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MH2
climber
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Aug 26, 2014 - 11:26am PT
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when you sit down for 20 minutes all that stuff comes up sooner or later and it is an opportunity to observe it for what it is . The way prescribed for observing it is to not push it away and don’t crave it (just observe). (PSP also PP)
As another meditator, do you recognize what JL means by 'alert open focus?' Is it what you describe above?
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Aug 26, 2014 - 11:32am PT
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""Healthy habits, social intelligence, and critical/analytical thinking are about as specific as you can get with regards helping the next gen along on the 'ladder of success'."
This is of course why most school districts are still serving junk food in the cafeteria and judging students and teachers by standardized tests? "
This attempted juxtaposition makes no sense to me whatsoever. Unless it was an attempt at tongue-in-cheek agreement.
Individuals vary within social groups with regards to attributes like boldness, risk taking, and curiosity. Sure.
I tend to shy away from proclamations about 'the masses' however. Individuals are complicated and interesting if you're open minded enough to grok such unexplored territory. That others' adventures don't look like mine doesn't trouble me much.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Aug 26, 2014 - 11:39am PT
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As for Zen and and Theravada forms of Buddhism, I think the misunderstandings about losing the self arise from the differences between Buddhist apophatic definitions and western cathephatic definitions.
Western thought loves to define things in positive and definite statements. Hence God is an eternal, infinite, omniscient, omnipresent omnipotent spirit etc.
Buddhism defines things in terms of the abscence of ordinary traits. Hence Ultimate reality is seen as "unborn, uncreated, undying, unchanging". Other terms are emptiness or nothingness.
Likewise with personal characteristics that are sought after. To be egoless is an extension of the eastern ideals of personal calm, dignity, poise, and equanimity.
Westerners are more active (being a cultural ecologist I think it has a lot to do with climate). They talk about selflessness, forgiveness, generosity, charity and "doing good".
Getting rid of ego eastern style means getting rid of self centeredness and selfishness in western terms. That's all.
The Dalai Lama is beloved all over the world because of his wisdom, his humor, and his selfless service to both the Tibetan nation and spiritual seekers all over the world. The samurais were a perversion of Buddhism. They got the meditation part down for the ends jgill suggests, but they never partook of Buddhist ethics.
Buddhism says it takes both meditative wisdom and compassion to become enlightened.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Aug 26, 2014 - 11:43am PT
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Individuals are complicated and interesting if you're open minded enough to grok such unexplored territory.
Agreed even in the midst of the most conforming societies. However, your faith in individuals and individualism is typically American and not shared by most of the world which enjoys much more of a sense of family and community than we do.
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Aug 26, 2014 - 12:00pm PT
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Getting rid of ego eastern style means getting rid of self centeredness and selfishness in western terms. That's all (Jan)
Finally, a message of great clarity.
Jgill: There's a real satisfaction in going into territory unexplored by other climbers and finding new climbs, even if they turn out to be not as challenging as one might have desired. The exploration itself provides gratification. The same is true of math.
I have my doubts
People don't like endless ambiguity or uncertainty (absolute groundlessness). Everyone wants final answers, definitions, concreteness, clarity, things that really exist, and accomplishments. Yet these are the very things gives rise to suffering. People require the comfort , safety of knowing what's what, predictability, closure, permanent , independent , separate existence, and meaning. (MikeL)
Surprisingly, I will agree somewhat. We've both made blanket statements that cover a bit too much territory. I have known a number of PhD mathematicians who have had no interest in research after their theses. Most have been very smart and certainly capable of doing more, but the exploration gene just wasn't there. And there are certainly talented climbers who simply repeat routes that are popular, showing little interest in exploration.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Aug 26, 2014 - 12:17pm PT
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My taking individuals as they come has zero to do with the status of the American family, the American worship of 'individualism' - and everything to do with simply having an open mind.
My approach towards others is the same regardless of what country I'm in or where the person hails from.
Do you speak for 'most of the world' now? Is 'most of the world' living here and experiencing American family life for themselves? Is a substantial population of 'most of the world' still trying to emigrate to America?
That Americans lack a sense of family smacks of an outsider's view with a narrow focus and a strong bias filter. Hey, we all do this, regardlesss of nationality, with regards to places we're not that familiar with.
It's not the same as less developed countries, sure, but after traveling extensively to 35 countries, many of them less developed, I'd hardly hold most of them as models for how family members should treat each other. Do I need to provide examples?
Most of the American families I know personally are incredible and vibrant - a HUGE step up from families I knew growing up. They are not without their problems, of course, but the level of dysfunction is so much lower than in the past.
On the flip side, American life can be alienating, for a variety of reasons. I haven't observed it being any more lonely or alienating than life in less developed countries, however.
