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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 14, 2018 - 08:03am PT
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I'm still pondering pregeometry.
interesting that you are... my posts above about the origin of our perception of 3D environments, and the neurophysiological source of our ability to navigate in 3D, and make inferences, might get in the way of our ability to imagine a metricless "geometry"
however, my recent thoughts are about the actual algorithm the brain uses to create 3D, which is essentially without metric, which is imposed after the map is created and adapts with experience.
maybe the biological solution to describing 3D is a clue to "pregeometry" ?
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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May 14, 2018 - 08:17am PT
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As a side note, I like 3D movies but they never seem as natural as what the human eye is seeing!
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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May 14, 2018 - 09:44am PT
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however, my recent thoughts are about the actual algorithm the brain uses to create 3D, which is essentially without metric, which is imposed after the map is created and adapts with experience.
What I've always found fascinating is the remarkable ability of the human eye and mind to perceive so easily the illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface. Who watches a movie with the constant thought that what they're really seeing is color moving around on a 2D surface? Depth is something incredibly easy to assume. It seems eyesight itself is based on the illusion of diminishing size. interesting to consider.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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May 14, 2018 - 04:02pm PT
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ACIM Lesson 190
I choose the joy of God instead of pain.
Pain is a wrong perspective. When it is experienced in any form, it is a proof of self-deception. It is not a fact at all. There is no form it takes that will not disappear if seen aright. For pain proclaims God cruel. How could it be real in any form? It witnesses to God the Father's hatred of His Son, the sinfulness He sees in him, and His insane desire for revenge and death.
Can such projections be attested to? Can they be anything but wholly false? Pain is but witness to the Son's mistakes in what he thinks he is. It is a dream of fierce retaliation for a crime that could not be committed; for attack on what is wholly unassailable. It is a nightmare of abandonment by an Eternal Love, which could not leave the Son whom It created out of love.
Pain is a sign illusions reign in place of truth. It demonstrates God is denied, confused with fear, perceived as mad, and seen as traitor to Himself. If God is real, there is no pain. If pain is real, there is no God. For vengeance is not part of love. And fear, denying love and using pain to prove that God is dead, has shown that death is victor over life. The body is the Son of God, corruptible in death, as mortal as the Father he has slain.
Peace to such foolishness! The time has come to laugh at such insane ideas. There is no need to think of them as savage crimes, or secret sins with weighty consequence. Who but a madman could conceive of them as cause of anything? Their witness, pain, is mad as they, and no more to be feared than the insane illusions which it shields, and tries to demonstrate must still be true.
It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness.
My holy brother, think of this awhile: The world you see does nothing. It has no effects at all. It merely represents your thoughts. And it will change entirely as you elect to change your mind, and choose the joy of God as what you really want. Your Self is radiant in this holy joy, unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable, forever and forever. And would you deny a little corner of your mind its own inheritance, and keep it as a hospital for pain; a sickly place where living things must come at last to die?
The world may seem to cause you pain. And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect, it cannot make effects. As an illusion, it is what you wish. Your idle wishes represent its pains. Your strange desires bring it evil dreams. Your thoughts of death envelop it in fear, while in your kind forgiveness does it live.
Pain is the thought of evil taking form, and working havoc in your holy mind. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free. In pain is God denied the Son He loves. In pain does fear appear to triumph over love, and time replace eternity and Heaven. And the world becomes a cruel and a bitter place, where sorrow rules and little joys give way before the onslaught of the savage pain that waits to end all joy in misery.
Lay down your arms, and come without defense into the quiet place where Heaven's peace holds all things still at last. Lay down all thoughts of danger and of fear. Let no attack enter with you. Lay down the cruel sword of judgment that you hold against your throat, and put aside the withering assaults with which you seek to hide your holiness.
Here will you understand there is no pain. Here does the joy of God belong to you. This is the day when it is given you to realize the lesson that contains all of salvation's power. It is this: Pain is illusion; joy, reality. Pain is but sleep; joy is awakening. Pain is deception; joy alone is truth.
And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made; we choose between illusions and the truth, or pain and joy, or hell and Heaven. Let our gratitude unto our Teacher fill our hearts, as we are free to choose our joy instead of pain, our holiness in place of sin, the peace of God instead of conflict, and the light of Heaven for the darkness of the world.
...It's all about perspective!
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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May 14, 2018 - 07:14pm PT
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Biologists 'transfer' a memory
Man, Honnold's gonna be a billionaire once this sh#t launches - I want in on the IPO for sure.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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May 14, 2018 - 08:00pm PT
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I know this will seem improbable but I was a complete rationalist and an atheistically leaning agnostic until I took psychedelics. Suddenly I realized there was much more to my brain and the world than logic. Then I lived with Tibetan Buddhists in the Himalayas .....
What I like about the theory of karma is that it places responsibility on us, not on God. Humans screwed up paradise and still are.
The answer to the the idea that "Form is emptiness and emptiness is form may be a terminal experience" is that it shouldn't be. The final step in most traditions is to come back to the mundane world and living without ego, have a heart for others and selfless service. It's true we read a lot about physics and cosmology on this thread, but very little about heart. It might be worthwhile to ponder why.
The Buddhist say it takes both wisdom and compassion. The Apostle Paul said faith without works is dead.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 14, 2018 - 08:13pm PT
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why assume that physics and physical cosmology (and science in general) is without heart?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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May 14, 2018 - 09:32pm PT
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Depth is something incredibly easy to assume. It seems eyesight itself is based on the illusion of diminishing size. Interesting to consider.
This is only true in societies that are used to looking at things in two dimensions. UNICEF did an interesting experiment in the 1970's in Nepal showing various types of drawings to villagers. The idea was that illiterates could learn about things from pictures posted at tea shops.
