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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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The aspect of the meditative mind that's never talked about on this thread, mainly I think because it's dominated by men , and is an open and sometimes hostile forum, are the emotional aspects dealt with before arriving at emptiness. I love the saying "Easy weight loss through karma shedding".
I can guarantee you that anyone who's meditated over the years, has gone through a lot of emotional introspection, some verbal, a lot of it symbolic, a lot of it unconscious material that took a lot of effort to bring to the surface. They also went through practices to enlarge their perspective in order to have more compassion for themselves and others. Without that process, no one is able to clear their minds enough to see the empty nature of what we cling to.
One does not have to chose between intellect and emptiness. In Tibetan Buddhism in particular, there is the notion of everyday reality and Ultimate Reality and our need to use skillful means to traverse them both.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jan: a lot of it unconscious material that took a lot of effort to bring to the surface
There it is again, hiding in plain sight. Emotions are a pretty abstract affair, certainly as abstract and esoteric as any given subjective experience. Where should we suspect those emotions are lurking prior to surfacing them?
And we had a female Rufus hummingbird feed off a Salvia on our deck yesterday morning. It was quite blustery in the yard at the time so the Salvia was blowing around quite a bit making its flowers a hard target to hit. Now our little hummer clearly made a conscious decision to fly down from her perch in the apple tree to feed on the Salvia, and consciously selected which flower to try, but who here thinks she consciously did the high-wind close quarters docking necessary to successfully insert her beak into the flower and maintain that pairing long enough to feed? Or was it her subconscious mind that allowed her to follow through with her intent feed?
Similarly, Largo has no meditative subjective experience of no-thing or anything else which isn't entirely provisioned by his subconscious mind doing the heavy lifting of contextualizing his experience.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Agreed, though Largo will have to speak for himself. The question that recurs on this thread and one of the questions of our time I think, is whether that unconscious mind is in contact with another dimension of existence or simply meat induced. The yogis and most meditators say of course that it is in contact with or a reflection of something else, while the scientific materialists will disagree. Frankly, I think it matters less and less what the answer is so long as the methods of accessing the unconscious are recognized by both.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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I think it matters from the standpoint of [conscious] mind emerging from complexity. On one hand, you can think of the conscious mind as the exposed tip of an iceberg which is unconscious below the surface, but I personally suspect it's far less distinct a division than that. For example, just between my bad hearing and having spent hundreds if not thousands of hours essentially meditating on a tightrope I've experienced a fairly vibrant and diverse hierarchy of subconscious functioning. And those experiences have sometimes left me with the impression that iceberg isn't static, but rather is constantly roiling under the surface of the water and our conscious mind is just the part that's emergent at any given moment.
My tightrope for instance - 10mm rope cranked down incredibly tight with pulleys nine feet in the air between two trees about 30-35 feet apart. I spent many hundreds of hours on that tightrope often not coming down off it for an hour or so at a time. Sometimes those hours were spent walking and turning, sometimes juggling pins, sometimes just laying on it, and other times just standing in one place for the entire time. Similar to meditating, after a while you get a good feel for the division of labor that's going on - what you're doing consciously and what your subconscious is taking care of. That division is somewhat stark, but so is the level of active cooperation and signaling between the two.
But the operating level of my subconscious mind while tightroping is, as MikeL would say, quite distributed, but it's also very low level - none of the signalings from my subconscious ever rise to the level of language or explicit indicators I need to do this or that in order to stay on the rope. And that's quite a contrast from what I experience with my bad hearing where my subconscious is continually floating dialog my way which I definitely don't have anything to do as some of what it floats is patently ridiculous.
And think about it - when this sort of thing happens, I'm having a subjective experience of my subconscious mind forking over babble and then having to consciously roll up my sleeves and try to figure out what really might have been said. And this isn't like not quite hearing someone or having a hard time making out what they're saying; no, in these particular instances my subconscious mind thinks it heard just fine as it didn't bother to engage me with any indication it was having a problem hearing the other person. And seriously, you wouldn't believe some of the sh#t I get handed every now and then (and let's not even bother with where the database it or I am searching resides).
