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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Jun 25, 2015 - 12:16pm PT
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 25, 2015 - 03:00pm PT
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. . . and my studies have taken me recently to learning about trance (MikeL)
I'm curious about how a meditator perceives "trance" in relation to meditative states. Are they the same? Do they differ by degree? Are they completely different?
To me they would appear to be the same, but I've been wrong before.
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Jun 25, 2015 - 03:37pm PT
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This quote is not only an example of vastly inflated and cluttered English but is riddled with half-truths and shallow reasoning.
Haha, and I thought she might be your very own soulmate. Pot and kettle again, I suppose. And since she's been dead for three-quarters of a century, I don't think her musical tastes would be particularly revealing. But please do ramble on, no-thing man.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jun 25, 2015 - 03:55pm PT
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It's nice, isn't it? to have Cintune around to fill in the gaps when you cannot.
Still working on those links, Moose.
So many women, so little time.
Oops, Freudian slip. ;)
http://vine.co/v/e55iiOuLJeI
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 25, 2015 - 06:54pm PT
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This quote is not only an example of vastly inflated and cluttered English but is riddled with half-truths and shallow reasoning.
maybe you can take the quote apart and show what is "half-truths" and "shallow reasoning."
I suspect it comes easy for you to claim such when you don't agree, and that it will be a bit harder for you to actually explain your reasoning.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 25, 2015 - 08:21pm PT
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Thanks, TTR. It would be good to get another reply from an experienced meditator. I joke about these things but I am curious about the distinctions between these two mental practices.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 26, 2015 - 12:23am PT
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^^^Wow, you lucky duck!
It that you in the doorway above? Classic picture.
We expect a full TR when you get back. If you come back ; )
BTW, how much does it cost to see a Shakespearian like that?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 26, 2015 - 08:29am PT
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what interests me the most about mind is consciousness and free will
Perhaps this will cure you.
Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science
Margaret A. Boden
2006
a lengthy review:
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/mechanical-mind
The contents pages alone are a long read, but lively and entertaining as the review says.
an example of Margaret Boden's writing:
I find it interesting to compare William James with Margaret Boden.
The contents page of James' The Principles of Psychology (1890)
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/principles/contents.html
an example of William James:
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Jun 26, 2015 - 10:06am PT
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. . . and my studies have taken me recently to learning about trance (MikeL)
I'm curious about how a meditator perceives "trance" in relation to meditative states. Are they the same? Do they differ by degree? Are they completely different?
To me they would appear to be the same, but I've been wrong before.
trance? i have no idea what that is MikeL ? and JG what do you mean they appear to be the same? What is your experience with a meditative state and a trance. Are you just being curious from an armchair perspective or are you curious enough to do it on a regular basis for a month or so to have a 1st hand perspective? I know you did the art of dreaming and had a very powerful experience; that said you may have a very insightful experience from meditating for a month.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 26, 2015 - 10:13am PT
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“Crazy ideas” are what form the bases of all knowing and conceptualizing. Like any object you label or conceptualize or make, where do they come from? How do they show up? How is it possible to bootstrap to anything never seen or done? How can one reach beyond their grasp?
a heroic and romantic view of where ideas come from... which of course ignores the process. The idea of the "Eureka" moment as if some insight is divinely passed to the recipient as "received knowledge."
Perhaps MikeL has a more nuanced view of this, his working model not informed by the actual history of many of the ideas set up as an example... and he perpetrates many long standing myths regarding how science is done. And not having done any of it himself, he is at some loss as to how it could possibly be done.
Crick and Watson’s discovery was the culmination of a very large research effort to understand the structure of a rather important molecule. The whole process of this "discovery" is steeped in controversy, see, e.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_Structure_of_Nucleic_Acids:_A_Structure_for_Deoxyribose_Nucleic_Acid
but the controversy of the discovery's "priority" (who got there first) is a good example that the "crazy idea" model of how things get known has serious short comings. To wit, the research results from many groups, the discussions with many people, the perceived competition of others. Not to mention the many false paths and incorrect "ideas" that happened along the way.
