What is "Mind?"

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PSP also PP

Trad climber

Berkeley

Aug 22, 2014 - 06:48pm PT

Jgill so much constructing you should have been a builder.

The zen manual is your experience. But you need to look at the experience closely to learn anything.

I use to have a friend that was constantly wishing for other peoples things like their nice cars, women, money etc. always saying I wish I had that; I called him the wishing machine. He never asked who is it that is wishing. That is the zen manual; actually asking the question and observing.

and your construction of "emptiness" as being a helpless state is another semantic disconnect. Emptiness is 100% engagement and you can't be fully engaged when you are attached to "I" because by definition it is a distraction . As you mentioned athletes commonly get fully engaged because it is necessary to be able to perform the skill, they can't be distracted and do the skill at that same time.

IMO they (the royal they) typically don't understand that the high that comes afterward was because they dropped all their stuff ("I") for a while . usually the ego co-ops the experience and they think they feel great because they were sucessful.

BASE104

Social climber

An Oil Field

Aug 22, 2014 - 06:50pm PT

My latest issue of Scientific American showed up today, and the entire issue is devoted to many new discoveries in human evolution.

It is really interesting, and provides some answers to the questions we are asking.

JGill would enjoy it. I doubt the Zen Pen would read it.

Jan would love it. There have been a lot of advances in anthropology lately. DNA evidence and certain isotope markers which indicate diet and other things. Paleoclimate has been tied to events as well.

Symbolic language started showing up around 70,000 years ago. One author really emphasizes this as a big event.

Carry on.

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - Aug 22, 2014 - 06:57pm PT

If you can hold an open focus long enough - and nobody that was ever born can do so without practice (JL)

What support do you have for that statement?
--

Try it. Ask anyone you ever encounter to try it. You will never, under any circumstance, meet someone who can hold an alert, open focus without prolonged practice. "Alert" open focus is the very opposite of zoning out, which we all do, a lot. But someone with an untrained attention can not help but narrow focus on whatever thought, feeling, memory, sensation, etc. that has the most valance at a given time, and the moment that material is identified with, your focus automatically narrows like the aperature on a camera. Basically, the untrained mind is genetically coded to narrow focus from one thing to the next, so holding an open focus is basically going against our survival instincts. If it was easy to do, we would not have to sit quietly and keep our spine straight and watch our breathing and hold a soft focus and cha cha cha, all of these things designed simply increase the likelihood of being able to hang in the space between thoughts, so to speak.

All of this is eaisly and empirically verifiable by self oberservation and asking others attempting the same thnig. This is not my "opinion," anymore than a basketball is round is an opinion.

But don't take my word for it. Try it and report back.

JL

MH2

climber

Aug 22, 2014 - 07:21pm PT

You will never, under any circumstance, meet someone who can hold an alert, open focus without prolonged practice. (JL)

How would I know if an autistic person is holding an alert open focus?

jgill

Boulder climber

Colorado

Aug 22, 2014 - 08:19pm PT

Basically, the untrained mind is genetically coded to narrow focus from one thing to the next (JL)

"Trained" vs "untrained" is task-specific. To revere an empty mind seems like such a waste . . .

MH2

climber

Aug 22, 2014 - 08:28pm PT

Basically, the untrained mind is genetically coded to narrow focus from one thing to the next, so holding an open focus is basically going against our survival instincts. (JL)

Has no human ever gone against their survival instincts? Without practice?

Basically, I agree with Jim.

But the larger point is that even if I tried it myself and found it impossible to hold an alert open focus without practice and even if a million people told me the same, I would be foolish to claim that none of the billions of humans in all their genetic, cultural, and traumatic brain injury variety has ever done so.

It sounds as though even a single exception to your claim about alert open focus would undermine your confidence in your own experience. Your experience can stand on its own but you should not push it on everyone. That is what religious zealots do.

jgill

Boulder climber

Colorado

Aug 22, 2014 - 08:37pm PT

You will never, under any circumstance, meet someone who can hold an alert, open focus without prolonged practice (JL)

A conviction borne of personal experience and lots of data no doubt. If you say so.

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - Aug 23, 2014 - 11:57am PT

You will never, under any circumstance, meet someone who can hold an alert, open focus without prolonged practice (JL)

A conviction borne of personal experience and lots of data no doubt. If you say so.

John, this is not a case of me "saying so" based on my guessing about what I believe or in trying to bolster my position or any succh thing. MH2 is arguing simply because he likes to challenge anyone claiming anything catagorically - with the excepting of someone providing a measurement. But notice what he will NOT do - try it on for size himself and report back as he was invited to do. As is, he's arguing about Paris having never been there, always trying to find an exception to undermine, and missing Paris entirely. Judgement sans inveestigation is truly a duffer's trap.

And an Open Focus does not translate to an "empty mind," but rather to the direct experience of emptiness, or no-thing-ness. Big difference.

