness off content, and have him start telling us where the seams in his awareness are. What do you bet that he would go back to the business of brain functioning like an ant to a hole.
The thing is here is that such people are taking a one-track approach to the work and insisting that they know what is up, and this is fundamentally dishonest. I have repeatedly given examples of things that we can never know about sentience and mind by way of a strictly objective view, have shown rather clearly that discursive explorations are all a perspective, and that every perspective is limited, and people refute this having no experience with anything but objectifying, then categorically announce silly fictions like consciousness has been officially deconstructed into proto, core, and autobiographical “selves” because Demasio and others say so. To anyone who has spent ANY time actually looking at their own subjective experience, this is laughably simple and grossly mistaken. Then there is poor Fruitcake, still braying that “mind is what the brain does.” What if we said that “gravity is what an avalanche does.” Would that be enough for anyone but Fruity?
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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May 25, 2014 - 07:07pm PT
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Jan notes:
...you have to have a healthy functioning ego before you can lose your ego and be non dual.
And The Slow One proves it in spades.
Funny thing is, once he loses it, it just comes back stronger than ever.
"Lemme just tell you all about my subjective experiential breakthroughs, you punters.
Not that I'm actually going to tell you anything at all.
And that'll be your fault."
Doooood. That's like, so Zen.
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MH2
climber
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May 25, 2014 - 08:01pm PT
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Thank you, PSP also PP. I like the words of ZM SS. Long ago I heard something similar. Best I can remember:
If a motorboat driving down Main Street has a flat tire, how many flapjacks does it take to cover a doghouse roof?
That is wisdom as I know it and use it.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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May 25, 2014 - 08:49pm PT
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I would like to note in reference to jgill's observation that PSP's quote from the Zen master helped him see where largo is coming from, that all of the meditators on this thread come out of specific traditions where the words have been defined. None of us are just talking off the top of our heads. We are all trying to applythese teachings to the modern world, but we haven't invented anything, just rediscovered what many through the ages have already known.
I was also reminded of this when Werner made a statement that the only thing that was important was Self realization and this got a hoot for ambiguity from tvash. In fact the idea of the microsm self and the macrocosm Self has a long, intricate and distinguished philosophical history in India for over 2,000 years now.
The problem here among others, is the lack of a common vocabulary among the various traditions let alone between meditators and scientists.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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May 25, 2014 - 08:59pm PT
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i believe youve confused me with someone else. i neither read nor respond to werner.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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May 25, 2014 - 09:25pm PT
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Sorry if that wasn't you. Maybe Werner or the person involved can remember. It is extraorinarily difficult to go back through the thread trying to find something like that. Next time I'll just say "someone" and be safe.
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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May 25, 2014 - 10:01pm PT
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all of the meditators on this thread come out of specific traditions where the words have been defined
Somewhere south of the Pleiades.
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go-B
climber
Cling to what is good!
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May 26, 2014 - 09:31am PT
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...it's more on how you use it!
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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May 26, 2014 - 01:36pm PT
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if you're too lazy to quote someone - honestly and in context, you might consider leaving their name out of your post entirely.
Fabrication, sloppiness, and fuzzy thinking aren't in great demand these days .
Credibility , on the other hand...
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 26, 2014 - 02:08pm PT
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this does seem to go on in endless circles...
and Largo hasn't confronted the Kantian question regarding the possibility that the "interior experience" may be a fantasy cooked up by the individual... while still a valid experience for that individual, having no other connection to "reality."
I don't doubt the validity of the "meditative experience" an individual might achieve with years of training. It is by all accounts a very different state than our usual state. I hesitate to say I may have had some rudimentary experience of this, only because I will be excoriated by those long term practitioners.
That said, it is a huge stretch to generalize the state to some property of the universe. We don't even know if other Earth bound life have access to that state, let alone generalizing it to all of matter, as a universal attribute would.
We have no way of generalizing that state, in any quantitative manner, to other places in the universe. The physicalist does have a way of doing that, and this has resulted in a generalization of physical properties throughout the universe.
While a "quantitative" description of that state may elude us at the present (though we seem to make a significant case by actually measuring brain activity) we are left with a description, and a practice whose results are interpreted by a tradition, presumed to be ancient (though obviously not more ancient than history, as there is, by definition, no evidence of it before).
This doesn't demote the experience at all, in my way of thinking, as it is a way of understanding what this thing that Largo refers to as "first person experience" actually is in the big picture, our way of exploring the functioning of our physical body.
That practice does not preclude the possibility of a physical explanation (though that is not a traditional interpretation of the experiences).
Given what we do know, right now, all explanations are consistent with the phenomenon, and all are possible. Sharpening the debate helps to provide a means of discriminating among these explanations, basically by finding other phenomena inconsistent with the various explanations.