This is only a part of the "problem solving" that happens when trying to understand some piece of science. Much of the activity ends up in the trash, and is forgotten and often unacknowledged. This is especially true if the solution to the "problem" ends up being "obvious" and "elegant," a sort of protection against the seemingly inept attempts to come to grips with that understanding before that understanding is achieved. In science, the victors get to write the history...
This laborious process of trying to "understand" something exists in all human activities, in art, recall the telling of Ansel Adams' attempts to render onto a photographic print what he "saw," the making of the image Monolith which was the successful product of that process. Once he understood what it was he did, he was able to refine the process and explain it... not only that, he felt he had found the way to producing photographic art which expressed his vision. He was 25, he had started photographing Yosemite about 10 years earlier. I find it interesting to go to an exhibit of Adams' work and be able to look at it closely, and get an idea of how much effort went into a small set of images over the years. You can see the changes and the experiments, the prints almost all seem unique. Like the performance that Adams often described, each performance captured in the print, each a "rehearsal" for the next.
The "crazy idea" model of the way things get done in science, in art, in almost anything side steps all the messy in between stuff that occupies the time to the next "crazy idea." There are many more "crazy ideas" that are not only crazy, but also unsuccessful. The largest utility of the notion that ideas are formed out of "individual inspiration" is to be able to assign credit, which is largely irrelevant in the long run.
In science, Crick and Watson published the first paper correctly describing the structure of DNA, but not the first paper on the subject. They depended on work that had gone on around them and before them. But we like our heroes. Had the idea truly come out of "nowhere" it would not have been accepted by the community. The process of understanding is a communal one, with all the participants intensely involved with working to understanding. It is not the work of a lone, inspired mind.
In art, one can trundle up to The Diving Board in spring and create their own image of Half Dome, armed with the knowledge of how Adams realized his vision. Your resulting image may even be more artful than the original. One can hang it on their wall and appreciate the beauty, recount the arduous process, and stimulate the sense of awe, and acknowledge Adams as inspiration. Of course, you wouldn't have "an Adams" print, but you probably have something better than just having bought a commodity, you'd have an Adams' vision.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 26, 2015 - 10:13am PT
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"I'm curious about how a meditator perceives "trance" in relation to meditative states. Are they the same? Do they differ by degree? Are they completely different?
To me they would appear to be the same, but I've been wrong before."
Trance /hypnosis is of course one more state of mind but in general it is looked upon with suspicion by the meditative world. In fact, in many schools of meditation, it is forbidden along with psychedelics and seances. The reason for this is that it renders a person out of control of the contents of their own mind whereas meditation aims to put a person more in control (albeit by letting go of the ego) than they've ever been before.
Trance as I understand it, is a letting go so that you will do things a hypnotist or shaman orders. A seance reportedly puts one in contact with the dead or other disembodied spirits who then control the person resulting in the need for an exorcism. Psychedelics, also cause one to lose control of one's mind. In our age however, many have gotten interested in meditation through psychedelics.
The first time I ever saw a shaman go into a trance or put someone into a trance and cure them, I recognized immediately that this was what my Christian Science grandmother was able to do to herself by repeating certain phrases over and over until she lost ordinary consciousness (though she just appeared to be lost in thought, sitting with eyes open). In this way she was able to prevent asthma and epileptic seizures while awake. In both cases the patient is assured that there is a benevolent presence acting on their behalf which is often able to change a person's thought patterns for their own benefit which of course is also the aim of meditation.
In terms of the evolution of religion, shamanism has been around for a very long time but in most places has been replaced by the great religions as we know them, which arose during the agricultural era. The shaman is thought to have a gift of communing with higher spirits or the dead whereas the priests of agricultural religions get their authority from being literate and able to read scriptures and ritual directions properly.
It therefore stands to reason that in an age of disillusionment with the agricultural religions, people would seek other forms and shamanism would make a come back. In many places, particularly Asia, they have peacefully co-existed through the millenia though the priestly religions have always looked down on the shamanistic ones. In the West, shamans were labeled witches and warlocks and their religions pagan and heathen, and exterminated until the current secularized society.
Anthropologists often label shamanistic and nature worshipping religions "little traditions" and the agricultural religions "big traditions" which is still a biased view. In Asia anyway, one prays to the place gods and nature spirits and visits a shaman for success in everyday activities, while the "big traditions" are used to benefit one's eternal life.