That hearing/language processing, compared to the subconscious tightrope stabilization, is incredibly high-level processing basically to the point of a quasi-dialog between my conscious and subconscious mind. And between the two there is a spectrum where feeling, seeing, tasting and smelling all reside. I personally have no problem seeing consciousness as emergent from subconscious complexity and processing most of which is dependent on the brain regardless of whatever else it may be 'tapped into'.
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nafod
Boulder climber
State college
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having spent hundreds if not thousands of hours essentially meditating on a tightrope... Cool post!
At the age of 57 I just got a slack line. For my son for his birthday, of course. It's rigged in the front yard between two trees, where I constantly just go over and step up on it and work on balance. I get to watch the training ongoing live in real time, what you've subsumed into the subconscious. It's cool.
I teach flying, and working on the slack line helps me with my flight instructing.
Last tidbit, when I was flying in the Navy, we had a pilot who was struggling with carrier landings. Basically, the control patterns he had internalized were wrong. I made him fly with his other hand on the controls, which made him have to think his way around the landing pattern again, and broke his old bad internal habits. Then he could "reseat" them.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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What Largo experiences is what Largo experiences. A teacher of mine has a sound bite that he repeats over and over again: “IT (reality, experience) can show up as anything.”
I appreciate healyje’s descriptions and his interpretations. What healyje experiences is what healyje experiences (which includes his interpretations of the content of his experiences). I don’t think that is the contentious issue that Largo continues to point to. Often referenced simultaneously with “emptiness,” the experience of experience would appear to be the thing that some of us are enamored with, while others say, “So what? Big deal.”
The experience of experience became the focus of my attention when I began to recognize that all viewpoints / interpretations / understandings appeared unique. In the depths of fine-grained detail, no two people really seem to agree about anything. Whaaaaaa? How could that be? What kind of reality is this where anyone and everyone has different experiences? What or where is the thread of commonality in perception, in consciousness, in awareness of reality? How is it that we can all have such different views and feel so right about them? (And I’m talking about serious, committed, smart people in academia.)
I’m fine with the idea that “whatever is showing up” is the result of a meat brain: cognitions, emotions, moods, instinct, hot-cognitions, multi-layered and convoluted self-reflections, knowledge representations, and all sorts of artistic expressions. Doesn’t matter. Those things are all colorful forms of content in my view. However, the contents, the representations, the conceptualizations, the interpretations are not the same things as the experience of consciousness itself. Perhaps in his own inimitable manner, this is one of the things that Largo continues to harp on. It’s not a fine point, imo.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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whether that unconscious mind is in contact with another dimension of existence or simply meat induced.
This scientific materialist doesn't disagree. I don't see a conflict or an either/or situation in the above statement. I don't see why a meat brain could not be in contact with another dimension of existence.
Science is not about denying possibilities.
In a vaguely related line of thought, I was surprised lately to find that there is a "science of laughter." There is an interesting suggestion about how the left and right cerebral hemispheres must interact to see humour. I was, and still am, curious about whether anyone has tried to measure reaction times between when a funny event happens and people laugh. Verbal jokes probably wouldn't make the right stimulus because often people see the joke coming. Pratfalls as were featured on Funniest Home Videos might work. If it were up to me I would train cameras and microphones on an audience watching the closing credits to film-of-your-choice. I feel fairly safe in guessing that laughter is not a thing you are always conscious of before it happens. It seems likely that laugher is a product of the unconscious mind. It could easily come from another dimension of existence.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Thanks healyje, for me that’s your most interesting and thought provoking post yet.
I think an equivalent to the process of your mind supplying meaning when you don’t hear well, might be a person trying to speak a foreign language that they don’t yet understand well. It’s always been a mysterious process to me how I could walk away from a foreign language situation for some time and when I came back to that situation after say a month, I could understand and speak better than when I was completely immersed. Clearly my unconscious mind had been working at it even when my conscious mind was speaking my own mother tongue. If I am away from the foreign language for a year or more however, this is no longer true, and I have to play catch up again.
