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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Of course, more virile and thoughtful seniors (like Ed) may still have the horsepower and bandwidth to suss things out properly, academically, scientifically.
I contribute where I can... and I am very much in the mode of pulling back. While I seem to still be able to make contributions, what is a much higher priority for me is to help the next generation grow into their roles as scientists and science managers and leaders.
So it can't be all about me anymore, and it doesn't have to be... I've had a productive science career, and a productive management career... I've done pretty much what I'm going to do... maybe a couple of things I'd like to do left... but I'm happy with where I got to in the scheme of things.
It's actually a very nice place to be.
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Ay Aye
Social climber
MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Sep 10, 2015 - 12:06am PT
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'It Thought Me'
The weight of the brain weighs heavily on the mind,
There's the part of the self that we never find,
Round and round so tightly wound we're always bound,
The miasma of all our circuitry seems so unkind,
Some parts are left behind and some remain,
Melded and molded the meltdown has melted,
It scours the chrysalis hatching new birth,
What part was metal then now is new flesh,
Heart muscle is cauterized with iron mesh,
Scraping at the new world for all of its worth,
And sweet Caroline what beautiful music you sing,
Swaying to blues on a warm summer day,
If I could hold you and I could caress you,
Your love would sweep all of my troubles away,
If I could just be with you on this warm summer day,
Our minds are not there yet,
My mind and your mind's a lifetime away,
There's only this moment though,
There's only this one you know,
There's only what we don't know,
I know we are the dream,
We know so much more,
We have so much potential,
We can always dream more,
What will we let love teach us today?
-Ay Aye
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 10, 2015 - 04:22am PT
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Just a quick thought here.
Living life with no meaning is essentially impossible because we are by nature meaning-makers. But we can try and live with no meaning, or occupy a subjective space where meaning is meaningless, which usually causes our best nature to come forward - paradoxically.
No-meaning is a slippery term, and many people tend to feel negatively about feeling a meaningless orientation, not realizing that this negativity (nihilism) is itself a meaning, a negative one. NO MEANING precludes generating ANY value judgement, good or bad, about your experience. Your experience simply IS. And when values attach to your experience, that "this is good," and/or "this is awful," you simply let those feelings and judgements be, treating them as meaningless. Obviously this is an existential exercise, not an orientation we play out, for example, with our girlfriends. Telling Sheila that her hourglass figure and tenderness and intelligence and billion dollars and chalet in St. Moritz mean nothing to you does not, as they say, get it done.
Easy to describe. No so easy to step out of generating meaning.
JL
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Sep 10, 2015 - 05:41am PT
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While I think it's good to let go of former biases and limitations as much as possible, I think this happens to most people at some level as they age. We look back, just happy that we're still here and and laugh at how we used to care about such trivial things.
However, if we focus on anyone other than ourself for any length of time, we need to make choices. Therefore we need to care about what kind of person we want to be, how far we want to extend ourselves, how much energy we have to do so.
Personally I am going to teach online for many more years past official retirement as I too feel I'm not done with guiding young students. I still have mountains of data to publish because now it has become historical and I have knowledge that few younger members of my Sherpa tribe have but are interested in. I'm thinking more and more than my years of meditation in middle age were to reorient me somewhat to the later years. I'm doing more of the same as when younger but with a different attitude. No ambition, just a desire to go on being useful.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Sep 10, 2015 - 07:16pm PT
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Jan:
I like how you express what you see in front of you in your last paragraph. It’s a vision.
However, as for “needing to make choices,” “needing to care about what kind of person you want to be,” . . . I have doubts.
From my point of view, what looks like choices aren’t. They could well be functionalities that are simply you. What you do is what you are; it’s not like you have free will to be that which you are not.
Indeed, were that true, then “caring about who you want to be” would be irrelevant. “Caring” might constitute a diversion, an entertainment, something to observe with interest—but “caring” might be just thoughts that arise, simple manifestations (from God knows where). Taking oneself to be concrete, serious, real ,as [your name here] could be a fictive construction of linking memories (which are only occurring now)—as one would thread pearls to make a necklace.
Even intentions could be thoughts that arise out of nothingness.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Sep 10, 2015 - 09:15pm PT
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I am large; I am multitudes . . . I am Legion
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Sep 10, 2015 - 09:16pm PT
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I am tired.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Sep 11, 2015 - 12:27am PT
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I think the functionalities that are me were formed at an early age and at this point I do tend to just do them without too much analysis.
