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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 26, 2015 - 04:28pm PT
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John S. Your assumption is that we are all doing this stuff on the fly, that there is no protocol or real knowledge gained, and any insight per this stuff is all my own, all things being equal. In fact all things are not equal, any more than I was initially the scholastic equal of the teachers I had in grad school or the Yosemite locals I first climbed with in Yosemite. There are universals involved.
The collective experience of people long associated with the experiential adventures is going to mean nothing to those outside that sphere, because you don't have the collected experiences that wrought the rules of thumb I mentioned, any more than a novice climber is going to understand what is actually involved in climbing El Capitan. To the outsider, the rules of thumb are not objective truths, rather beliefs and opinions based on personal evaluations. None of this is true.
Don't take my word for it, read around. Or shut up and stop calculating and tell us what you find.
Rupert Spira said (I was quoting Spira so those are not my words): no-mind meditation is NOT a task or activity that is DONE by the discursive mind.
Ed said: 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.
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Actually Ed, Spira meant EXACTLY what he said in that statement. You're just not understanding it. Did that ever occur to you, that a bright, intelligent person who has spent 35 years on this material actually knows something lost on those not centered on the work, and which they can just as easily - and probably more accurately - arrive at discursively? Lord.
You apparently are arguing that no-mind meditation (NOT focused on an object - which is a requirement of the discursive mind) - is "only" done by the discursive mind (you did add "perhaps."). This is not remotely true though it is a common misconception till you know better through experience.
The only "wild speculation" here is the wonky notion that A), Spira doesn't know what Ed knows about no-mind meditation (that it really is a discursive task), and B), no-mind meditation is in fact a focused task of the discursive mind.
Rather than go on and on - let's just cut to the quick here.
Ed, do you have any idea what alert, no-mind meditation is? And when Spira described it as "being present with our awareness," what direct experience have you had of this that makes you jump up and down that such an experience HAS to be a task.
Put differently, is it possible for you to imagine a state of alert awareness that is not tasking or trying to achieve a point of view, and is NOT connected to behavior in any way shape or form.
JL
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Jun 26, 2015 - 04:46pm PT
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JL said"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. and "That is the starting point. The first belay. But nobody thieves their way past it and makes much progress."
Well said JL. It has fascinated me for a quite while; most people who first come to the zen center come because they what something to help them with their lives . They are used to dealing with things like a self help program; like what Moose was talking about earlier, for their health. Little do they know that trying to satisfy the self is what causes the suffering.
But if you tell them right away that treating meditation as a self help tool has limited value they have a hard time perceiving this because every thing is oriented to what can I do for me. It doesn't make sense from the I , Me, My perspective because it can't be perceived.
Zen Master Seung Sahn used to lie to them; they would tell him how lonely they were and he would tell them if they practiced very hard for three months (do 500 bows a day and come to the zen center every morning) they would get a boyfriend or girlfriend. I think he trusted that the process of just doing the practice rigorously would help the practitioner to let go of the I , me my view.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 26, 2015 - 04:53pm PT
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Bottom line ....
The modern gross materialists have no clue.
They are prisoners of their own minds.
The intelligent class are in control of their minds.
The gross materialists are not as they have no clue whom to sync their minds to.
Thus the gross materialists wander endlessly in every direction like a chicken without a head ......
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 26, 2015 - 06:37pm PT
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The collective experience of people long associated with the experiential adventures is going to mean nothing to those outside that sphere (JL)
I get a little confused when you use the expression experiential adventures, for on the one hand we have climbing which certainly fits the rubric, but which also involves considerable "discursive" thought; then you speak of no-mind awareness which I will admit probably involves very little or no actual thinking. Isn't this too broad a spectrum for the expression?
Create new descriptors that are more focused.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 26, 2015 - 06:56pm PT
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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.’”
William James may have got it right. A single brain cell could be a knowing presence that intimately and directly knows its own being, experiencing it simply as 'I am.'
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 26, 2015 - 07:02pm PT
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Thank you for the book suggestion, Mike. I will try to see what it has to say. I usually only take real interest in small questions like, "How does a dragonfly intercept a mosquito?" Big questions are out of my league.
However
You can be a part of the field by investigating your own cognitive processes up close and personal.
In that case I may be not just a part of the field but a leader in it.
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jstan
climber
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Jun 26, 2015 - 10:35pm PT
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A single brain cell could be a knowing presence that intimately and directly knows its own being, experiencing it simply as 'I am.' MH2
OK. How might this be done? If the cell acts only as a passive receiver of action potentials I don't offhand see how a decision that it "exists" could be made. How is it to know what existence means?
