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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 1, 2014 - 11:56am PT
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Giving up control does not mean handing it off to God, whatever that means, but letting the process go whetever it will. The idea or belief that some entity controls us be it our own egos or God is an interesting thing to ponder. Without someone tending the store, will we all go mad and light ourselves on fire? What is the fear, exactly??
JL
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Giving up control does not mean handing it off to God, whatever that means, but letting the process go wherever it will (JL)
So, the process is now in charge, and it has a will as does I.
The next step would be for the process to separate from its I.
Good luck with that.
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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MH2
climber
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Once I accepted that I knew nothing and was only getting in my own way, I quite efforting and the process shifted. (JL)
The only satisfactory description of the outcome of a zen process would be one that no one recognized as such. Earlier this morning, if my faulty memory serves me, the above sentence ended with, "I quite efforting and everything dropped away." Which made me wonder, if everything drops away, what is left to notice that everything has dropped away? To me it makes no sense to make any statement about a state of 'no mind.' But non-sense does keep kicking the can here and there.
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
The shaggy fringe of Los Angeles
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Those hand signals made my day.
------------------------
What is Mind?
I = Knowing, looking, seeing, action, accomplishment
Mind = thinking, association, differentiation, conclusions, stored information
Noise = random thoughts, others ideas, others influence, compulsions, inhibitions, beliefs, worries, upsets, discord, efforts
With out a guide, the noise will swamp the boat every time.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 1, 2014 - 08:46pm PT
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Which made me wonder, if everything drops away, what is left to notice that everything has dropped away?
no-thing
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
The shaggy fringe of Los Angeles
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The No Thing is a wonder to behold.
Like a giant yucca flower that, in just a few days roars out of the spines and lives in glory in the sun.
The No Thing is near infinite with abilities and perceptions that would make a Christian-like god tremble in fear and high tail to parts unknown.
Edit: Yet, as usual, we are probably talking about completely different things. Such is the forum of Babel.
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Without someone tending the store, will we all go mad and light ourselves on fire? What is the fear, exactly?? (JL)
The word "fear" occurs frequently in your posts, John. We are "afraid to try meditation", our discursive minds "fear giving up control", etc.
Why is this? I don't really see a lot of fear and anxiety rampant in my social circles. And I certainly don't fear the astounding revelations Zen promises . . . it just sounds - and I apologize - tedious and boring. Is it a consequence of your years of practice that you feel those not attuned to Zen live a life of fear and apprehension, trembling through days filled with unmet challenges? Is this because some (many?) who are attracted to Zen are disturbed and seek a way out of their normal existence?
Just curious . . .
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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from the above discussion I am thinking I get a sense of what Largo has been talking about with his "no-thing"
in particular, the role of our behaviors which sum to what we are getting at here as "mind." We have a tendency when describing our mental experiences to put a primacy on one aspect of "mind" the aspect that has to do with discursive thinking. It isn't a surprise since we tend to verbal and written descriptions, and that is what those discursive behaviors express.
however, there are experiences which are difficult to express with language, often because we don't believe anyone else has that experience (so we think it is an individual aberration) or that we are dysfunctional in some cognitive way (we're going crazy).
in the NYTimes Science section today there were these three interesting letters:
Neurology
TO THE EDITOR:
Re “A Rare Visual Distortion” (June 24): As a child, I very frequently experienced micropsia. As an adult, I had it only on rare occasions of extreme emotional stress. One time, I was sitting at a table with the man with whom I was breaking up. I rationally knew I could reach out and touch his hand, yet he had receded visually to such a great distance that to touch him seemed utterly impossible.
I have been a visual artist all my life. When I first saw the portrait paintings and drawings by Alberto Giacometti, I was startled to see that he had captured that sensation — the seated lower bodies of the portrait subjects seemed very massive and near, but the upper bodies and faces had the appearance of being far, far away. This made me feel he had had this same distancing phenomenon and had captured it incredibly well.
Jenny Badger Sultan
San Francisco
Wow, and here I thought I was the one who coined the term! I’ve always referred to this as my Alice in Wonderland syndrome. I even told my doctors that I sometimes felt like Alice. I got the usual raised eyebrow and a prescription for more antidepressants.