I too have no problem seeing consciousness as emergent from subconscious complexity and processing which is mostly dependent on the brain. However, I find it intriguing that there might be, as the spiritual teachers of many traditions say, another form of consciousness that is available only to a few, although all have the capacity.
Nafod describes an interesting process of retraining old patterns by disrupting the unconscious or subconscious habituations to them, a process that is being used quite effectively for victims of PTSD, with rapid eye movements. This brings up the role of memory and where it resides and how it is accessed. Given super learning proceeds better with movement while memorizing, it would seem that it resides in the early evolved unconscious parts of the brain. How then does conscious mind access it? Somehow it sends a signal that it’s looking and then the unconscious mind goes to work and reappears with the answer hours or even days later. I have even had the sensation while trying to remember something, of my nonverbal brain scanning my memory geographically, trying to find where it is stored.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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I think Joe has a good point directing attention to the subconscious or unconscious. I see the conscious part of the mind as icing on a large cake, with the unconscious mind constituting the "bulk" of that entity, a continuous flow of signals throughout the complex structure. Why not focus on how that formative area of mind - where physical processes mingle with spiritual effects - converses with the upper levels? This is where the foundations of consciousness lie.
But, Joe, a tight rope nine feet up in the air? Wow, that's daring!
Over the long course of this thread my opinions have changed in various ways. For example, I now think about free will and agency somewhat differently than before, thanks largely to HFCS's links and commentaries. And I've learned a bit about advanced physics thanks to Ed and jstan and my own curiosity, particularly regarding the nature of time.
My knowledge of neuroscience has improved thanks to Andy, but marginally since I started at ground zero (my fault, not his!)
Jan's posts about foreign cultures and beliefs have been excellent, and EEyonkee's posts on evolution have provoked thought. But efforts to mathematize consciousness - brought to our attention by JL - are not impressive in a good way. Richard's comments about analytic philosophy have been instructive, however.
There's more from others, of course, and I have enjoyed reading the posts and thank their authors.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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But, Joe, a tightrope nine feet up in the air? Wow, that's daring!
John, not as daring as you might think and the reason has very much to do with this discussion of the role of the subconscious.
I started out walking a tightrope 3-4 feet high between two particular trees. I did that mainly because I got very good at running full tilt at it, launching at a bit of a distance, jumping on and sticking it. But at some time after a couple of years, I got intrigued by the psychology involved - namely that no matter how high I put the rope on those two trees it was physically always the exact same walk except for the mental and emotional factor. So, to experiment with and overcome that psychology I decided I'd do the sensible thing and raise the level of the rope incrementally by nine inches or a foot at a time until it was significantly higher on the two trees (but still within reach if I stretched for it). I discovered two things in the process:
a) in the 5-8 foot height range when you come off there is a great deal more risk of inverting without any opportunity to correct which is quite unhappy.
But more striking was that...
b) for heights under 9 feet, your subconscious/body maintains an incredibly strong imperative for jumping off the rope when it gets any inkling at all that you're losing it as opposed to sticking with it and working to stay on the rope; but at 9 feet, at 9 feet that radically flips and your subconscious/body no longer wants to jump off the rope and the imperative shifts strongly to working to stay on the rope at all cost (or diving on the rope - anything but jumping off).
So that's why nine feet - that and the dynamic mounts from the ground into a sitting/laying position are way cool as is going from those to walking.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jogill: I see the conscious part of the mind as icing on a large cake, with the unconscious mind constituting the "bulk" of that entity, . . .
Most every discipline of science sees surface manifestations as the result of deep-structured entities and activity—and it is those that are focused on in science. It’s a rare belief that posits “what you see is what you get.”
We don’t believe our senses these days. We believe our minds and its conceptualizations. This *could be* an indicator of how much folks have given beliefs and abstractions credence.