All anecdotal, but family life in America appears to be alive and well to me. Thanks for asking.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Aug 26, 2014 - 12:19pm PT
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Getting rid of ego eastern style means getting rid of self centeredness and selfishness in western terms. That's all
So does this amount to a criticism of many on this thread who have pointedly suggested that this "ego-ridding" is founded in an actual ontologically-based total dissolution of a sense of ego in the psyche?
Your characterization in the above seems to confine this ego diminution to a sort of social modification --- a social regulatory function perhaps rooted in a long-standing ethical need in Asian societies to put a firm check on rampant draconian individualism.( This ethical need might in turn derive from deep and reoccurring ecological and economic considerations)
Could the rise of Buddhism in India and China---at least partly---have historically amounted to a sort of social levee , or dam, against the sometimes unchecked rise of regional warlordism?
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Aug 26, 2014 - 12:28pm PT
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I suppose one could measure the health of the American family by observing the condition of American teens. In working with teens extensively in two different capacities, I'm extremely impressed so far. Huge improvement from my day IMO.
I'd say we're doing just fine, growing wealth disparity problem not withstanding.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Aug 26, 2014 - 12:56pm PT
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MH said”As another meditator, do you recognize what JL means by 'alert open focus?' Is it what you describe above?”
Given all the semantical misunderstandings and that I am fairly dyslexic I am not sure I do, but I think JL is talking about the same thing.
One of the most difficult transitions is most people come in looking for a self improvement solution and to transition to a big question What am I? style with no attainment with nothing to attain is a big move.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Aug 26, 2014 - 06:15pm PT
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Ward, I think it's both, existing on a continuum from what is socially beneficial to the deepest layers of the individual mind. And yes, I think economics and the underlying ecology played a huge role, the group effort and discipline of rice growing being thought by most specialists to be the reason. Buddhism's social origins in India are commonly thought to be a reaction of the growing mercantile classes against the tradition and priest bound agricultural society. In China, it may have been a reaction against war lordism, but more commonly against the upper class authoritarian biases of Confucianism and the lack of an explanation for a life after death in both Confucianism and Taoism.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Aug 26, 2014 - 06:23pm PT
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And Tvash, I'm glad that you are so happy with the American families and teenagers you know. Optimism is also an American trait. I guarantee you that if you were raised in Japan, hardly a Third World Society, you would not be touting the glories of individualism.
As for America, I go by statistics rather than personal experience, and these are not quite as wonderful as your experience. Rates of divorce, single parenthood, children from broken homes living in poverty, drugs, incarceration, and violence in America do not compare favorably with other societies. Rich or poor, developed or not, part of family life is having an evening meal together, yet this is no longer the statistical norm in America. You may see that as individualism but the rest of the world regards it as social impoverishment.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Aug 26, 2014 - 07:00pm PT
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I generally agree with Jan in the above post. But I would not attribute the diminution of family and community life seen in recent times in the West to individualism.
America very firmly subsisted on rugged individualism for most of its history---- and yet the family and community played a much greater role in daily life than it does today. Even in Europe, which lacked an individualistic pioneering ethos, we have seen nearly the same outcome as regards the family, and other similar demographic trends.
Many of the social changes we are now witnessing , negative or positive , are a direct result of technological change, rather than commonly shared ideologically-based creeds----which themselves are likewise molded ,modified, and perhaps even eventually eliminated by historical, demographic, and technological factors.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
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MH2
climber
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Aug 26, 2014 - 08:12pm PT
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Thanks for the reply, PSP also PP. One of my climbing partners a few years ago was severely dyslexic. He could not handle conventional school. He could not read without great difficulty. However, he was very smart. If he was shown how to do something, like tie a knot or build a stairway, he only needed to see it done once and then he could do it himself. He was creative, also. Last I knew he was making beautiful wood furnishings for homes in the Taos area. And skiing a lot.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 26, 2014 - 08:46pm PT
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He wrote:
"The difference, and this is crucial in understanding much of the discussion having transpired on this thread, is that the practitioners of fiddle playing or hard math or sonnets are not ---as a matter of course, establishing and sustaining ironclad antithetical distinctions between their transcendent discipline versus normal default modes of mental functioning. A fiddle player is not positioning his special knowledge or experience as an equivalent ontological or epistemological rival to ordinary non-fiddle knowledge . Nor is the fiddle player requesting that you spend years fiddle playing as the indispensable condition for validating your considered criticisms of any non-empirical heuristic claims ,with which ,on the face of it, you just might happen to disagree .
"To do so creates an unbridgeable chasm based upon an oppositional framework . IMO it's about high time to bring the "meditative arts " into proper appositional perspective, like fiddling, as a healthy corollary to daily living ---and thereby hopefully rid it of any awkwardly high pretensions of a profoundly existential nature."