However, I come from a family where I had one role model who was a paragon of integrity and one who never missed a chance to fudge and be sleazy in the name of self interest, so for me there was always a choice to be made from as early as I can remember.
The fact that I chose one role model over another and strived hard to stay on that path caused me to function as I do now. I don't think our choices ever stem out of nothing if we trace them back far enough.
I could even go back further, using karmic reasoning, and say that I was incarnated into a particular family to be given that choice in this life.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 11, 2015 - 02:12am PT
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Healje, one can learn a hell of a lot - straight out objectifications - about "mind" via meditation, and I went into this in technical terms (focus, raw awareness, attention = the Three Pillars of sentience) but it found no purchase here because this is a discussion group. The experiential adventures all vector off the practicum aspect, not looking at the topo, so to speak, so there is little ground to cover for those lacking any interest to "shut up and stop calculating." As Mike said, there is a vast difference between direct experience and a construct.
And when John G. said that Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form is just a simple observation, he was considering the notion as a mental construct, which was no big deal - like glancing at the topo for the Chouinard Herbert on Sentinel and saying, "So what?" Get up there with no rope, like Honnold did for 60 Minutes, and you might change your tune - who cannot see why?
Fact is, if we were collectively trying to do various things per the experiential adventures, then reporting back here about what we experienced, this thread would be cooking with gas. But we ain't. We're fiddling around with constructs based not on climbing the route, but browsing the topo and speculating.
JL
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 11, 2015 - 08:11am PT
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Dingus, what exactly is "my church?"
Meditation can be widely viewed as simple introspection. It is only one of many possible means of looking directly at our lives, sans beliefs, faith, or dogma.
If you have any other means that you would suggest, I will take a crack at them, but I'm not a religious person so anything having to do with "church" is unlikely to go far with me. But if you have some experiential approach, techniques, methods, or whatever, I'll give them a test drive for sure.
I certainly don't claim to have any exclusive on the means of looking at our lives, and in fact my favored method (no-mind meditation) is probably the least popular mode going. So suggest something else and we can cover some ground.
JL
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Sep 11, 2015 - 08:40am PT
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We're back to the issue of vocabulary. We have to use some kind of words to describe experience and having trained in a Zendo for so many years, of course Largo uses that vocabulary. What is not clear is how much of the rest of Zen (reincarnation for instance) he has incorporated. It is easy to jump to the conclusion that he believes it all, when he's just using the vocabulary.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 11, 2015 - 09:08am PT
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Dingus, let's get real for a minute.
I said that the reason this thread doesn't cover as much ground as it might is because people are generally not discussing "mind" per se, even when they want to, but as Harris and many other have pointed out, they are discussing objective functioning, brain processes, and so forth, and speculating on mind.
Neuroscientists like to say that mind is an emergent function of the brain. But none will go so far as to say the emergent function is selfsame to the brain. But since most lack any means of investigating anything save objective functioning, they often default back to phrases like: Mind is what the brain does.
Of course we are not asking just what mind does, but what it IS, and in the regards we, as subjects (NOT objects) are obliged to observe within the experiential bubble itself. If this were all that easy, psychologists would not be in such high demand, nor yet friends and family, rabbis, priests, and any other sympathetic ear that can help a soul mutually wrestle down this life or ours.
Perhaps in the larger order of things, wrangling our lives - not just our biology - is what this thread is all about. If this were easy to do, or could be entirely known through biological investigations, of course we would do so - but that path, like all perspectives, has limitations. I remember once when I was young my father, an MD, said that eventually all mental issues would be handled through medication. But this is not remotely true, and in many cases it is not understood why people respond to this or that drug, or why it might eventually even worsen the condition. In some cases a person is diagnosed on the basis of how they respond to a given drug, while we wonder why the drug works in the first instance.
So we are in the end back to looking at our lives and wondering out loud: What gives? Perhaps this is what we all have in common, those of us who keep this thread alive.
Anyhow, and as mentioned, there are many ways of observing mind, and again, rather than bicker about the ways I have so far suggested, kindly suggest some of your own, or your personal observations per mind drawn from your direct experience. Anything that is legitimately empirical.
JL
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Sep 11, 2015 - 09:11am PT
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Cogent.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Sep 11, 2015 - 09:12am PT
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Fact is, if we were collectively trying to do various things per the experiential adventures, then reporting back here about what we experienced, this thread would be cooking with gas. But we ain't. We're fiddling around with constructs based not on climbing the route, but browsing the topo and speculating.
