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jstan
climber
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Aug 23, 2018 - 08:12pm PT
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question is something that was worth 21865 (and counting) posts to discuss.
Actually this thread followed an earlier one of about 20,000 posts on the same topic.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Aug 23, 2018 - 08:15pm PT
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21865...
Thought experiment START:
How many posts would there be here if we subtracted the posts of largo and his (enabling) followers?
Would it be a more sensible number?
More substantive?
Perhaps a higher signal to noise ratio?
Hm.
Thought experiment END.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Aug 23, 2018 - 08:47pm PT
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JL champions one and only one perspective regarding Mind - the quest for the experience of no-thingness. Beyond that achievement he seems to have nowhere to go. No-thingness says it all.
I can only conclude that the sudden revelation of empty awareness (which may or may not be the same as no-thingness), after years of sitting and abandoning thought and reasoning, must be so stunning, so impactful, that satisfaction over its achievement drains the body and spirit of any remaining vestige of curiosity.
So sad.
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 23, 2018 - 08:57pm PT
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The gross materialists are their own worst enemy.
The gross materialists are so deluded they actually believe they are the doers .....
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Aug 23, 2018 - 10:10pm PT
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Actually it is feels like curiosity moment to moment. There is so much curiosity at times it can be a bit overwhelming. So what is curiosity?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Aug 24, 2018 - 06:31am PT
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Genetic analysis has revealed the first known, first generation neanderthal - sapiens (denisova) hybrid, found in a cave in Siberia. Chromosomes are half one and half the other. Now that mind is fascinating to contemplate! Also interesting is the fact that the closest known relatives of the neanderthal are found thousands of miles away in Croatia. This extends the range of neanderthals considerably unless the neanderthal mother was a captive taken thousands of miles away. Possibly the result of early human trafficing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/science/neanderthals-denisovans-hybrid.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Science
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Aug 24, 2018 - 08:00am PT
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It’s a kind of a test to determine whether or not you’re doing it right.
We need to get the mis-appropriation of this thinking out in the open. It’s more of an unkind epithet than anything else, imo.
How often has one heard the same comment (“you’re not doing it right”) in school? Anyone who’s been a teacher has said it--much to the chagrin of students who don’t get it or see an approach or a trick or a process in a field of study.
If almost every other discipline (other than let’s say in the arts) has its own recognized ways to investigate or solve problems, then why not consciousness, awareness, or seeing what perceptions, interpretation, or cognitions are?
Ed: I guess it's an interesting question: "what IS" anything? Ultimately we find that we can't answer that question for anything.
Yes.
Why would highly subjective meditative introspection lead to any different result than intensely objective scientific experimentation?
Because it’s different along many salient dimensions: subjective is not the same as objective (or is it?).
Could we apply what’s learned in physics to anthropology or any of the arts? What kind of experimental set-up could we devise to find answers as to what’s beautiful or moral or effective in those areas? What could physics tell us about any social study? We’ve recently recognized here that evolution has (perhaps) important social dimensions to it, yet evolution has tended to be presented as entirely objective.
The Law of the Small Instrument: “Give a child a hammer, and you will see that everything he encounters needs pounding.”
Either different disciplines require different skills and knowledge, or everything is the same on some level. I’ll go for the latter, and say everything is simply a manifestation in consciousness.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 24, 2018 - 08:39am PT
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Why would highly subjective meditative introspection lead to any different result than intensely objective scientific experimentation?
--------
What you can see here and elsewhere is a perspecive by which only a quanitative "result" is deemed valuable. That is, if we were to come up with some actual numbers to peg to mind, THEN we'd really be onto something. Otherwise, we're wasting our time.
It's also worth looking at the word "introspection" regarding meditation as described here by Mike, PPsP, myself and others. Because most of us are operating from a discursive from of mind, meditation in this regards is imagined as a subject observing something - thoughts, feelngs, sensations, plans, memories, imaginary conversations and confabs (quite common), unicorns, and so forth.
This is where we all start and for good reason: without attention trainingour, no one has the capacity to stave off mind wandering - that is, our attention gets shanghaid by whatever thought, feeling or other content that has the most valance. We have no detachment and enter what is sometimes called Awareness Fusion, whereby our awareness becomes fused with that thought or sensation and we lose a detached, objective vantage where we are present, and aware we are present.
So at the beginning we neeed an attentional anchor, something to help batton down our attention so it doesn't wander off on it's own. Mantras, following your breath, tracking body sensations (Vipassana) and other attentional anchors are used, usually for may years, before you can develop enough mental fitness to not wander off.
The problem is this is just a step, like working up the ladder in climbing, tickikng off 5.5s, then 5.6s, and so forth. It's also wildly misconstrued as being the mode in which the core of wisdom traditions arrived at their general positions. To a novice or someone trying to reckon any of this from without (without actually climbing the mountain, so to speak), advanced meditators are (many imagine) trying to achieve some state where they can "achieve" or be made aware of special spiritual" knowledge to which science is not privy to.
This, i think, is where John G. getshung up - that mediatation puts people in a certain brain "state" called empty awareness, the pay off of which is ecstacy and spiritual bliss (so called "spiritual content"). That is, empty awareness is seen as some special "content" of the brain, thereby preserving both a linear-causal belief system, and the aded belief that empty awareness is brain output.
Except it doesn't work that way in my experience. Quite the oposite.
