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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 19, 2015 - 09:06pm PT
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The experiential adventures cannot ever be conflated with belief-based religious groups claiming things about virgins and so forth. This is the purest foolishness . . . And so we have people conflating experiential adventures with flying virgins (JL)
You missed the point entirely.
Different games entirely, and maybe the two will yield some similar fruit so long as we don't get . . . (JL)
OK, that's all I was asking. You are no longer claiming that meditative no-thing is the same as physics' no physical extent (which itself is a matter for physicists to argue)
Good.
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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Jun 19, 2015 - 09:54pm PT
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'The Acolytes of the Consciousness Discussion Liturgy'
I have measured the woo factor of transcendental meditation and I've observed the empty space between each and every quark,
I've put two and two together and it equals no-thing plus or minus seventy two virgins and a mushroom in the dark,
I have argued this with young geniuses who found bliss without a door or a bed or paycheck or even a city park,
But I've never seen the likes of them who wax so damned contentiously about the mystery of a lark,
Like the existence of human consciousness be it ordained, evolved, or random, or mathematically inplausible and hark...
Is that your mother on the phone?
-bushman
-channeling village idiot
-channeling nearby star media traffic
-none of the above
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crankster
Trad climber
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Jun 19, 2015 - 10:02pm PT
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Mind less.
Even a simple amoeba and blade of grass exhibit consciousness.
Because of their clueless-ness, modern science is engaged in so much destructive materialism and completely neglects the living entities life force.
You should be very ashamed ....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 19, 2015 - 10:32pm PT
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it was an interesting listen, if only to realize how science seems like such a threat to some.... I suspect to Largo too...
Spira: to say "there is a finite mind that knows a finite world made of matter, that is the true blasphemy"
"the new science is the science of consciousness...
...until we know the nature of the knowing with which our experience is known, nothing true about the known can be known."
Sounds a bit like MikeL there, too...
but I was astounded to have, in the process of listening to Spira, this quote from an odd little book I read decades ago wrenched out of my memory, a soliloquy of sorts:
"It fills all Space, and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness ah, the happiness of Being!"
indeed, the happiness of being.
I wonder what is "new" about Spira's ideas... unless it is the pulling together of many ancient ideas, and discussing them in YouTube pieces.
So what could be more blasphemous than the idea that we are, indeed finite, originating from the world of material things. That most interesting idea of Darwin's, perhaps the most threatening idea of science. An idea less than 200 years old at that... not the result of deep philosophical musing, but of following a curiosity to explain a set of observations, of the material world.
Apparently the philosophical implications seem to be rather profound. We can let the philosophers hash that out.
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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Jun 20, 2015 - 06:29am PT
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Mr. Darwin, so insightful.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 20, 2015 - 07:19am PT
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No ..
You projected that idea from your mind onto the world outside of yourself.
You should be very ashamed .... :-)
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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Jun 20, 2015 - 07:29am PT
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Shame is overrated.
Incomprehensible demoralization and degradation, now that's something.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 20, 2015 - 08:27pm PT
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while we may give a large latitude to our fellow humans condition of consciousness, there seems to be a larger reluctance to give it to other things.
Things?
Well I see fellow spiritualist in the know conjecturing ALL Life contains consciousness. Which is basically construed from when one organism reacts to another...
Now if your questioning whether a "Thing" like Siri posses the same consciousness when I ask her where Wallmart is and she returns with the answer, "on Hwy 62". I'd say you need to re-boot.
Here's some new language for ya from my enlightened couple days spent with my daughter for Father's Day weekend at Big Bear. Consciousness comes by way of emulation from child rising to the expectations from the parent. Maybe in different words, the girl/boy being born from a women genetically grows in consciousness as they become aware that someday they must replace the parent, and they themselves will have to be the parent? <my work in progress.
Now take the Oak Tree. The Acorn drops from the tree. Lies there with all its genetic makeup until the environment affords the required necessities for it to take root. Once it pops its head above the dirt, the genetics has a predominance of the nessasery requirements for growth, light, water, nutrients, soforth. BUT, say by the time it reaches 10ft there's a pine blocking the light so it bends around to receive enough light...
Consciousness??
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 20, 2015 - 09:47pm PT
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The experiential adventures cannot ever be conflated with belief-based religious groups claiming things about virgins and so forth. This is the purest foolishess.
I've never understood the spiritualist that see a need for procreation/sex while in heaven?
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Jun 21, 2015 - 07:16am PT
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 21, 2015 - 01:06pm PT
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So I'm reading the latest issue of Time (as an ancient of days I still take a few print magazines) and toward the back there is a full page advertisement with the headline FIND YOUR INNER PEACE. It's part of The Great courses® series and looks to be real bargain at a price reduction from $254.95 down to $69.95 for the DVD. There are 24 half hour lessons, starting with 1. Mindlessness, followed by 2. Mindfulness-the Power of Awareness, which intrigues me due to all the references on this thread about awareness. I wonder, is this the same thing JL is always preaching? And if so might I not achieve this result in a mere 12 hours instead of painfully sitting for years?
There is a small photo of the teacher - a Dr. Mark Muesse, professor of RELIGIOUS studies at Rhodes College (a warning bell here recalling JL's commentaries) - sitting upright on a pad on the floor with his legs in a pretzel. The ad says "With 24 lessons taught by an award-winning professor, this course will set you on the path to inner peace."
What do you think? Would this be a good investment?
