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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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The example I had in mind is my experience relieving pain associated with a severe gout attack. The pain is severe, sometimes continuous and lasts up to several weeks. In the beginning I use ibuprofen until my stomach is toast or they aren't strong enough. Sometimes if it is not too severe, I can walk around slowly working to the point that it is ignorable, but that usually just makes it worse. If I can go dark and quiet I can get to that point where the continual pain just melts away and I get a break. It doesn't fix the problem, but at least I get relief and so as soon as I go back to action, the pain returns eventually. I have done similar things with muscle and joint problems. I'm sure there is some kind of medical explanation or some kind of established technique but I just figured this out, out of necessity. I think the mind is capable of some amazing things and people tend to limit themselves for lots of reasons.
Basically, the conscious mind can willfully interrupt or over-ride impulses from and to the brain. I think there are already several established techniques like Bio-feedback and these are fields that are being actively investigated.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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"Finally, something of substance in this thread!"
With all due respect, you and I see things very differently.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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With all due respect, you and I see things very differently.
You make that sound like an issue. Or am I just reading too much into that?
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WBraun
climber
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severe gout attack.
The karmic reaction for the supporting and maintaining industrialized slaughterhouses is severe gout attack.
The karmic reaction for the supporting and maintaining animals to send to the industrialized slaughterhouses is severe gout attack.
Stooopid Americans are violent abusive fools and killers and thus their karmic reactions is lots of violence and wars in their society.
Stoopid Americans and their hamburgers ......
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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When you sit retreats pain comes up and since you are stuck on the cushion you get a chance to watch it. When the mind settles the pain appears as a energy or tension point and if you observe/feel closely it is changing constantly and quite a bit of the time it isn't even there .
Rather than labeling it pain and as something you wish would go away you just watch it and it changes the relationship.
Jon Cabot Zinn has done alot of work with meditation and pain and started a very successful program at UMass medical that has been adopted nation wide.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Ed: Drop the conversation and see. you imply (in your usual dismissive manner) that I don't... how do you know?
From your writing. Just above you wrote . . . .
Ed: I take it from the continued participation of the set of people engaged on this thread that we continue to create constructs to enable our engagement on this topic. Anyone can see this who is sitting with their terminal in front of them reading and responding to this thread.Reality as we know it is a construct...reality as we don't know it escapes our conversation here... however we can speculate over methods to achieving knowing, which is OP's launching initiative. What a method does to achieve that knowing requires a construct of both the method, and the new knowledge...
I did not mean to be dismissive. But "dismiss" is what seems to be called for.
Any discursiveness is a conversation. I can understand it plainly if we are just talking here; but, if you are trying to triangulate or reason-out Reality, then I don’t think you can do it. I don’t think anyone can do it. Just about every liberated master has said so. And every so-called “practice” is a finger pointing at what cannot be articulated. But it can be known.
As Largo keeps pointing out, IT’S THE EXPERIENCE that’s “the matter” (pardon the pun), and I mean experience AS experience—not as content. Content are beliefs. Experience is consciousness . . . not of “any thing.” No-thing. Get it?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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I have eliminated severe pain with a technique some might consider derived from meditation. Some might say otherwise.
If you can eliminate or reduce severe pain, that is the main thing. It isn't necessary to know how it works. In medical school courses at U of Chicago we were told, "Medicine is still largely empirical." Meaning that it isn't necessary to know how a technique works in order for it to work. People used aspirin for thousands of years before learning how it works.
There are advantages to knowing how a technique works if you want to improve on it and understand why it works for some people and not for others.
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WBraun
climber
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The material body is the source of all misery for the living entity.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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The karmic reaction for the supporting and maintaining industrialized slaughterhouses is severe gout attack.
The karmic reaction for the supporting and maintaining animals to send to the industrialized slaughterhouses is severe gout attack.
Stooopid Americans are violent abusive fools and killers and thus their karmic reactions is lots of violence and wars in their society.
No, actually, it's a lot worse than that.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Or, am I actually using a kind of meditation in motion?