I view allof this talk as unconscious discusive rants demanding, beseeching the opposite to be false, unverifiable, invalid, etc. However when it comes time to actualy do the testing, to put the hypothesis to work, we get nothing back but more talk. Mercy . . . It's basic science. Here is the theory - you cannot hold an open focu for long without training. You doubt the theory, simply test it. No woo or mystery to it.

Per the "data," that data is overwhelmingly robust, reaches back thousands of years and exists in all meditation halls and in any text that goes into personal or 3rd person (in the case of teachers) accounts of people dealing with the challenges of practicing alert, empirical self observation. There is no instance in the literature, nor yet will you find any teacher or practitioneer who has either experiences, or data of others, who right off the bat simply sat down and dropped into the space between thoughts, sensations, memories, desires, etc. and could hang there witout being shanghaied by the first idea that came along, then snapping back to a while later and wondering where they went, how they lost the open focus, etc.

The practice is a proces and no one skips rungs, though some are faster than others. But be a good scientist and don't take my word for it. Test the theory for yourself, or read about it if your are scared or bored or lazy or can't be bothered for whatever reason - and tell us your experience, or what you have read about people getting started with no-mind self observation. What people struggle with is that this is not an inherent skill, and that someone, somewhere has dicked it with no practice - which is as ludicrous as claiming someone could master writing sonnets or playing the violin or doing hard math with no practice at all. They could just step up and do it.

Not ever . . .

More later. Time to go riding.

JL

Jan

Mountain climber

Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa

Aug 23, 2014 - 04:16pm PT

Thanks Base, for the heads up on the new Scientific American and you should read the new chapter by Sam Harris in return. http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/chapter-one

I do really like what Harris has written. I was thinking as I read it that he covers many of the same issues I always did in my comparative Asian religion classes. As for religion, he doesn't espouse any, but he's got Buddhist philosophy oozing out of his pores.

For all those who read Largo and get confused, try Sam Harris. He says much the same thing about emptiness and no thingness and loss of self, but in slightly different vocabulary which often helps. Harris seems to have mostly followed the Theravada school of philosophy and meditation which is an entirely different branch than Zen, so it's interesting to see the similarities and differences.

Harris also takes the very classic Buddhist approach of discussing things from the personal up. Are you happy and what does happiness mean anyway? If you aren't, how can you acquire happiness? No talk of cosmology or metaphysics at all, but an emphasis on personal ethics instead.

The great British historian of the rise and fall of civilizations, Arnold Toynbee, often said that the most important event of the 20th century is that Buddhism made it to the West. I thought of this often as I read Harris. His secularized Buddhism (the Theravadins say this was the original Buddhism) is the type that will take hold I'm sure. It is skeptical of all isms, sees the shortcomings of both religion and science in human affairs, at the same time believing that the findings of neuroscience will help us to understand why these age old techniques of meditation work. He sees meditation as a method of building a better and happier and more ethical brain. No woo.

High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber

Aug 23, 2014 - 04:32pm PT

For all those who read Largo and get confused, try Sam Harris.

lol, I was going to post up the same thing yesterday, but then I got distracted. Darn the discursive! discursive this and that, discursive wanting, discursive surfing, discursive reading. At bottom, discursive out of control, unregulated thinking I guess. No wonder half the time I feel like a bb in a tin can in a wash machine!

But I'm not sure I got a lot out of it, this first chapter. But I'll withhold judgment and wait to see. Frankly, his writing on this one seemed, well, a bit "discursive," but we'll see later.

I agree though on this. Given the "poverty of language" concerning all the many and various new schools of thought and thinking going on ushered in by the modern secular age, there is a place for "spiritual" even among the atheists, non-religious, scientific and others, imo, although of course the definitions need to change depending on area, field or context.

"Spiritual" doesn't necessarily need to mean ghostly or pertain to woo.

WBraun

climber

Aug 23, 2014 - 05:19pm PT

How ironic HFSC and Sam Harris both atheists following Buddhist philosophy.

Buddha was none other than God himself but never said he was.

He preached Ahimsa non violence against animals and all living entities.

The Brahmanas during that period used a vedic animal sacrifice for eating animals.

There was never any injunction for killing animals for sense gratification.

The sacrifice was for releasing the soul of the animal to get a higher body namely human.

They only used a very old animal.

It was a test of their brahmical powers.

Because Buddha preached against the vedas it was considered atheistic.

But only God himself can do this correctly by cheating the atheists to stop further Karmic reactions that will occur in their next lives.

After Buddha disappeared from view to the materialists he returned as Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and drove Buddhism out of India and reestablished the vedic consciousness.

Chaitanya Mahaprabhu defeated all the atheists, impersonalists, the mayavadis, and the Buddhists.