Inquiring minds want to know.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 21, 2015 - 01:49pm PT
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^^^ if you want to save the duckets. I think I saw the same program on Piratebay.com for free.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 21, 2015 - 07:59pm PT
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OK, that's all I was asking. You are no longer claiming that meditative no-thing is the same as physics' no physical extent (which itself is a matter for physicists to argue)
I'm saying I don't know. I do know that both physicists and meditators look into the void, or the undifferentiated realm, and even the most articulate folks stumble in trying to say WHAT that is. But it makes little sense to me - and none at all to my friends I ride with - that we are talking about different realms. I think what John is arguing against is, once again, content - or what people find in the undifferentiated, depending on how they use their awareness and focus, science using a narrow focus and phenomenon.
The curious bit for me is people's mania to hold onto a world view in which all phenomenon are the blowback of physical causes, when "physical" is itself such an equivocal term, especially when you introduce no physical extent, no dimensionality, no rest mass, and other non-measures that seem to underscore the not-so-solid non-stuff folks are still banking on to be the sort of "ultimate reality."
My understanding of this from the science angle is solely owing to my friends who are 25 years younger than me and have a simple rule they apply to how people think about this. If you are old school, you will hold out the hope that non-objects (photons, experience, etc .) can ultimately be explained by way of purely physical and mechanistic objects. To these folks, the objective is God the Creator.
Perhaps it's simply how we look at things that determines our explanations. Some see flying virgins.
But so far as John saying that we need to let the physicists argue and experiment out the "truth" about non-things, I agree if you mean we leave them to do the calculating. But by this logic, we would have to leave the discussion of consciousness to those few who studying it as an experiential discipline - if we were being strictly honest with outselves and were sticking to what we actually and empirically know - and I'm having to much entertainment on this thread to let that go at that.
JL
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 21, 2015 - 08:44pm PT
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I'm saying I don't know (JL)
We are in agreement, then. I don't know either. I strongly suspect the two realms are not the same, and perhaps you strongly suspect they are. Your Prodigies may be able to lead us in this esoteric quest, but they still seem a little wet behind the ears. But then again they ARE Prodigies.
With age will assuredly come wisdom.
;>)
Why do philosophers like to dress in togas to have their statues made?
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 21, 2015 - 09:15pm PT
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Why does the gross materialist always wear a tie that cuts off the blood flow to his brain and makes em stooopid?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 21, 2015 - 09:34pm PT
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Speaking of perspectives, I just got back to this thread and found steevee's comments saying I forgot about WWII while praising the Japanese. To clarify, my comments were meant to provide a contrasting example to Blue's assumptions, not to be a historical treatise on Japan's modernization pains for the past 135 years. I used to teach a 3 credit course on that to a mixed class of Americans, Japanese, and Okinawans, so I am well aware of the complex events and emotions surrounding that period. Certainly, no one lives in Okinawa for 30 years and is unaware of the war or the inequities and complexities of the ongoing American occupation there.
I also taught many courses on the differences between American and Japanese culture, including the strengths and weaknesses of both systems. However, since blue was extolling only the positives of his belief system, I responded likewise.
Just as there are reasons both religious and otherwise for the Crusades and the Inquisition, there are reasons both within Japanese culture and without, for what happened in WWII. I think jstans's recommended video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EsW_uvnSao
did a good job however, in showing that the militarists who propagated the war were not the average Japanese. These militarists co-opted Buddhism during the feudal period and then used Shinto to destroy the power of the Buddhists and Samurai classes in order to modernize. It was an effective strategy and also proved that even the peaceful nature worshipping Shinto could be ruined for political ends.
What the film didn't mention was that the Japanese had kept to themselves for three centuries until Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay and shot the place up in the name of American led free trade. The Japanese quickly adapted by sending delegations around the industrialized world to learn the secrets of the West's power. They were told repeatedly that the Germans had the best military, the British the best navy and the U.S. the best factories, and imitated them all. They were also told that every great power needed an empire and they were given the German empire in the Pacific by the League of Nations after WWI, as the West saw nothing wrong with empires at that time. It was only when the West saw Japan encroaching on their own empires did they object and often in the most racist terms. Meanwhile Japan was horrified at the way the Western powers including the U.S., had carved up China, taken over the Phillipines and Guam, and annexed Hawaii after a coup against the native rulers.
The real contemporary crime of the Japanese was not in building an empire like all the other advanced nations, but in treating their new subjects even worse than the Western powers. Their 2,600 year old military tradition and its honor code of death before surrender, and their views of themselves as isolated, different from, and superior to others, all played a role. Even so, as late as the 1940s, over 300,000 Indonesians volunteered to help the Japanese war effort to prevent the return of the Dutch imperialists . I have also been told in Singapore and Malaysia, that despite the suffering they caused, the Japanese earned their respect because "they were little brown guys like us who defeated those big white giants. And when that happened, we knew we could too, and some day we'd be free, and have our country back".
So yes, whether discussing meditation or international politics, it's all a matter of perspective. There is no absolute truth out there.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 21, 2015 - 09:52pm PT
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I think I read somewhere that ties started their long journey to what they are today when Egyptian soldiers started carrying the Pharaoh's umbilical cord into battle for good luck.
I think this possibly corrupt memory started its journey from a reference in Homer W. Smith's book Man and His Gods.
Among his other accomplishments, Homer W. Smith lifted the kidney out of the Swamp of Woo and showed that the kidney works by known physical principles.
Homer W. Smith also wrote From Fish to Philosopher, which sounds like it might help understand what goes on in this thread.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 21, 2015 - 11:08pm PT
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There is no absolute truth out there.
Famous last words you will soon meet and see .......
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 22, 2015 - 12:18am PT
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In the world of men there is no absolute truth unless it is something as general as the Golden Rule. What most of us are arguing about here is whether there might be a universal truth beyond the world of men and would they be able to recognize it if there was.
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