I myself do this, and I'm sure many others as well. Working in construction my hands suffer some punishment. Early in my career one boss demanded, "take slivers out on your own time!" and that's resonated throughout my life. One day while pouring 27yds of concrete w/o gloves, my hands rubbed raw till bleeding and the lime burned like a mutha. But I couldn't stop till the job was done. Once I cut my finger in half jus behind the nail. Under my own pressure to get the job done I jus duct taped it up and continued working. With blood dripping out the end, and ready to through up under Excruciating pain. With a sense of duty, I actually felt moving to a different place in my mind. I rose to somesorta precise seriousness with a wide eyed awareness within a complete calmness of humility. And worked more efficiently than I prolly ever had/have. Moving meditation? Prior to the cut I was 180deg in attitude. My ego was soaring like a bull in a china closet =:-/
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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But more important is the recognition that thinking is a construct and not becoming attached to these constructs.
This confuses me. Is thinking, or what we're thinking about, the construct?
Thinking seems like it should be right in there with heart beating, breathing, peeing and poopin.
Seems like one of the defaults of the body?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Experience is consciousness . . . not of “any thing.” No-thing. Get it?
So work, research, climbing, gymnastics, surfing, etc. do not constitute "experience", eh? The word "experience" means sitting in a vacuous mental state? This is probably what JL means by experiential adventures - conscious observance of emptiness. Where's the adventure?
I, for one, am not impressed, but to each his own.
Constructs eh? Construct = something constructed. And away we go once again into nebulous land wherein dwells Oswald Rabbit and the Rock Candy Mountain. Used to love that comic when I was a kid!
Congratulations, Grandpa Wizard!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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...then I don’t think you can do it. I don’t think anyone can do it. Just about every liberated master has said so.
so you have the authority of "every liberated master"
it must be so
apparently, some practices are more pointable than others...
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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The experience of pain becomes emotional. We've all witnessed cutting ourselves and seconds later felt the pain. So pain is our bodily senses traversing into our emotions. The power of the mind is able to subside the emotion. Shouldn't that be considered free-will?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 5, 2015 - 04:24am PT
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John, I have noticed that you often use the word "vacuous mental state" to describe something but I am not sure what. Is such a state what you experience when you shut up and stop calculating? Are you inferring or speculating per what others encounter when they do whatever it is they are do?
My sense of this is that you might be equating content and the discursive grinding on content to be stimulating and in the absence of content and working it over, our brains go into a kind of sloth nothing blah "state."
If this is accurate, or nearly so, perhaps you can empirically do a "reality-check" and ask around and see if a vacuous mental state is found by anyone on this thread, and what is involved in attaining same.
In the experiential adventures most people are surprised to find that with some little training, they can pay even grater attention when, paradoxically, their content - equated with wild horses - is simply left to graze in the widest possible corral one can muster.
JL
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Yes, Dingus. There may be a kind of similarity in the swooping of bird flocks and the swirling of thoughts in a human brain, as there is between the shape of a coastline and the shape of a snowflake. However, we can see the birds and capture their behavior on film for analysis. We can't do that for thoughts.
Questions about how individual animals interact to generate collective behavior are being asked and answered. I like the studies of ant colonies. A study that opened new doors looked at the activity of individual ants versus the activity of the colony as a whole. Individual ants showed bursts of activity and long intervals of doing nothing. There was no clear rhythm to individual ant activity. When all the single-ant activity cycles were added up, though, the activity of the colony as a whole did show a distinct periodicity.
http://nsmn1.uh.edu/bcole/papers/Cole1991c.pdf
Questions about how individual(?) thoughts interact to generate behavior are beyond the scope of study by direct observation for now. Your reminder about apparent randomness is a point well made. In so-called chaotic systems, what appears to be random may be the result of deterministic processes which are very sensitive to conditions down at distance and time scales we have trouble resolving.
All of the examples of colony, swarm, school, flock, herd, or human crowd behavior depend to some degree on the nervous systems of the individual organisms. It could be that from studies of those interacting organisms we will learn things about how the neurons inside their brains interact to produce individual behavior. Sort-of fractal, eh?
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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BB: You’re a tough guy! Dude.
Jgill: So work, research, climbing, gymnastics, surfing, etc. do not constitute "experience", eh? The word "experience" means sitting in a vacuous mental state?
Ha-ha. Close. Even “a vacuous mental state” is a thing. No Thing.
Turn on the TV and watch it for a while. You’ll probably fall in with whatever narrative shows up for you. Now, drop the narrative. What do you see? Are you saying that there cannot be experience without content? Without interpretation?