As with many aspects of the mental sphere, it is not easy to define or discern what is actually going on.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 26, 2015 - 10:33am PT
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I have to quite using that "knower" energy to post here. It's just a certain way of phrasing and tone and when it runs against the "Rational Mind" subpersonality that people are fused with on this list, it diverts attention away from the issue, and the Rational Mind jumps up to challenge the other "Knower." That's called a "bonding pattern," and when the rational Mind is underdog in this contest, it literally freaks out. It's been my way of rankling the inflated chest-beating of scientism, but it is ultimately just screwing around so I'm off it now.
Per this quote:
Science, like every effort of thought, consists in interpreting experience. It is a mistake to think that experiment is of any use for this purpose, because all human thought, including beliefs which appear completely absurd, is experimental and claims to be based on and confirmed by experience… All thought is an effort of interpretation of experience, and experience provides neither model nor rule nor criterion for the interpretation; it provides the data of problems but not a way of solving or even of formulating them. This effort requires, like all other efforts, to be oriented towards something; all human effort is oriented and when man is not going in any direction he remains motionless. He cannot do without values. For all theoretical study the name of value is truth. It is impossible, no doubt, for men of flesh and blood in this world to have any representation of truth which is not defective; but they must have one — an imperfect image of the non-representable truth which we once saw, as Plato says, beyond the sky.
---
The problem and glaring limitation to this it is based entirely on a "doing" model. That is, when it comes time to "solve or formulate" any ideas, concepts, and so on, our attention has to be "oriented towards something; all human effort is oriented and when man is not going in any direction he remains motionless."
This is half-true. Especially with the experiential realm, you have to stop calculating (thinking) and simply be with the experience for a good long time till you can even start to formulate what is there. That is, for extended periods of intense introspection, you have to NOT orient on some "thing" and just sit there observing. THEN, after getting a sense for the terrain, and getting feedback from many sources, you can start the discursive process of focusing on discrete "thing" and perceptual processes and formulating your thoughts.
If straight discursive wrangling was effective, who wouldn't do so? It's so much easier. Fact is, sitting and observing no-thing can involve torturous stretches of non-action which to a nutrino like myself - or like a shark, who feels he might perish if it stops moving - I would much rather just noodle the terrain. But it doesn't come clear that way, lest we'd all do it.
So yes, I do agree with much of what the woman said. But not the part about observing always needing an object to focus upon. As I have said many times, doing otherwise is very counterintuitive and till you have direct experiences otherwise, you are likely to have the same or similar concepts as those in the quote.
JL
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jun 26, 2015 - 10:39am PT
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Thank you Paul and Jan. I wonder what MikeL is getting into here? Maybe he will explain.
To set the record straight, I did meditate for several years during the late 1950s and early 1960s, before my first marriage, return to grad school, having a child, etc. I suppose the only "proof" is a comment Chouinard made somewhere in Master of Rock about me sitting in meditation before bouldering sessions. I found it calming, peaceful and relaxing, and although I never reached the point where "I" seems illusory, I reached a point where it didn't matter. Of course, I never got to the deep stages that JL describes.
Wier, in his 1995 book, Trance: from magic to technology, defines a simple trance (p. 58) as a state of mind being caused by cognitive loops where a cognitive object (thoughts, images, sounds, intentional actions) repeats long enough to result in various sets of disabled cognitive functions. Wier represents all trances (which include sleep and watching television) as taking place on a dissociated trance plane where at least some cognitive functions such as volition are disabled; as is seen in what is typically termed a 'hypnotic trance'.[2] With this definition, meditation, hypnosis, addictions and charisma are seen as being trance states. In Wier's 2007 book, The Way of Trance, he elaborates on these forms, adds ecstasy as an additional form and discusses the ethical implications of his model, including magic and government use which he terms "trance abuse" (Wiki)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 26, 2015 - 11:08am PT
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I have not read Mind as Machine. I got dizzy just going through the contents pages.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=nQMPIGd4baQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=margaret+a+boden&hl=en&sa=X&ei=btSMVYb6Bszv-QGv57SYAw&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=margaret%20a%20boden&f=false
I did read some excerpts which deal with the history and current state of thought on Grandmother cells. It is fascinating to see how a concept evolves. I will see if I can learn enough and condense it to say something here.