I see this as an emotional rant whereby the discursive is feeling done out of knowledge that is rightfully held as its own, usurped of its hegemony by some high-blown woo. In my experience, what is being said is that there are more than one way to use the mind, and while the content and experiences of the various paths are not mutually exclusive, there are limitations to both discursive and open focus modes that immediately come up in the practice. The belief, if not the conviction that the discursive cannot wrangle all of reality is based on a certain view of mind.
When I say “discursive,” I am thinking in a technical sense, specifically per the techniques of using the three cornerstones of sentience – awareness, focus and attention – in several ways.
The discursive use of the mind can broadly speaking be said to be the technique of objectification. To create a mental object, we need to tease out one person, place, thing or phenomenon from the rest of reality. We do this by narrow focusing our awareness, which is the similar to the “capture” or “lasso” function on a graphics design program like Photoshop.
Here, we basically cut out a horseshoe or a planet or an ocean (“narrow” focus is a very relative term) and hold it apart from the rest of reality, whereby this “object” of our awareness is given our attention (“pay attention”). Think of awareness as light, focus as a magnifying glass, and the burning orange dot is our attention that is “paid” to whatever we are objectifying.
Through this discursive process we can work up our fantastic measurements and physical breakdowns of discrete physical phenomenon. Obviously we can never achieve this if our awareness was toggled wide open and we never focused on a given pine cone or quark or honey beaver.
The limitation of narrow focusing is that while sentience can be consciously used to isolate out most any damn thing, by objectifying it “out there,” and crunching the data with our meat brains, sentience cannot escape itself, so to speak, to posit itself, external to and separate from itself, for discursive viewing.
Put differently, the observer is indivisible and borderless and whatever it objectifies “out there” can never include itself, AS sentience. This strange phenomenon is comically referred to the impossibility of kissing your own lips.
Mentally speaking, whatever is viewed can never include the viewer.
The question then becomes: By what means can we use sentience to view and experience sentience itself (not the physical processes, or objective functioning, believed to "create" sentience). One way is open focus introspection.
In this attentive, borderless awareness exercise, we all begin by trying to somehow still “look” at ourselves from the open focus perspective. Somewhere in the process the looker or “I” drops away and there is just looking sans looker. But “looking” is no longer an apt metaphor. Here we are simply abiding IN sentience - wre all of our faculties - from an alert being state. Full emersion in the moment to moment experience of being sentient and being present as the panoply of people, places, things and phenomenon blow through our field or awareness, fast or slow. At first the whole shebang will seem chaotic and untenable. Then we slow down and empirical impressions are made about the basic nature of the shebang. The mistake most people make is believing that these impression are synonomous with discursive data, which is the data stream you get from narrow focusing. This data, drawn from the forest, not the trees, is of another order, neither above or below the discursive, but by no means selfsame.
This experience, while impossible to quantify or perfectly describe, is one not open to narrow focus discursive thinking, and gives one a glimpse at the all, which strangely, is not the same as the stuff or objects (meaning it's NOT the sum and substance of al the stuff out there) that flash through awareness.
JL
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Aug 26, 2014 - 09:00pm PT
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Could the rise of Buddhism in India and China---at least partly---have historically amounted to a sort of social levee , or dam, against the sometimes unchecked rise of regional warlordism?
could this type of religion just fit better with their type of government?
No dictator wants to share the podium with another, especially one that says He's The Creator of the Universe.
Then there's the authority that God bestows upon each individual being solely responsible for their eternal destiny, that would be hard to swallow as a communist.
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Aug 26, 2014 - 10:02pm PT
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Somewhere in the process the looker or “I” drops away and there is just looking sans looker (JL)
So when you speak of the "I" dropping away, that is merely part of the process or journey to your final goal. When PSP talks about the "I" dropping away there seems to be more of a social aspect involved, becoming selfless, benign, etc. It doesn't appear that he goes as far as you in the process. ???
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MH2
climber
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Aug 27, 2014 - 07:16am PT
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In this attentive, borderless awareness exercise, we all begin by trying to somehow still “look” at ourselves from the open focus perspective. (JL)
This is not what happens for me. I may be able to see my nose and feel the chair I sit in but my 'self' as such has nothing to do, nothing to say, and is present only as part of whatever is around it.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Aug 27, 2014 - 07:36am PT
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the role of technology in the ... shaping of the mind... the human mind is surely strongly influenced by technology... The collective is forming.
Homo technologicus collectivus, lol!
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Aug 27, 2014 - 07:39am PT
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Find he who conjured language and burn him!
Will our eyes migrate to our chin?
Kinda wish the Selfies would wrap it up at some point. I mean, how many ways can you slice that onion?
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