It’s interesting and funny-strange to me that so-called disciplined investigators (viz., my ex-colleagues, and going on all the way back to Aristotle) depreciate raw direct experience compared to concepts. (Surface manifestation could be what’s really going on all the time.)
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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We don’t believe our senses these days.
we have an administration that pretty much believes their senses, and does not seek anything deeper, let alone thought.
Having watched the bioptic Hannah Arendt last weekend, in the climactic scene, the character Arendt makes the case that it is thinking that is important, vitally important, lest we let our unthinking functioning lead us to inhumane acts.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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I would argue that thinking alone is not enough as pure logic has led to some conclusions with awful consequences for other humans. The thinking mind can justify anything if not backed by intuition and heart. Think of the Nazi and Japanese medical experiments and planned euthanasia for example. Think of slavery and genocide.
We need whole human beings who do not dwell too much on any particular aspect of human potential but seek instead a fully human middle way.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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The thinking mind can justify anything if not backed by intuition and heart.
this is an assertion that is your opinion, but stated as fact.
What's more, it is exactly the opposite of Arendt's conclusions regarding the nature of totalitariansim.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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I liked the movie, but it did not do justice to Arendt’s output. Her thoughts were complex, sometimes exhibiting idiosyncratic inconsistencies—which are fine by me. (Each person is a multitude.)
Arendt’s passion and values went beyond her capabilities to merely think, although I can understand how she thought that evil people (and their followers) did not think (for themselves). Arendt’s “thinking” could well be the same thing as honest self-reflection, wherein one looks inside one’s own heart for answers. To do that, one must listen in quietude rather than think.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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To do that, one must listen in quietude rather than think.
another assertion. We have a tendency to generalize our own experiences, don't we?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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I started at ground zero
Nice musings from John Gill.
I've learned things here, too. My neuroscience lab work showed me how easily synapses can be changed, and how long-lasting some of those changes can be. Every sensory input we receive makes small changes in, perhaps, thousands of synapses, but doesn't usually leave a lasting impression on either our conscious or unconscious mind because of the gazillions of synapses in our nervous systems that aren't much affected.
When we do learn something 'new', it is often because it fits snugly into a place in the jig-saw puzzle picture of our world we have previously built. Starting from ground zero, it would take a lot of effort to make significant headway on any new picture.
Memory is a wonderful mystery. We know many things about the molecular basis for it, but not much about how that molecular machinery keeps track of where we left our car keys.
A few days ago I was placing a garden hose. As I am dragging it I stand up and am stunned with pain. My head has hit the arching stem of a rose bush. It feels like one of the thorns has made a new hole in my skull. When my vision clears I think, "Well I won't do that again!" Then 5 minutes later the same thing happens. But it only took two lessons for me to learn.
I have a lot of respect for the biologists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, geologists, weather scientists, and others I have met and talked with about significant contributions they have made to the narrow areas of knowledge they explore in their professional lives. As I go on asking them questions we often come to the splendid prospect of terra incognita. Their answer to a question is, "Nobody knows."
They must've never met Werner.
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Don Paul
Social climber
Denver CO
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Lucky for them. MikeL the reason I'm not convinced by your raw experiences is that they are not observable by anyone else, nor do the experiences of others match yours.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Ed: another assertion. We have a tendency to generalize our own experiences, don't we?
"We?" Ha-ha. It's nice to be in such good company.
It’s all assertions, wouldn’t you say, Ed?
I’m curious to hear how you experience deep self-reflection. Do you do so intensely or with circumspection while you’re multitasking or having conversations with others?
Don Paul and Healyje:
On the problem of interpretation of an unconscious:
1. “The unconscious” cannot be found, measured, or delineated empirically any more than mind can. One cannot say what “the unconscious” is as a thing, much less what it does or how it does it.
2. Any action may be technical in intention and may be technical with regard to consequences, but the actual form of an action is arguably simply expressive.
3. There is an apparent inconsistency with those who argue for the substantiality of one invisible entity (e.g., the unconscious) while arguing for the insubstantiality of another invisible entity because it cannot be found (e.g., spirit).
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