As for consciousness, William James at least has a view that is easy to condense. As I understand it, psychology was paying attention to brain science in his day, and there was a school of thought which saw the brain organized as a hierarchy in which many lower level neurons feed information to fewer higher level neurons. James took the hierarchy to its logical conclusion: one neuron which receives all information and makes all decisions. This neuron he called the pontifical cell. At first I thought he meant the part of the brain that generates categorical proclamations without supporting evidence, as shown by certain posters on this thread. However, it turns out that James was comparing the brain to the Catholic Church.
James took his line of thought to what he considered the most tenable conclusion: the soul. He was curious about how the soul connects with the pontifical cell but admitted that this was beyond his reach. His speculations sound familiar; something about an all-pervasive soul ether which can influence the mind.
At any rate, it would surely simplify the question if we could localize free will and consciousness to a single cell in your brain, and then blame it.
In the same travels I came across another interesting factoid. About 2,000 years ago the Roman physician and philosopher Galen of Pergamon made an important contribution to our understanding of the nervous system. He treated wounds acquired in battle or in staged contests and noticed that cuts to nerves sometimes caused a loss of sensation only, and at other times a loss of movement only. From this he guessed that some nerves carried sensations to the brain while others brought motor commands from the brain to the muscle.
The attempt to localize nervous system functions continues.
Also of interest: Galen's father was preparing young Galen for a conventional life of philosophy and politics when the father had a dream in which the god Asclepius commanded him to have his son learn medicine.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jun 26, 2015 - 12:48pm PT
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jgill: I'm curious about how a meditator perceives "trance" in relation to meditative states. Are they the same? Do they differ by degree? Are they completely different?
I don’t meditate; I contemplate. The difference is that there is no object. . . . I Just sit in awareness, and within all that shows up.
The idea that trance is somehow a diminishment of awareness or volition is perhaps now a dated idea among some folks. Your choice of a section from Wiki is singular. Currently according to a few people, trance happens in various ways all the time. Whenever one is focused on one thing to the exclusion others, I’d say that is indicative of a kind of trance.
Here is a short list of trance-like states by my personal experiences: listening closely to anything; charisma; anything repetitive; catharsis; improvisation; wu wei; attraction or aversion; a kiss; experiencing a passion; sexual copulations; television watching; dancing; being intimate with another; rallies; driving; crowd or mob actions; being psychologically present (cognitively, physically, and emotionally); being fully “engaged” in anything; being lost in thought; flow; postprandial depression; the felt effects of any drug; doing anything automatically; entrainments of all sorts; anything that looks like a result of hot cognition; an argument; being “in tune” with another in a conversation; . . . .
What my investigation is bringing up for me is the following: “What Is Normal Consciousness?”
Is normal cognition or normal consciousness only what’s referred to as “cold cognition?”
Ed: [Mike’s} working model not informed by the actual history of many of the ideas set up as an example... and he perpetrates many long standing myths regarding how science is done. And not having done any of it himself, he is at some loss as to how it could possibly be done.
You ascribe to me many things you don’t know. (It’s what you do.) You also appear to ascribe an extremely high level of mental-rational conceptualization to discovery processes, IMO.
MH2:
Try this book instead to read where cognitive science got to theoretically (right up to new notions of grounded or embodied cognition): “The Big Book of Concepts” (Murphy, 2004).
After so very many years of detailed, empirical, and thousands of research studies, . . . they just don’t really know what cognition is, much less consciousness
But, of course, they have theories.
You can be a part of the field by investigating your own cognitive processes up close and personal.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 26, 2015 - 02:24pm PT
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The key IMO is what Mike just said: call it what you want, but if your adventures are focued on objects, most of what we are saying will never get through. While Rupert Spira is not exactly on my wavelength, he has been very lucid on basic tennets of the no-object, no-mind adventures:
No-mind meditation – or the experiential adventures as I have called them here – are NOT activities or tasks that are sought, accomplished, or done by the discursive mind. Experiential exploration is simply the direct experience of being with awareness. To BE awareness is not an outcome that needs to be, or can be, DONE by the mind. To know ourselves AS awareness (or sentience) does not depend on what the mind is doing or not doing.