Many of us have read captivating novels. How would you casually explain the feeling that you get, the story that captures you? Well, here’s what I might say. You are looking at dark squiggles on a white background. From that words are constructed by you, and those words become a plot line, and if it is one that really resonates somehow with you, feelings arise. If it is an especially vividly written novel (let’s say), you might even feel muscles tightening and loosening. It might even seem as though you are actually LIVING the story. All this from dark squiggles on a white background. Look at just HOW MUCH interpretation and construction are involved.
Neither I nor you can possibly describe how much or how extensively of that is going on every instant of our lives.
There is the equation, there is the chalkboard, and there is the light that shows both. It’s an old allegory (of the cave).
Ed: apparently, some practices are more pointable than others...
At the end of the day, it’s an inside job, Ed. An “experiential adventure” is a direct apprehension. You just “get it.” A person can be explained differential calculus all day long and never get it, and another person can get it right away. There seems to be nothing that can prove anything to anyone (eh, DMT?). Everything is “personal.”
I can imagine, for example, how exasperating it might be for someone to say to an artist that (let’s say) something cannot be painted.
Only you’re not an artist. You’re a scientist.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 5, 2015 - 09:43am PT
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Ward said:
But that is not amenable to objective measurement
Not true. If your skull was physically opened up and your cerebrum scrambled like an egg you would conclude that consciousness is associated with the proper biologic functioning of the brain and CNS.
This is a type of crude observationally-based association which tells us more about consciousness than any activity bereft of measurement.
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Actually it doesn't tell you anything about consciousness, Ward, but it might tell you plenty about the objective functioning you associate with consciousness.
In fact, any activity bereft of direct observation cannot tell us anything about consciousness itself. This statement will make little sense to you unless you have worked through the reasons that subjectivity is not reducible to objective functioning, a kind of baby step toward the experiential adventures without which you will likely be looking to measurements while believing you are studying consciousness itself.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Only you’re not an artist. You’re a scientist.
oh, MikeL, you seem so controlled by your stereotypes... which you obviously require to maintain your rather stark criticisms...
when you resort to the refrain "you either get it or your don't" it is a sign that you not only can't explain "it" in any manner, but you secretly suspect that your prejudice for "it" is baseless... make an appeal to the "universal rightness" of experience.
as I've been saying since we have gotten onto experience, it has as much to do with reality as quantum mechanics does... experience is no more authentic then theoretical physics, it is ultimately just another perception... another construction if you will. Its major advantage is that you can't explain what it is, so that allows for all sorts of speculation.
as for your distinction between "artist" and "scientist" you display an obvious, but commonly held misconception of how science is done and probably how art is done, you aren't an artist and you aren't a scientist, you're, at best, a critic... and you decide, based on your own personal whim, what is "worthy" of your criticism on some particular day.
I find some of your criticisms very useful foils for my own opinions, which is criticism at its best.... often I find your criticisms rather flaccid... e.g. appealing to 8th century writings and presenting them as unquestionable 'truth' seems a bit weak, not that you seem to try very hard in many cases...
it is an Aristotelian notion: the reliability of our everyday experience...
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle/#Sci
"In Posterior Analytics ii 19, he describes the process by which knowers move from perception to memory, and from memory to experience (empeiria)—which is a fairly technical term in this connection, reflecting the point at which a single universal comes to take root in the mind—and finally from experience to a grasp of first principles."
not only Aristotle, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-india/
yet, in Aristotle's case above, we know that memory is not "objective" and we certainly know that "perception" is not "objective" either...
I can see that Largo, MikeL and others will object to the accusation of being Aristotelian in their notions of "experience," and there are problems with Aristotle's account... but this seems to be a common issue with grappling with experience... see the discussions on classical Indian philosophy. I invite them to describe their notions of "experience" (an invitation which I think they will demure with the equivalent statements: "you get it or you don't").
A powerful criticism of "experience" comes from Feyerabend's essay "Science without experience" which applies more broadly to our discussion.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Ed: oh, MikeL, you seem so controlled by your stereotypes...
Oh, Sweet Jesus, Ed. Try to relax a little. You’ve read that poorly. (Black squiggles on white backgrounds and two tons of interpretation.) It was just an imaginary characterization to point to something. I can see I should have added . . . “and you’re a darned good scientist.” Ugh.
EDIT: my most sincere apologies for the misunderstanding.
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