Mike was driving at the fact that meditation is using consciousness in a totally different way then when we are quantifying, or clawing after "results" about something "out there," or in John's case, about consciousnss itself. Unless you are made curious by the possibility that this is so, trying to coax someone in that direction is like trying to someone into free soloing. Or studying math. None of these paths are for everyone, though some claim their own is the only true path.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 24, 2018 - 09:16am PT
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Jan:
Genetic analysis has revealed the first known, first generation neanderthal - sapiens (denisova) hybrid, found in a cave in Siberia. Chromosomes are half one and half the other. Now that mind is fascinating to contemplate! Also interesting is the fact that the closest known relatives of the neanderthal are found thousands of miles away in Croatia. This extends the range of neanderthals considerably unless the neanderthal mother was a captive taken thousands of miles away. Possibly the result of early human trafficing.
There is a bit of work to be done here. In the past genetic evolution has had isolated populations on which to work (we have been assuming). This has all changed as a result of the airplane and globalization. Someone expert in meiosis in the human genome needs to do some programmed extrapolation.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Aug 24, 2018 - 09:36am PT
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Having tested as 1.6% neanderthal myself (the western average is 1.2%), I'd be interested in that.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Aug 24, 2018 - 09:39am PT
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As for achieving empty awareness as the end goal, the end goal in the vast majority of Buddhism (Mahayana) is not this. Rather, the goal is to use that insight to help others (the boddhisattva vow).
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Aug 24, 2018 - 10:23am PT
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Having tested as 1.6% neanderthal myself...
Curious, any impulse ever to eat your meat raw, gather and hoard tubers from the surrounding neighborhood? or any impulse ever to construct simple bamboo traps to snare rodents or insects?
...
AI in 2018...
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Don Paul
Social climber
Washington DC
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Aug 24, 2018 - 10:56am PT
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Achieving empty awareness sounds about as interesting as holding my breath. I could be interested in it for a few minutes then would want to challenge myself more. I wouldn't want to sit still that long, even in Nirvana.
Wondering if anyone would explain precisely how something like fear of spiders & snakes is encoded in DNA. Or if it's not encoded, then what?
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Aug 24, 2018 - 11:23am PT
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"Rather, the goal is to use that insight to help others."
OK, so JL and fellow meditators are on this thread to help others by exploring their own Minds.
Once that's been taken care of, perhaps we should explore other aspects of mind, like Lucid Dreaming or the Art of Dreaming, then the mysteries of multiple personality disorder, or how the mind relates to time, or how LSD affects the mind, or how the conscious mind springs from the brain, or . . .
Or, we sit in a mental vacuum contemplating nothing.
Sounds like a plan.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Aug 24, 2018 - 11:42am PT
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Wondering if anyone would explain precisely how something like fear of spiders & snakes is encoded in DNA. Or if it's not encoded, then what?
Precisely? I don't think anyone knows.
But based on my sense of evolutionary theory, the fear of snakes and spiders probably reaches way back before hominids, encoded in our DNA and bodies at the very earliest stages, circa earliest proto-mammals (think shrew-like creatures).
How far back is that? Something like 150 mya, right?
...
btw, in regards to the popular passion vs reason debates... I have long contended, in my science-grounded speculative moments, that the circuits and mechanisms of emotions and feelings (iow, sentience) are likely a lot older, a lot more primal, than the ones of higher cognition/cognitive powers.
Something to recollect when we read posters, though well-meaning, criticize (pure, critical) thinking (and point to Nazi and Japanese medical experiments and planned euthanasia, for eg, and genocide as evidence) and laud intuition and heart (where, as the poetic source of feeling and emotion, hate, lust sexual and vengeful also reside as antipodes to compassion, love, kindness).
In these areas of thought, a useful concept/reality to keep mindful of is so-called... motivated reasoning. These Nazis, for eg, engaged not just in reasoning ("pure logic") but, essential to grok, in passionate, very heart-felt motivated reasoning.
...
How was glycolysis encoded in our DNA and bodies? How was photosynthesis encoded in the DNA and bodies of our cousins?
WB, what is glycolysis? Ever wonder how the mechanisms of action re glycolysis evolved? or over what time span? A few centuries? A few million or hundreds of million? What say you?
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 24, 2018 - 11:44am PT
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More st00pid brainwashed guessing ^^^
You have zero clue as usual .....
Go live in the real jungle sometime instead of your sterile environment where you might actually learn something.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 24, 2018 - 01:10pm PT
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI
Here our visual perception is discussed as the brain's (top down) best prediction of what we are seeing, in response to real time data flow from our sensory inputs. At the start I had formed the question as to how the visual perceptions of newly born humans might be different from those of an adult. The presentation ACTUALLY GOT ROUND to that question!
Spending several hours spent watching this one hour talk (IMO) far out weighs the value offered so far in this thread. It also treats the perception of nothingness, scientifically.
Edit:
HFCS:
The same speaker, you dog. Was one month ago, actually.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Aug 24, 2018 - 01:19pm PT
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far out weighs the value offered so far in this thread...
So I guess you didn't appreciate my Anil Seth TED link then. Posted here many months ago.
lol
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Aug 24, 2018 - 01:35pm PT
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Curious, any impulse ever to eat your meat raw, gather and hoard tubers from the surrounding neighborhood? or any impulse ever to construct simple bamboo traps to snare rodents or insects?
Not really. However, some scientists think that my over active immune system and its inflammatory effects could have been inherited from neanderthals.
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