On the other hand were it programmed with two different messages for pinging the outside world and the different messages yielded two different replies, then the cell could infer that it existed in an environment, and it could actually affect that environment. Clearly this is anthropocentric as this is the way we determine whether we exist. Some even post on ST for such reasons. So I don't imagine this is the way a cell would work to achieve knowledge of existence. Following Dennett's suggestion in the link JL provided I don't see why cells need to "know they exist". If they could do anything to promote their continued existence then there might be Darwinian reasons for them to develop this power. You are accomplished in the field. Can a single cell do anything to promote its survival?
Is it not a passive system component that provides outputs when its inputs are appropriate? If so we don't need to assume any higher power to get the function we observe.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 26, 2015 - 11:25pm PT
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You apparently are arguing that no-mind meditation (NOT focused on an object - which is a requirement of the discursive mind) - is "only" done by the discursive mind (you did add "perhaps.").
no, you might read what I wrote a bit more carefully, and try to not jump to conclusions.
what I wrote was that minds that are "discursive" also meditate...
certainly you learn not only from doing, but from the instructions of your teacher, a decidedly discursive process. you also describe to your teacher, or at least compare your experience with what you think your teacher is describing.
If I listen to Spira, I compare my experience with his... actually, since our experiences are similar, I am trying to understand his interpretation of the experience, also compared with mine. This takes place by way of language, and involves the discursive mind.
The entire thread is discursive... an exercise in communication and miscommunication... taking place through language, written, spoken, etc...
It is true that when I meditate, the usual behavior of discursive thinking is not a part of it, there are no explicit narratives, no "executive tasking" and a body-centered observational point of view. I presume that everyone finds a way to get to that "state." But I think you are confused to mistake it as "NOT connected to behavior in any way shape or form."
But as usual, I probably misunderstood some point you were trying to make.
As for Spira, I found his synthesis of all this old stuff to be rather uninspiring. It is not only not "new" but not "science", so it is a bit of a joke to call it "the new science of consciousness" when it is actually just all of those "old time religions" wound up together.
But that's just me... I've only spent my past 45 years or so, doing science... for which you become exasperated in my apparent "lack of perspective." I guess Spira has only spent 35 years doing something... so he has that proportion more perspective...
and what do you mean by using the word "discursive"
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/discursive
adjective
1. passing aimlessly from one subject to another; digressive; rambling.
2. proceeding by reasoning or argument rather than intuition.
interestingly, when I am hard a work on some problem, my mind is not passing aimlessly, but is focussed... perhaps hyper-focussed on the task at hand, but not in a rote manner... since that sort of work usually has no prescriptive solution.
and in some ways one is open to intuition in exploring the solutions to the problems...
so while my mind is "working" it is not "discursive" by the definition in either sense.
Maybe you have a better definition...
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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Jun 27, 2015 - 05:39am PT
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'Roll Roll, Crystal Ball'
The things that go 'round in my head,
As I toss and turn in motel bed,
The news and happenings out there,
Which catch us sleeping unaware,
Going quickly through them in my mind,
Are past experiences left behind,
Of things that happened with who and when,
What will transpire and where I've been,
Roll roll the hours go by,
My thoughts are stalled I know not why,
If I could read a crystal ball,
Would it not change things for us all?
Not knowing what the future holds,
Which choices change what life unfolds,
While fortune molds our destiny,
The time is catching up with me,
And thoughts that swirl and draw on me,
On what I'll do and where I'll be,
Like all our thoughts now here today,
They ebb and flow and wash away,
What matters it the things we think?
The parts we play all interlink,
All our best thoughts will have their run,
When time is past and day is done,
So bring along the brightening dawn,
It's turning to the page were on,
I'll sigh and breathe the morning air,
What's done is done but now I'm here.
-bushman
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 27, 2015 - 08:40am PT
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jstan asks how
A single brain cell could be a knowing presence that intimately and directly knows its own being, experiencing it simply as 'I am.'
I am not sure this will help, but this is what JL had to say. I have replaced the word 'mind' with the word 'cell.'
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 cell. To know ourselves AS awareness (or sentience) does not depend on what the cell is doing or not doing.
I may need to find an audience more capable of stretching words to cover mental furniture. Or go back to William James:
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.
In my neuroscience days it was convenient to think of neurons as units that summed their inputs and then fired off an action potential when a threshold was crossed. On closer look neurons are complicated and dynamic structures with many different types of membrane channels opened or closed by chemical or electrical activators. Different regions of a neuron's cell membrane can have different properties and responses to stimulation. One part of the membrane can activate spontaneously and influence other parts of the membrane. Neurons should be at least as capable of exhibiting C as your garden variety ameba.
