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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Boulder Creek CA
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Jul 13, 2010 - 06:16pm PT
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An original motivation for learning to climb (solo) in my early teens was as a lab to explore my human reactions facing the unknown apart from other people. Becoming well known as a climber after Royal discovered me was an uncomfortable surprise and worked at cross purposes to this. Although I now enjoy the social aspects of the climbing community, it took me a while to be comfortable with it.
I had been very intrigued by Einstein's observation that we only use a small part of our intelligence, and wanted to explore what I could do apart from the influence of parents and teachers and friends. I felt that a mind full of fixed ideas and words and music was shutting off awareness.
I was a scholar and musician, and not any sort of athlete. I applied the mindset of a dedicated violinist to learning bouldering and soloing; practicing the same climbs many many times. I didn't know any other climbers and explored what could be done independent of the influence of others.
And I went alone into the Idaho wilderness to learn shutting off the barrage of words and music in my head. You could call the result a religious experience; but that's not how I think of it. I think of it as waking up.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 13, 2010 - 07:52pm PT
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hey Largo, I know that... I've even done that... quieting the chatter and just being...
I also understand what you are saying about the "left brain" thing... which is what I do mostly... I recognize the limitations of both practices. I'm just saying that my choice is conscious and not unexamined.
I know your choice is also a choice... not a whim.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Jul 13, 2010 - 07:57pm PT
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hey Largo, I know that... I've even done that... quieting the chatter and just being...
I also understand what you are saying about the "left brain" thing... which is what I do mostly... I recognize the limitations of both practices. I'm just saying that my choice is conscious and not unexamined.
I know your choice is also a choice... not a whim.
Ed, I think we are approaching the same "thing" but from different ends. I tried the strictly intellectual approach and I was not able to level myself out of myself. So I went to where i could experience some results.
I think that Jstan has a very valid point: people cannot hang in the mystery for long. Put differently, we cannot hang in chaos, or in vulnerability, for more than a moment without wanting to steady up. Arno Illgner's Rock Warrior course is set up to address this very thing.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 13, 2010 - 08:04pm PT
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somethings you learn to live with, in science, it's the fact that you'll never know everything... never be able to explain everything, that "everything" lays as much in Newton's ocean at the shore as it does beyond the horizon unseen.
If you're not comfortable with that sort of uncertainty science probably isn't a good thing to do...
...I'd love to climb with Arno and discuss his thoughts on climbing.
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jstan
climber
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Jul 13, 2010 - 08:05pm PT
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Ed has published minutes before me. Largo is into "imagining" but what does he mean by it?
Here is a definition.
to imagine: the conscious act of allowing the mind to operate unconstrained
It is conscious and it is an act or a choice.
So tell me that imagining that the presence of mass causes space itself to become curved is not imaginative!
Or today's blockbuster idea that the sun is like a giant vacuum sweeper gathering up dark matter.
Mind you this may even be more than some neurons firing in someone's head. Dark matter in the sun can explain the speed with which energy generated in the center of the sun makes it way to the surface - and once there helps keep us all alive.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/dark-matter-sun/
Hate mystery? Who would do such a thing?
We live for the chance to explain it.
Just as some live for the chance to solve a mystery high up on a face.
I seriously doubt Largo is doing something a lot different from this.
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 13, 2010 - 10:56pm PT
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Dr F
You need to make another post just to keep yourself convinced ......
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go-B
climber
In God We Trust
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Jul 13, 2010 - 11:25pm PT
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Bitd, I found and put up the Pit and the Pendulum, at Malibu Creek. Mark Wilford came there, and Mike Ayon and I showed him around. We did the Pit and also he soloed a serious boulder problem that became the Eiger Sanction, across from the Pit. Mark bagged the line left of Pick Pocket which he didn't name, so we called it Wild Willie, for good reason!
One time at the Apes Traverse, Dale Bard was there talking with a guy who said he was Troy Mayr. But he isn't my friend Troy, so I thought this is weird? Now I don't know if he has the same name or what? But then he says he put up the routes at Williamson Rock? So I go you're full of it, and I called him out on it, Dale was put a back, trust me I know the real Friends of Williamson Rock, Troy Mayr, we have climbed many days up there and that was just offensive!
Genesis 2:4, These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.
Nehemiah 9:6, “You are the Lord, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; and the host of heaven worships you.
Isaiah 45:12, I made the earth and created man on it; it was my hands that stretched out the heavens, and I commanded all their host.
Isaiah 45:18, For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited!): “I am the Lord, and there is no other.
Jeremiah 10:12, It is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens.
Jeremiah 32:17, ‘Ah, Lord God! It is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you
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Jeremiah 51:15, “It is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens.
2 Corinthians 5:1, For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
Well not to give God His due, is way more offensive!!!
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Boulder Creek CA
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Jul 14, 2010 - 02:45am PT
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It is difficult to listen to the other person in a conversation when you are busy with your own thinking and speaking.
It is likewise difficult to be at a high level of awareness when your mind is busy generating thoughts.