The essential discovery of all the great experiential adventures “is that experience is not divided into a perceiving subject, an entity known as ‘I,’ and a perceived object, world or other. If we look for the essential ingredient in every experience of the mind, body and world, we find consciousness or awareness, a knowing presence that we intimately and directly know as our own being, and that is experienced simply as ‘I am.’”
That is the starting point. The first belay. But nobody thieves their way past it and makes much progress.
JL
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 26, 2015 - 03:22pm PT
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One of the big problems as jstan points out is that we have no unified vocabulary or set of definitions. What MikeL is calling contemplation and meditation, I would label exactly the reverse.
As for trances, they represent a spectrum like most everything else, but the definition of trances as making your mind open to control by someone or something else (television etc) still seems appropriate to me.
I once was almost hypnotized by a Navy psychologist who did hypnosis as part of this various therapies (it worked particularly well to help people stop smoking). He claims he wasn't trying to hypnotize me but I've never been sure. I was however hungry, dehydrated and sleep deprived so in a weakened state. He had very hypnotic eyes and voice and at one point I felt my consciousness slip out of my head and I could see it like a cloud, emerging from my stomach (this in perfect keeping with yogic theory about trance and astral worlds). Meanwhile, it took all my willpower to suck it back up into my head. After that I ate and drank a lot of liquid and then I was "normal" again. I'm way to much of a control freak to give anyone that kind of power.
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jstan
climber
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Jun 26, 2015 - 03:32pm PT
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That is the starting point. The first belay. But nobody thieves their way past it and makes
much progress.
Here we find a totally unnecessary negative. "Thieves". It is an expression of the
superiority the writer assumes he possesses. Very revealing. The following would do just as well.
Edit:
Better actually. The OP was just an unsubstantiated personal opinion. What I suggested is a statement of fact. Presumably it is the data.
I haven't found any way to avoid this that allows progress.
Indeed according to Occam's Razor if you posit an agent or some other assumption that is
later shown to be unnecessary, you have egg on your face. You missed something.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 26, 2015 - 03:38pm PT
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are NOT activities or tasks that are sought, accomplished, or done by the discursive mind.
perhaps they are only done by discursive minds... you certainly possess one, and I suspect everyone who engages in those activities does to (though that might be a wild speculation).
You meant something else in that statement.
But even what I think you meant is fraught with your own particular point of view... which is a least part of your point. But once again, aside from asserting that "experience" cannot be "objectified," you haven't actually offered anything up but to harangue us to find that "experience" ourselves, which many have done.
Points-of-view are an entirely interesting idea, and part of it has to do with the calculation of how to move, to control the body to get from point A to point B, whether or not this is a discursive exercise, it involves the coordination of a number of processes of over which presides the central nervous system, the executor. The calculation requires some model of space and time, of how the actions will result in the intended affect. And they are executed by a large number of animals.
We can elaborate the notion of "POV" but it is important for a large number of behaviors that have little to do with you philosophical arguments.
Experience is communicated from one human to another, as it is from animal to animal, to varying degrees, from a mother teaching a child (species independent) to the workings of social groups.
How does that happen in your view? it sounds like you're arguing that it cannot happen.
One doesn't have to roll up on the shoals at sea because of statements like "the map is not the terrain!" The map communicates many important and useful bits of information, based on the experience of others (or perhaps even a prediction, where experience is abstract). You don't have to experience a shipwreck on those shoals yourself to understand what the map is telling you.
The argument that the "subjective experience" is central to understanding consciousness/mind/sentience/... may be entirely misguided. While it is a difficult one to answer, it might be answered at some point, and it might not turn out to be a central issue, but a peripheral consequence.
It has become a central debating point precisely because it has not good explanation, not because it has been determined that that is the most important aspect of the phenomenon currently understudy.
Can you offer anything to elaborate your view (and I do practice meditation, so that avenue isn't going to be very productive for me, but even your meditation experiences as you have expressed them here seem rather unique to you).
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