Unlike amebas, our neurons and the rest of our cells long ago became a collective entity. How that might relate to C is not clear to me. Perhaps neurons have regressed from the ameboid level of C as multicellular organisms have achieved new levels.
It may appear that William James takes us back toward the ameba with his pontifical cell, but remember that the pontifical cell receives information from all the other 10 billion neurons. What does the pontifical cell do with that information, other than wear the mantle of consciousness? I have not yet found out how the pontifical cell directs its minions to make toast and tea and pay taxes, if it bothers to do so.
An Everest of metaphysics:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/principles/chapter6.html
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jstan
climber
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Jun 27, 2015 - 09:06am PT
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Thanks Andy.
So if as you say the cell can act as a complex filter between its inputs and its outputs, we can have Darwinian evolution of the cell function but acting only through life/death of the whole organism. The cell can act as a complex filter between inputs and outputs but absent feedbacks the potential for learning and development of higher functions within the cell are limited. If there are feedback modes, on the other hand the cell can sample various filter processes with the constraint that any of them jeopardizing organism survival will be selected against. That said there presumably are a variety in the processes that do not jeopardize organism survival. With feedback the cell may select among those looking for the processes that also enhance the probability of organism survival. But of course it does that anyway. The force driving the cells acquiring higher powers does not seem to be there, almost by definition.
Maybe I am not clear. It is early yet and my cells may be dividing.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jun 27, 2015 - 09:30am PT
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Ed: . . . perhaps they are only done by discursive minds... you certainly possess one, . . . . How does [experience communicated to one another] happen in your view? it sounds like you're arguing that it cannot happen.
“You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.” (Pema Chodron)
"Your view should be as high and vast as the sky. Pure awareness, once it manifests within the mind`s empty nature, can no longer be obscured by the negative emotions, which become its ornaments instead. The changeless state of the realization of the view is not something that comes into existence, remains or ceases; within it, awareness observes the movement of thoughts like a serene old man watching children at play. Confused thoughts cannot affect pure awareness any more than a sword can pierce the sky." (Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche)
The point of sitting or meditation / contemplation is not learning dogma, but to learn about oneself.
“‘What do you seek?’ Hui-k’o replied: ‘Peace of mind.’ ‘Show me your mind, and I’ll pacify it,’ answered Bodhidharma.”
There is no mind. This is what a sincere practice begins to show.
I can understand Ed’s, Jstan’s, Jgills’s (and others’) complaints and concerns about proving one thing to another, or issues of validation or verification. But as Werner continually points out, those views / requirements are a bit narrow.
My readings, personal and professional experiences, and training from different disciplines initially impressed me with the power and pervasiveness of social and psychological construction in many forms (in finance, in accounting, in the development of industries, in organizational behaviors, in scientific knowledge, in philosophy, in cognitive science). I began leaving the academic reservation even before I finished my coursework and qualifying exams (much to the chagrin of some of my advisors). I began to ask “why” and “how” a lot in the academic presentations of my peers. I backed into post-modern criticisms because of what I was reading and due to resonance with buddhist thought, my experiences in entrepreneurial adventures, practical understanding of leadership and followership, as a reviewer of academic journal submissions, frank conversations with academic colleagues in the UK over many beers, and deep disillusionment that arose from my war experiences. In the end, nothing was quite what it seemed. Discipline helped to clarify that I really knew nothing but one thing. The rest was, as Pema Chodron wrote, just weather. Me included.
IF (big word, that) anyone wants to know what’s what, there is nothing anyone else can do to make that happen for them. It’s all up to the person / being / individual (sic). The only teacher that really matters is the teacher in you. There appears to be no way to communicate anything fully to any other being. Direct apprehension (whether it be about differential equations or a belief that 1+1=2) happens when it happens. There is no proof of anything (other than I AM) that anyone can “force” upon anyone else (as DMT so forcefully shows us time and time again). In the end, whether a conversation be about the existence of photons, the values of politics, what is mind, or spiritual liberation, it would seem that every belief is personal.
As PSP reminds us, once one lets go of “personal,” then beliefs no longer show up.
There appears to be no proof to any thing. It seems there is no mind at all (really).
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 27, 2015 - 09:41am PT
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I didn't engage in this discussion to prove anything... reread the OP.
Taken as a personal statement by Largo, and leaving it sit as on obvious troll may have been the best course of action. You can think anything you want...
'The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."'
Ron Suskind, October 17, 2004 NYTimes Magazine
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jun 27, 2015 - 11:34am PT
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The only teacher that really matters is the teacher in you. There appears to be no way to communicate anything fully to any other being. Direct apprehension (whether it be about differential equations or a belief that 1+1=2) happens when it happens (MikeL)
I certainly agree with this. Feynmann once said (as nearly as I recall) he had to work everything out in his own mind before it became clear, rather than simply understanding what others were explaining. Apart from the chasm of intellectual ability between myself and Feynmann, he and I have (had) this shared experience of "creating" in our own minds the results of others. Many other mathematicians might agree. A famous mathematician once said that you have to "read" math with paper and pencil in hand.