There's an interesting thing about a big thunderstorm; everyone stops and listens at the moment of a big thunderclap.
Step one is to quiet the mind.
There are lots of religious and meditation practices to do this. They are all crutches. Not to say that's necessarily a bad idea, unless it becomes a noisy obsession in itself.
If you can just quiet the mind then you can listen.
Unfortunately all the pain and noise going on in the world makes listening very challenging; and people who manage to listen for a moment tend to retreat quickly back into the familiar noise of their thoughts.
It's great to be off alone in the winter mountains.
I am eager to go into space. There's an experience known to the Apollo astronauts, called the blue marble effect. When you look back towards the earth and see just a little blue marble. Then you look around and begin to realize how very far it is to anything else that might conceivably support our form of life. And so we'd best take better care of that blue marble.
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GBrown
Trad climber
Los Angeles, California
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Jul 14, 2010 - 02:59am PT
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HFCS says:
"Then again, in a lot of circumstances, "where we are convinced we know" is not a bad thing but a good thing. Performance, behavior, results, of all kinds depends on being convinced we know, on having knowledge and acting on that knowledge. In sports, in business and industry. And I would suggest equally so in the "practice" of living.
We are not yet, by and large, in a habit of reframing this. We are falling for the traditional religious framing here. It's time we reframed it. Reframe it (a) in terms of decision-making, for better or worse, (b) standing up for your decisions, and then (c) accepting accountability, again for better or worse, for those decisions and stances. That is a strategy that we all use, that is played out everyday, in all areas and fields of the human experience, for moving forward."
DAMN! That is very well said!
The idea was presented a bit earlier in this string that people cannot tolerate too much uncertainty and in too much confusion will grasp something in order to stabilize the situation. I think that is pretty valid. It might be "God" or it might be "Darwinism", the infallibility of the King, "all corporations are bad", "Don't try to rise above your station in life". Most of us have picked up on something while we were growing up because somebody we thought was cool did it or said it, or because our parents said it -- we adopt data and concepts to fit in, feel a part of the scene - which provides a sense of stability.
Some of these concepts are easily dropped later when we become more used to the idea that we see things and evaluate and judge things from our own viewpoint, that when we do things there are effects created that can come back on us in good and bad ways, and that we personally have to learn our own lessons. (I guess there's quite a lot of people who don't get very far on that though.)
Probably the greater the magnitude of the confusion and the rapidity of development of the confusion have a bearing on how solidly fixed will become the thing we have grasped onto in order to nullify the confusion.
You can tolerate quite a bit of unknowns and confusions as long as you have a modicum of personal certainty of your ability to manage your immediate environment. A population under threat is a sucker for a slogan, a dictator or some tyranical version of whatever political, religious or scientific forms are extant.
Big PhRMA has this down pat. Get "Generalized Anxiety Disorder" invented, pay doctors and media to alarm the public about it and present the stabilizing solution of Paxil to them in TV ads. With their antidepressant ads they got millions of folks, including highly educated ones, repeating with absolute certainty that people are depressed because they have a low level of serotonin. The theory is unproven; no patient can be given a biological test to determine it; when the failed clinical trials were dragged out of the closet, effectiveness = placebo. Add in the harmful effects: suicidality, withdrawal symptoms, birth defects, male sterility, depersonalization, destructive impulsive behavior, etc. Bah, something other than science.
This is a world where there are some people who will do the most dastardly, unethical, manipulative, deceptive, destructive and despicable things quite intentionally and consider that they are totally justified in doing so. And this occurs in high political, religious and scientific fields as well as on the street and in homes and communities.
I don't care where someone is on the scale between the finite and the infinite (or any other way you want to put it). What I really care about is what people do here and now. I object to butchery and unwarranted destruction and degradation of life. If people don't have the ultimates figured out, that's fine. If they have them figured out (right or wrong), that's fine. At least here and now we can operate with good sense, integrity, honor, care and consideration and encourage other people to do so.
As far as censure or punishment goes, you could probably help a child grow up fast and well by directing yourself not to his deed but to where he violated his own sense of right and wrong or his own personal integrity.
"Yer sendin me tuh bed wit no supper cause I burned down thu barn?"
"Nah, we gunna have fun fixin it. Ahm sendin you tuh bed wit no supper cause frum wat you said, you viuhlaated yer own common sense and integridde cause Billy call you a scardy cat. That ther showed very poorly on you and I just can't tolerat dat! Now go tuh bed."
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 14, 2010 - 10:22am PT
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"The first offense is to decry persons who try in their lives to broadcast the glories of the Lord."
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Jul 14, 2010 - 11:19am PT
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Engineering and medicine (two applied science disciplines) are real-time, substantive, everyday proofs, illustrations, reminders (a) that science is an awesome effective investigational tool, worthy of respect, on the right tracks to figuring out how the world works and how life works and (b) that the world is intelligible, works according to rules, rules of causality, that are invariant.
Knowing better is doing better.
Knowing the rules means doing better.
Because of science and its everyday engineering products at work in the fields, we can be more "convinced," or more confident, if you prefer, in regard to how things truly work (and how the world truly works) than we could be without them.