For the moment, at least, the explanation of the universe in terms of physical principles does not require the additional attribute of "consciousness" to explain phenomena in the universe. Our lack of a physical explanation of "consciousness" is considered the sole exception. Unfortunately, we have no demonstration that there is, in principle, no physical explanation possible.
The problem with a purely philosophical approach to this issue has to do with the possibility that there could be some empirical path to an explanation, a path that we have not found yet. To prove that there is no such path would be very interesting, for sure.
However, if we exclude all "discursive" processes from the discussion, then obviously this required "proof" is irrelevant. But we have then constructed an argument that cannot be proved or disproved.
Once again, this is fine, but there is no way forward, except to bicker over its validity, which is endless as the entire question is intentionally framed in a manner to have no possible resolution.
At that point I'd say, go out an live your lives and not worry about it... this life you have is limited as far as we know, you had no control over your birth, you have no control over the fact that you will die. You have some control over the time in between.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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May 26, 2014 - 04:00pm PT
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Thanks Ed! That is a great summation of over 20,000 contributions to these various threads from which I have learned so much.
As for tvash, your last response is a perfect illustration of why I mistakenly thought the reference was you. It most certainly was in keeping with your style. Another example of the pattern recognition abilities of our brains, I suppose.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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May 26, 2014 - 07:08pm PT
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. You have some control over the time in between.
Yea I guess we could talk about how Oakland is going to kick Boston's butt.. HeHe
Your right though. But did you ever think one of us was going to find consciousness and pick it up?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 26, 2014 - 07:09pm PT
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Yea I guess we could talk about how Oakland is going to kick Boston's butt.. HeHe
we'll see (but they almost always do in the Coliseum... even last year... gee, who won the Championship last year? could it have been Oakland?)
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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May 26, 2014 - 07:09pm PT
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Largo hasn't confronted the Kantian question regarding the possibility that the "interior experience" may be a fantasy cooked up by the individual... while still a valid experience for that individual, having no other connection to "reality." (Ed)
I've mentioned this on numerous occasions, but since I have not "done the work" I am dismissed, usually by an absence of a reply.
We are not worthy.
If we but had the experience all doubt would vanish.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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May 26, 2014 - 10:04pm PT
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as is yours, jan. as is yours.
i dont know who you are or what your beef is, nor do i particularly care, past my simple request to kindly leave me out of it.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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May 27, 2014 - 02:30pm PT
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Finished Damasio.
He summarizes this discussion succinctly in the final pages:
on his "idea that mental states and brain states are equivalent":
"Those who reject the identity between physical states and mental states suggest that while a brain map that corresponds to a particular physical object can be discussed in physical terms, it would be absurd to discuss the respective mental pattern in physical terms. The reason given is that to date science has not been able to determine the physical attributes of mental patterns, and if science cannot do so, then the mental cannot be identified with the physical."
His counter argument:
"This is not because mental events are not equivalent to neural states, but because, given their place of occurrence - the interior of the brain - mental states are simply not available for measurement. In fact, mental events can be perceived only by part of the very same process that includes them - the mind, that is. The situation is unfortunate but says nothing whatsoever about the physicality of the mind or lack thereof."
"it is thus prudent to doubt the traditional view that asserts that mental states cannot be equivalent to physical states. It is unreasonable to endorse such a view purely on the basis of introspective observations."
And on to the key paradox of the ain't-no-thing view:
"The problem, some will say the mystery, has to do with how a phenomenon that is regarded as non-physical - the mind - can exert its influence on the very physical nervous system that moves us to action. Once mental states and neural states are regarded as the two faces of the same process, one more Janus out to trick us, downward causality is less of a problem."
In other words - consciousness is hard, but hard doesn't require magic.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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May 27, 2014 - 03:05pm PT
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Given that everything we are as humans evolved, an evolution perspective is always useful for this type of 'why do we...?' question.
Consciousness evolved because it provided survival benefits - an obvious one being the ability to plan for the future based on correlated memories of individual and shared experience.
The more specific trait of desiring to "know the answer" can and certainly has had a survival benefit - so it's not terribly mysterious that it feels good, and that we'll defend our positions, even relatively irrelevant ones, to the point of insult or worse. We're just wired that way by evolution.
Conversely, "not knowing the answer" feels bad, for the very same evolutionary reason.
It takes some heavy lifting from the neo-cortex to override the natural impulse "to know", just as it takes the same for a drunk to pass up a drink. One-size-fits-all answers, like God, magic, no-thing, and the like, are popular because the neo-cortex reminding you that you don't know, or that you may, in fact, be wrong, doesn't feel nearly as good.
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