One surprising finding was that simple line drawings and silhouettes were the easiest for them to comprehend and photographs the most difficult. Not one person out of hundreds knew what an arrow meant so in a three picture sequence they looked at the center first and then either the right or left picture followed by the third, and completely missed the point.
A circular sequence with arrows also confused them as they thought people and animals were standing on top of each other since they had no clue about the arrows. A sample family planning poster was also misunderstood. A woman and daughter were in the foreground and a man and son behind them on a path. Drawn to perspective, the villager's conclusion was that birth control made the wife grow larger than the husband so who would want that?
Final conclusion? A person learns how to understand drawings and photographs and perspective in two dimensions. It isn't natural to those who have never seen books or posters before. The villagers could learn quickly however, if the illustrations were explained to them by a live person
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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May 14, 2018 - 09:34pm PT
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I write very little about heart on this thread because nobody seems interested and it gets labeled woo.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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May 14, 2018 - 09:43pm PT
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The final step in most traditions is to come back to the mundane world and living without ego . . .
And that is truly admirable. But I'm not sure what that has to do with the central question of mind. Empty awareness seems some distance from compassion, although impermanence of "I" is much closer. Is impermanence of "I" a corollary of empty awareness?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 14, 2018 - 09:51pm PT
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Humans screwed up paradise and still are.
I think this is a false dichotomy, that we can divide the 4.1 billion year history of life on planet Earth into 4.095 billion years of "paradise" and 0.005 billion years of human's screwing it up.
Humans are doing just exactly what all life does, exploiting the environment's resources for their own benefit.
The consequences of this exploitation, left to its natural course, is the same whether or not humans are the exploiters. Ecosystems can only be exploited so much, once the limits are reacted the populations exploiting them crash.
The dynamic balance of these systems is a part of "paradise," but it might not be what we conceive paradise to be. The limits are simply those set by rudimentary principles recognized by the sciences, and those principles may seem "heartless," but in my mind it is more heartless to hold out hope for a good outcome than confront the actual situation, as human as that tendency is.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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May 14, 2018 - 10:31pm PT
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Anyone see Netflix "The Titan", A military family takes part in a ground-breaking experiment of genetic evolution and space exploration.
As the ozone layer changes and the environment becomes more hostile to human life and evolution sooo slow, genetic evolution experiments will be needed to stay here?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 14, 2018 - 10:38pm PT
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ask the dinosaurs about rapidly changing environments... 170 million years is not a bad run, beginning and ending with large extinction events, and there are the birds that made it... our modern example of dinosaur cousins.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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May 14, 2018 - 11:23pm PT
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"Humans screwed up paradise and still are."
I wasn't referring to a scientific explanation of life on earth but rather to the philosophical question of why there is suffering in human life. Western thought tends to equate it with the necessity of free will and the east with karma, what we have done to ourselves.
Personally, it seems a contradiction to me to claim that science has heart and then describe life on earth including human life as "Humans are doing just exactly what all life does, exploiting the environment's resources for their own benefit." I'm not denying that many do that, but there are others who have a different motivation. Human beings are multi-faceted.
As for loss of ego being a corollary of emptiness, it is supposed to be, but as with any stage on the path, can become distorted. Usually this is known as quietism.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 15, 2018 - 12:42am PT
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Personally, it seems a contradiction to me to claim that science has heart and then describe life on earth including human life as "Humans are doing just exactly what all life does, exploiting the environment's resources for their own benefit." I'm not denying that many do that, but there are others who have a different motivation. Human beings are multi-faceted.
then I guess I don't know what you refer to as "heart"
certainly the practice of science can open you up to a much greater compassion for life than philosophy, and a deeper understanding of the connection of all life, and an astonishing perspective of life in the universe.
human beings are not alone in their multi-facetedness as any familiarity with nature and natural history would reveal.
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WBraun
climber
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May 15, 2018 - 07:12am PT
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The heart is the seat of the individual living entity in its material body as the driver.
All the parts of the material body are the components that are manipulated from the heart.
The living entity is within the heart as the spiritual soul "atma"
In plant life, for example, the living entity as spiritual soul "atma" is in the root of the plant.
The gross materialist scientists have missed the single most important piece and that is the soul "atma" the living entity itself.
This is why Darwin completely botched his whole understanding of life and mislead himself and the entire western world ......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 15, 2018 - 07:19am PT
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the ability of life to exploit non-equilibrium processes to maintain itself still has many interesting puzzles to resolve.
there is no doubt that this can be seen as a mystery, and as a part of human intellectual development, lacking a deeper understanding, ascribe it to something that is not physical.
yet a more refined understanding of life reinforces the idea that we share a heritage of life over most of the time Earth has existed. Darwin didn't get that wrong, and he got much right.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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May 15, 2018 - 09:08am PT
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Jan: The Buddhist say it takes both wisdom and compassion. The Apostle Paul said faith without works is dead.
I’d say these are different notions. Wisdom is Bodhichitta in another form. Wisdom is an understanding of the emptiness or the lack of substantiality and the openness of “things,” whereas Bodhichitta is the feeling that one experiences of emptiness. ("Compassion" is a very loose Western idea.) When a person brings his hands together in prayer, it symbolizes the unity / the connection of the two.
If one sees how and what things are, there is no need for faith.
Any selfish action generates karma because it leaves an imprint (because one did not let the feelings to pass through one completely). Any selfless (no self) action is an expression of the Tao, and of that, there can be no individual ownership.
Distinctions about others, service, the mundane world, etc. are vikalpas—what Werner might call mental speculations or projections. There’s nothing wrong with vikalpas (interpretations) as long as one doesn’t take them too seriously or concretely. Like emotions, they are energy forms, forever shifting and changing. Impermanence that gives no real ground underneath our feet.
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