Good point. Why do you suppose no-one is reporting back? Perhaps to avoid the rolling of eyes? After almost 8000 posts the level of skepticism and ridicule would keep most reports where they originated, in the mind. Take a look at the "New-Age" movement and how anything that reeks of woo is automatically marginalized to some degree or another.
As an example, take a look at something like accessing the Akashic Records. Anyone here familiar with that? I know a few people that practice this and it is interesting how they are received.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 11, 2015 - 09:14am PT
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I don't see anyone here jumping to conclusions about Largo's beliefs. He has repeated himself often over the years; "The map is not the territory.", and so on. From his pulpit he uses phrases like, "fundamentalist quantifiers" to chastise the unbelievers. He claims to not be religious, but that is the way many true believers see themselves. They do not follow a religion. They know the truth.
Jan and PSP also PP and Wayno talk about meditation in a tone which does not put the uninitiated at a loss.
JL may be different because of his zendo training but the issue is not his vocabulary. More likely he has adopted the Rinzai method of rapping students with a bamboo.
Whether he sees himself as a preacher or not, he acts as one here.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Sep 11, 2015 - 09:20am PT
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A few months ago (maybe it was this thread) I made the important point that computation and quantifying were at the very root nature of consciousness itself. Far from being merely an artificial epistemological method optionally superimposed upon nature by dudes in white coats, computation is at the very heart of awareness/perception/thought whenever and wherever consciousness functions:
When you look at the hands of a clock or the streets on a map, your brain is effortlessly performing computations that tell you about the orientation of these objects. New research by UCL scientists has shown that these computations can be carried out by the microscopic branches of neurons known as dendrites, which are the receiving elements of neurons. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131027140632.htm
Without this computational,quantifying taking place in the CNS and brain at all times there could be no consciousness:
The theory, called "orchestrated objective reduction" ('Orch OR'), was first put forward in the mid-1990s by eminent mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, FRS, Mathematical Institute and Wadham College, University of Oxford, and prominent anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, MD, Anesthesiology, Psychology and Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona, Tucson. They suggested that quantum vibrational computations in microtubules were "orchestrated" ("Orch") by synaptic inputs and memory stored in microtubules, and terminated by Penrose "objective reduction" ('OR'), hence "Orch OR." Microtubules are major components of the cell structural skeleton. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140116085105.htm
(In 2013-2014 quantum vibrations were detected in microtubules inside brain neurons-- corroborating this theory)
Objective/subjective states of mind are two sides of the same coin of consciousness. There exists no basic unbridgeable dividing line between the two. They are not opposed to one another in their respective form or function--they simply take place in different parts of the brain. Both are made possible by materials and processes which lie at the foundations of physical existence. Both have evolved within evolutionary dictates.
If you told human consciousness to "shut up and stop quantifying" (or whatever the phrase is) and expected it to follow that advice in any real way-- death or unconsciousness would be the immediate result.Both subjective and objective states of awareness would be extinguished.
_
take a look at something like accessing the Akashic Records
This is an old idea brought to life and somewhat streamlined by Theosophists a hundred or more years ago.
If the universe could be fancifully thought of as a computer simulation then the Akashic record might be the hard drive, or one of the storage hard drives-- or better yet perhaps the laser element that conveys information to and from these hard drives to the simulation hologram surface (transport is required due to these hard drive elements and operating system being located in an alternate universe,i.e., the "astral plane". This data laser would therefore be the photonic "astral light" referred to in Theosophist literature)
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Sep 11, 2015 - 10:43am PT
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Interesting perspective on the Akashic Records Ward. Alternate universes opens up a whole new perspective doesn't it?
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Sep 11, 2015 - 10:53am PT
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Alternate universes opens up a whole new perspective doesn't it?
The alternate universe accounts for the fact that the data must be transferred from the programming universe (that other universe) to the staging platform (our universe).
When all that information first arrived that was the big bang.(A huge data dump if ever there was,to put it mildly)
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Sep 11, 2015 - 10:53am PT
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"Form is emptiness and emptiness is form" is impossible to experience (and in the heart sutra they are talking about experience) unless you can transition to a non-dualistic relationship with the moment. I get stuck in a dualistic relationship often because I want things to be different then they are and consequently get very distracted from what is actually going on.
Some forms of buddhist meditation practice (zen, vipassna, tibetan buddhist and probably numerous others)offer a promise that if you make a genuine effort (do the work) you can become unattached to the dualistic relationship and experience a selfless, non conditioned relationship with the moment.
I have found most people are way to busy dealing with their personal stuff to pursue such a path.
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