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STEEVEE
Social climber
HUMBOLDT, CA
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Jun 27, 2015 - 12:38pm PT
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Ed, when I originally read the quote you shared, I thought it was Hitler. I read the complete article and I found it very provacative.
Humans are easily distracted and like to follow pretty lights. I believe the human consciousness, collectively , can be one of the most destructive or contructive forces on earth.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jun 28, 2015 - 10:06am PT
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About trance . . .
As I said above, since I started reading-up on trance, I’ve been wondering “what is trance”—and “what is not?”
In early morning, I sit looking through our tall windows in a high rise home in downtown Seattle. I look out onto maybe a few hundred or a thousand windows over a 3-4 block distance, about two pitches up in the air. In what might be described as a state of tranquility, I will notice any window movement among the 100s. It appears that no movement escapes visual notice in that state.
But if a thought arises—especially one that lingers or turns into a sequence of on-running thoughts (because I get hooked for some reason)—then I observe less visually. Sometimes what I see are the images created by my thoughts rather than those of my eyes.
So, when am I “in a trance?” When I’m in a state of tranquility, or am I in a trance when I’m thinking?
(I have also noticed sometimes while driving a route I am familiar with that I get involved with a thought of feeling to such an extent that I become completely unaware that I am driving at all. When I come back to the driving, I become aware that “I” was someplace else. It’s disconcerting and dangerous.)
Again: what is “normal consciousness” or “normal awareness?”
In some Tibetan and Bon traditions, dark meditation sessions suggests just how much reality is a projection. If you can find a place that has no light at all (cannot see your hand in front of your face after 10 minutes), be still with your eyes open and see what shows up over a 30-60 minute period of time. Hallucinations are not unusual. For me it would occasionally get so bright that I felt the need to close my eyes (which of course wouldn’t help at all). More significantly, try it for a few days. Coming back into the light can encourage one to see everything as if it were a dream or a projection. It’s as if seeing is seen pristinely for the first time. Seeing light can “unbelievable.”
In some forums in cognitive science we would refer to different physical sensations as “modalities.” Our problem for some of us working in cognition was how different modalities were translated from one to another, especially into conceptualizations (“transductions”). Lakoff and Johnson (and others) attempted to solve that problem by arguing that embodied cognition (the need for a body, cognitively) gave rise to modal translations via metaphors. (For example: why is it that we “think-up” ideas rather than “think-down” ideas?)
All sensation appears to be “feelings,” to include thinking. A touch, a vision, a taste, etc., even a thought, all seem to provide different textures that have infinite ranges of values. These textures cannot be pinned down; we can’t seem to say what they are at their bottoms. Even concepts are feelings. The book in cognitive science that I pointed MH2 to above summarizes decades of empirical and theoretical studies about what constitutes concepts . . . to no final conclusions. There are many different theoretical views of concepts, but there appears to be none that explains or finally defines what concepts are (features, categorizations, exemplars, processes). I think this is also where both Polyani and Wittgenstein got to on the subject. Cognitive science has tended to focus on knowledge representations in this regard, but it seems to have even much less to say on how the operations of knowledge representations are dynamically employed to develop the kind of experience one would call “thinking.” A fascinating field of study, but really a mess.
If we can’t even say what concepts are (specifically, you know . . . a concept of concepts), how are we ever going to say what consciousness is?
At least we can say that “consciousness is,” and maybe try just sitting in it.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 28, 2015 - 11:00am PT
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I have also noticed sometimes while driving a route I am familiar with that I get involved with a thought of feeling to such an extent that I become completely unaware that I am driving at all. When I come back to the driving, I become aware that “I” was someplace else. It’s disconcerting and dangerous.
Disconcerting, yes,
but dangerous? I presume, by your parenthetical comment, that you fully subscribe to the idea that you cannot safely operate a motor vehicle without the executive, discursive, mind being "in control."
That is, because you cannot construct a narrative of your journey at the end of it, you presume you somehow "just got through" the journey, miraculously unscathed.
Very interesting comment.
What do you base your estimations of risk on? Your explicit analytic evaluation of the situation?
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jstan
climber
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Jun 28, 2015 - 11:10am PT
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Alternatively - short term memory problems? Not likely in a youngster but there are gradations. Following a potentially mortal incident loss of memory is often encountered. There could be less dangerous modes in which memory formation is blocked.
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