The Buddhists maintain that the principle "I am" is the Ultimate Truth, but this excludes the individuality of "I" and "you."

If there is no "I" and "you," or individuality, there is no possibility of argument.

The Buddhist philosophy depends on argument, but there can be no argument if one simply depends on "I am." There must be a "you," or another person also.

The philosophy of duality--the existence of the individual soul and the Supersoul--must be there.

This is confirmed in the Second Chapter of the Bhagavad-gita

High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber

Aug 23, 2014 - 05:59pm PT

Harris writes,

"1. The moment we admit the possibility of attaining contemplative insights—and of training one’s mind for that purpose—we must acknowledge that people naturally fall at different points on a continuum between ignorance and wisdom. Part of this range will be considered “normal,” but normal isn’t necessarily a happy place to be. Just as a person’s physical body and abilities can be refined—Olympic athletes are not normal—one’s mental life can deepen and expand on the basis of talent and training. This is nearly self-evident, but it remains a controversial point. No one hesitates to admit the role of talent and training in the context of physical and intellectual pursuits; I have never met another person who denied that some of us are stronger, more athletic, or more learned than others. 2. But many people find it difficult to acknowledge that a continuum of moral and spiritual wisdom exists or that there might be better and worse ways to traverse it... 3. Stages of spiritual development, therefore, appear unavoidable."

I thought this was an interesting section. All three points, at least thought-provoking.

This one, too, regarding first person mental facts...

"Every mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. This is a first-person fact—but it is, nonetheless, a fact that any human being can readily confirm. We don’t have to know any more about the brain or about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to understand this truth about our own minds."

So we can gather together facts (collect into a body of knowledge) about our minds and how they work, also facts about first-person sujectivity, that many if not most should be able to agree on.

Now of course I knew this before just as millions do but it is nice to hear it expressed every so often for reinforcement sake. Maybe someday it will be a part of a new modern secular belief system for getting on in life that millions will share in as a kind of common ground.

Iow, what he's discussing here is the issue or claim that there are objective facts about subjective experience. No wonder we are sometimes confused between objective and subjective.

And I like to ponder this, too, as a variation in terms of "mental life." So thus, version #2: there are objective facts to be known, to be discovered, to be learned, to be taught, about our "mental lives."

My "mental life" was busy as a bee today, everywhere discursive but also productive, I think. :)

.....

Still a personal favorite of Sam Harris: Insofar as it's a pointless universe and we're mortal... "How can we create lives that are truly worth living, given that these lives come to an end?"

I think it's right up there with: To be or not to be?

jgill

Boulder climber

Colorado

Aug 23, 2014 - 06:18pm PT

which is as ludicrous as claiming someone could master writing sonnets or playing the violin or doing hard math with no practice at all. They could just step up and do it (JL)

Good Will Hunting notwithstanding - that movie was a real stretch.

;>)

MH2

climber

Aug 23, 2014 - 07:41pm PT

There is no instance in the literature, nor yet will you find any teacher or practitioneer who has either experiences, or data of others, who right off the bat simply sat down and dropped into the space between thoughts, sensations, memories, desires, etc. and could hang there witout being shanghaied by the first idea that came along (JL)

That does not guarantee, as you claim, that no one has ever done that.

How much do music, sonnet-writing, and math share in common with holding an open focus?

The interesting thing to me is that you are unwilling to qualify your statement. You insist on the unverifiable absolute rather than say that holding an open focus is merely difficult and to the best of your knowledge requires practice.

jstan

climber

Aug 23, 2014 - 08:20pm PT

That does not guarantee, as you claim, that no one has ever done that.

MH2

Based just on his perceptions, JL is long on knowing what can't be done. It is left to us to get used to letting all this just float by.

ood Will Hunting notwithstanding - that movie was a real stretch.

JG

Millions of people are letting the possibility of being a Warren Buffet guide their vote. I hope it is less serious when I wonder why I can't read as fast and remember as well as Will Hunting. He was pretty stupid on one level though. Wondering whether he should check into Minnie Driver. That is pretty bad.

MH2

climber

Aug 23, 2014 - 08:24pm PT

Thank you. Yes. Open focus. Things float by.

Jan

Mountain climber

Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa

Aug 23, 2014 - 08:51pm PT

Reading fructose's comments on Harris, I feel I should clarify that while I saw Buddhism all over what Harris wrote, and he admits he has spent as much as two years in silent meditation altogether, unless you are very familiar with Buddhist vocabulary, you probably won't perceive it that way but will simply see his writings as a modern secular philosophy as does fructose.

For sure, he has found a way to discuss meditation and other than normal states of mind in a neutral enough way, that what he says will be accepted by a large spectrum of people. I admire this because I personally struggled hard to speak in an absolutely neutral way in comparative religion classes. Almost every word to describe the inner subjective world is so loaded with cultural and religious baggage, it's a real challenge.