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dirtbag
climber
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Jul 14, 2010 - 01:05pm PT
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Bump!
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Jul 15, 2010 - 12:25pm PT
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interesting suggestion about a singularity in your first link there, wanda.
locker, that last woman is too airbrushed, and i see too many like that on ST. you broke my heart with the woman before that, however.
"sex is the consolation prize for those who don't have love." --garcia-marquez
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Jay Karst
Trad climber
Golden, Colorado
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Jul 15, 2010 - 12:35pm PT
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Your all going to hell!jk
Speaking only for myself, I have seen Gods good works all around me when I climb, faith has heightend my appreciation for all things! In times of trouble I do have someone to talk to and on every** occation I have gained something from it. And when things are really good there is someone to thank.Faith keeps me thankful no matter what the situation. Several times I have been in situations where the only "logical" explenation was that there wasn't one. Besides seeing thing in black & White is just too boring. Adding some color to your life allows one view the world through a new set of eyes.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Jul 15, 2010 - 01:07pm PT
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Wanda-
I'll be the first to answer your last post and also make reference to Tony since he recommended a very interesting book that I'm currently reading, called The Conscious Universe: the Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena, by Dean Radin.
The book is a summary of all the psychic research which has been done up to this point in time and I would really challenge all the materialists on this thread to read it. For those of us with more of a consciousness orientation it is also valuable for its very thorough review of scientific methodology, experimental design in particular.
In this book Radin came up with a similar theory to gamma waves several years ago, saying that he believed one possible explanation for psi phenomenon is that some people are better able to filter out mental "noise" than others and thus get a clearer image than the human norm. He did not posit how this was done only that it seemed a reasonable explanation for telepathy and clairvoyance in particular.
Personally, I found the level of corelations in his book to be rather low. In experiments where 25% was random chance, thousands of experiments (he's big on meta-analysis) showed corelation with psi phenomena ranging from 34-39%. Of course most of these experiments were working with a cross section of ordinary people not known for their psychic abilities. He did note that statistically 1% of this random population had extraordinary psychic abilities with much higher success rates than 39%.
Since many systems of prayer and meditation say that everyone has this ability if they reach a certain level of spiritual attainment, it would certainly be interesting to look at the brains of the psychic 1% compared to meditation masters and see if there are similarities.
It seems to me that there is a ton of scientific research to be done amid many indications that the human mind is much more sensitive and aware than it has been given credit for, particularly in the West.
Using the radio wave analogy that your article on gamma waves does, a finding that humans are able to communicate mentally/psychically with each other and across vast distances of geography by that or some other method, would certainly call for a new paradigm in both science and religion. The conscious universe and the holographic universe are two terms already in use in an attempt to label this new paradigm.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Jul 15, 2010 - 01:29pm PT
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What's telling? Here's telling:
Do you ever see an effort- any effort at all- ever, ever, ever- on the part of supernaturalists, now on this thread, paranormalists, too, to simply come to grips with the fact that all living things on earth (including hbs) are material and mortal?
C'mon, you supers- and paras-, at least make an effort. Some effort. Challenge yourselves to get a grip on your nature (your material basis, also your one-shot mortality) just as you challenge yourselves to go climb some gnarly route. The difficulties you will experience are growing pains.
Got news for you: Even to us materialists (better: material functionalists, material biotic mechanists), life is a bounty. A bounty of colors. A bounty of wonders. A bounty of joys.
Challenge yourselves. Get with it.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 15, 2010 - 01:39pm PT
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if precise definitions for things like "consciousness" cannot be made, then any claims of scientific evidence is a priori called into question
scientific evidence is quantitative, empirical and hypothesis based. The hypothesis should have predictive ability which is quantitative, and be based on a rigorous "theory" a system which has a mathematical logic connected with a logically consistent explanation of many related phenomena
I'd say that from the discussion here that there is no way that such a book could even approach scientific rigor. So, while this sounds rather closed minded, unless the book has a "theory of consciousness" that meets scientific standards, it's dead on arrival... the rest of it is just pseudo-science... stuff dressed up in the guise of science which isn't.
Like Feynman said, the first job is not to fool yourself...
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Jul 15, 2010 - 01:54pm PT
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Ed- You failed to capitalize two sentences. Also, you left out two periods.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Jul 15, 2010 - 02:13pm PT
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Radin provides a long discussion along the lines of Ed's critique and is very careful to point out what has NOT been proven as well as what has, and to mention that a theory of psi will have to evolve for it to truly be considered a science.
He also goes on to discuss the four stages of a new scientific paradigm and to say that psi research is at level 1 with level 2 on the horizon.
He also makes the case that the level of validation for psi experiments would be acceptable in any other human subject experiments in medicine and psychology.
As for developing theory first, many scientific discoveries were stumbled upon by accident or came about by observation long before a theory to account for them was developed.
Meanwhile, the gamma wave model of how the brain works attracted my attention because wave transmission of intuitive knowledge, energy and various spiritual states, corresponds much better with my own experiences than the neuron model ever did.
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