LM, of Detroit, posted to nytimes.com
Very interesting to learn that these visual phenomena are now at least partially understood. These experiences may be much more common (at least in childhood) than previously thought, because they often go unreported. I had a few episodes of micropsia in elementary school, usually associated with a fever, but I never bothered to tell anyone about them, as they weren’t at all frightening. In fact, they were oddly enjoyable.
Julie, of New York, posted to nytimes.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropsia
Her verbal description is something we would say we understood, but her example of the visual experience is much better communicated in an image, which makes the sensation much more subtle
Alberto Giacometti
it is difficult to describe this visual experience with words, and probably the actual executive behaviors that lead to the artistic depiction of the experience is beyond words, and similarly for art produced for other senses (like music).
when I meditate in yoga there is a process, but the process is to access all of these things going on, without the controlling primacy of discursive thought.
there are two different types of experiences I've had doing science. doing science is a largely misunderstood process by most people, and even scientists. but thinking is certainly a major part of it... but not necessarily discursive thinking.
often I have to take a break as my thought have fallen into patterns that are not converging on a solution. get up, walk around, and basically abandoned thinking about the problem. what is being abandoned is not the thinking, but the discursive process. it is not unusual that diverting the discursive process from controlling the thinking on the particular topic frees up other ways to think through the problem.
the "process" here is to just go and do something else and "forget" about the particular problem that has your attention. what happens isn't easy to describe exactly because it exists beyond the control of the discursive mind.
another interesting experience is the problem of sitting with paper and pencil (it could be chalk and slate, or marker and white board) and think through the problem at hand using the written process... and upon getting stuck, going into someone's office and describe, verbally, what you are trying to do. more often than not that person hasn't the slightest idea on how to help you, but the process of using verbal description, and presumably a very different part of the brain, can help lead you to the answer.
all of these processes are used to get convergence on an answer through the thought process, and they all use different aspects of the thinking behaviors to get a perspective on the problem.
the meditation that I've done starts by relaxing into awareness, and I do what Jan described up above somewhere, of counting breaths. the discursive mind is still there but there is an awareness that overcomes me that is not verbal. often I realize that I've lost my count, but the point isn't to count accurately, but to draw the awareness away from the "monkey in a tree."
once I find that "place' I expand on it, the noise of the pre-practice yoga class becomes undifferentiated, and discursive thoughts bubble up, and die off. if I'm tired that day I might fall asleep briefly, usually I've lost my seated balance... somedays I "day dream" and the discursive chatter doesn't have any space to find that larger awareness
as I've done this I've been able to find that place more efficiently, and been able to expand it somewhat. I probably would be better at it if I had formal instruction, but its not like its a competition, I do have a process, or what my yogani would call a "practice", that process isn't the end state.
that state, also, is something I don't necessarily interpret as being beyond my own individual body. but it does connect to the functioning of that body in ways that are quite beyond description, yet are real experiences with real consequences.
one can describe an analytic idea with rigor which is the result of a process that remains difficult to describe at any level. that is beyond description.
opening yourself up directly to that experience is something you might be able to do using a process. being creative we've all had to find some process for evoking those experiences, method often being limited.
anyway, that's my take on this... that indescribable experience is "no thing" we can sort of try to define around it, but we cannot describe it precisely.
that's not to say we cannot understand it, our understanding may fail at any practical prescription
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 1, 2014 - 10:31pm PT
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Well Ed is off to the races - count on it. Once a person gets a little traction in that direction, it's like a never ending climb and you quite naturally want to have a look-see of that next pitch.
I think perhaps the best thing Ed has shown is that unlike all the projecting people do on this kind of exploration, with the Nehru coats and "masters" and fairy dust, once you sit your ass down and the bell sounds, EVERYONE is squared off with themselves, and the flow of experience. The art of being spectacularly alert but not interfering with whatever comes up is a slippery one to get hold of for everyone.
But the issue of no-thing is not so hard to expeience directly.
Ed mentioned that his yoga teacher suggested watching for the space between thoughts or feelings or whatever your awareness grocks onto. Sometime this proces is explained in terms or a molecule or an atom. The atom is you or me. The stuff or things are the neutrons and elecrons and other stuff. The space between the stuff is at times devoid of stuff or things, and in this sense that space is no-thing.
Les Fehmi, a neuroscientist formally at the Brain Institute at UCLA (I think that's right) was one of the first westerners to show we can have just as intimate a connection with the space between stuff (no-thing) as we can with the stuff or things (thoughst, sensations, memories, feelings, images, sounds, etc.). He birthed the whole "Open Focus" movement decades ago.
It is my understanding that much if not all of the fantastic things we hear about from religion per absolutes and infinite this and that - as well as the "thinking" and answers that occur when we have set down thinking for a bit - all spring from this no-thing space.
JL
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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with the Nehru coats
The Nehru jacket is still natty wear for the hip dude on the go:
Any way you cut it.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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'Essence precedes existence' versus 'Existence precedes essence'
One thing's for sure, it's not exactly a 'new' discussion.
'Letting go' of your existence to 'experience' essence? A somewhat dubious proposition at best beyond mere glimmerings of that which, by 'our nature', we are no more designed to experience in a significant way than the moment-to-moment 'workings' of our Vagus Nerve.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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There's the excellent play by William Shakespeare: Much Ado About No-Thing
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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'Letting go' of your existence to 'experience' essence? A somewhat dubious proposition at best beyond mere glimmerings of that which, by 'our nature', we are no more designed to experience in a significant way than the moment-to-moment 'workings' of our Vagus Nerve.
certainly you can make it into a cartoon, but part of understanding anything begins with careful observation. you can think of meditation as part of that method. you certainly cannot claim an explanation of how you come up with ideas... and certainly cannot claim a scientific description of the process.
the most likely reason being that you haven't been very careful in first observing that process, a process that is, by and large, not discursive.
and we aren't "designed" to do anything, what a strange expression from someone educated in biology...
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MH2
climber
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Ed is careful. I like his thoughts on and illustrations of why it may be difficult to describe certain experiences. A much better approach, I feel, than trying to describe those experiences.
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329762.700-consciousness-onoff-switch-discovered-deep-in-brain.html
When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn't respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed. As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of the event.
However, he points out that the interesting thing about this study is that the person was still awake. "Normally when we look at conscious states we are looking at awake versus sleep, or coma versus vegetative state, or anaesthesia."
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Thanks Cintune!
That was fascinating, the most hopeful clue yet and interesting that it was already predicted by Francis Crick.
Here's the part that I found most interesting personally.
"Ultimately, if we know how consciousness is created and which parts of the brain are involved then we can understand who has it and who doesn't," says Koch. "Do robots have it? Do fetuses? Does a cat or dog or worm? This study is incredibly intriguing but it is one brick in a large edifice of consciousness that we're trying to build."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 2, 2014 - 10:31am PT
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Healje said: "
Letting go' of your existence to 'experience' essence? A somewhat dubious proposition at best beyond mere glimmerings of that which, by 'our nature', we are no more designed to experience in a significant way than the moment-to-moment 'workings' of our Vagus Nerve.
I'd be interested in hearing about the experiences you had to ever arrive at this pronouncement, by what means do you know how we were designed, and to what end. And what, exactly, is "significant." Are you working off a survival model? Enlightn us.
It's esay to sound off about any aspect of this stuff, but if your data is not based on careful empirical observation, you get howlers like, "dubious proposition at best beyond mere glimmerings of that which - " Never mind meditation. A bonehead course in "the English" is indicated.
Again, people really oughta declare the number of alcoholic beverages they pound before contributing to this thread, just so we have some notion per origins.
JL
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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I just finished reading about the claustrum on Wiki and discovered that it's not a single location in the brain but two different membranes, one in each hemisphere, so it's hard to see how two of them could be THE locus of consciousness. I can see however that if a person could turn off one of them, effectively disrupting the communications of a whole side of the brain, that could certainly produce some of the altered states of consciousness that have been experienced.
In terms of evolution, the three earliest animal groups which seem to possess them are insectivores, marsupials, and prosimians which would indicate its appearance at a certain stage among what were then the most intelligent life forms (nothing said unfortunately about whales or dolphins).Since prosimians eventually evolved into more advanced monkeys and apes and humans, one suspects that many functions of the claustrum were superceded by the development of the cortex. Still, they could be the instrument of translation between the earlier brain and the later one.This would be giving credit then to a translator as the seat of consciousness?
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