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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Dec 16, 2014 - 11:59pm PT
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John, connecting meditative experiences with descriptions of reality from other disciplines - be they science, psychology, art, etc. - should not be an insurmountable problem seeming that there is only one reality and we all ingress same by way of our one principal tool: Awareness. That's not to say we use meditation to generate measurements nor yet measuring to understand mind (though we do use measuring to understand brain and objective functioning). But all disciplines are typically attempts to bore into the heart of what is real, so it is no wonder that far enough along the road, we should converge on the same terrain. Each discipline has a kind of favored-nation to a particular mode of mapping and expressing reality (numerical, pictoral, etc.), but we all understand intuitively that the map is not the territory, no matter how accurate. Whatever is "out there" remains what it is regardless of the mode of inquiry. If meditation points to a void/emptiness at the base of reality, and science does as well, the means by which we symbolically represent the basic stuff might differ but the stuff (or non-stuff as it were) remains the stuff/non-stuff. Unless we go with the Copenhagen interpretation of QM where observing itself factors into what shape that stuff might take. This is surely stranger than any woo ever dreamed up by man or beast.
What a fantastic world we live in.
JL
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 17, 2014 - 06:51am PT
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woo or wu wei?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/science/a-meditation-on-the-art-of-not-trying.html
"the quest for wu wei has been going on ever since humans began living in groups larger than hunter-gathering clans. Unable to rely on the bonds of kinship, the first urban settlements survived by developing shared values, typically through religion, that enabled people to trust one another’s virtue and to cooperate for the common good... But there was always the danger that someone was faking it..."
effortless action
effortless performance
effortless grace
“Particularly when one has developed proficiency in an area, it is often better to simply go with the flow. Paralysis through analysis and overthinking are very real pitfalls that the art of wu wei was designed to avoid.”
"However wu wei is attained, there’s no debate about the charismatic effect it creates. It conveys an authenticity that makes you attractive, whether you’re addressing a crowd or talking to one person. The way to impress someone on a first date is to not seem too desperate to impress."
the art of not trying
try, but not too hard
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1593650&tn=2860
It's a shame all the wu wei posts on the PGRvS thread are gone. :(
.....
re: the religion of peace
The anti-Republican, anti-Fox, Slate and Ben Affleck libs working overtime this week to defend this faith.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 17, 2014 - 08:30am PT
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If our universe is infused with various fields - the Higgs, etc... it's not really empty anywhere.
I only mention this inconvenient observation in light of imagined connection between the 'fundamental void' - which apparently doesn't actually exist - and the mental state of No Thing so often mentioned on this forum. This is a non-theistic religious idea - born entirely of faith and lack of expertise with regards to what we know of the universe scientifically. It's an attempt to conflate a wholly psychological experience with some fundamental physical reality unrelated to the existence of the observer - by mis-applying a very fuzzy semi-knowledge of physics.
Such attempted connections move what otherwise would simply be another profound mental state achieved through meditation - one of many - to the realm of silly, made up stuff - the region of space time reserved for the faux profound.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 17, 2014 - 08:38am PT
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"It seems to me to be so much more worthwhile to look to the future than rehash the debates of the past.I think if we get enough people thinking in a new way about the future, the old thinking will just naturally drop away as the older generations pass." -Jan
So true! :)
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 17, 2014 - 08:46am PT
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I suppose I shouldn't defend Pastor John - who runs the homeless shelter/church were I volunteer once a month, because of those abortion doctor killers, then. Same same.
Now that's some sound scientific thinking.
Atheism or Death!!!!
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 17, 2014 - 08:54am PT
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I suppose I shouldn't defend Pastor John...
This is incorrect. You should support him esp insofar as he does good works.
His beliefs, on the other hand, insofar as they include ideas like stoning adulterers, males are superior, Jehovah wants homos ostracized... atheists aren't qualified (or shouldn't be qualified) to hold political office... not so much.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Dec 17, 2014 - 09:16am PT
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It's an attempt to conflate a wholly psychological experience with some fundamental physical reality unrelated to the existence of the observer - by mis-applying a very fuzzy semi-knowledge of physics.
My thoughts exactly. I find it completely unconvincing that theoretical and experimental formulations in modern physics--especially those that may hitherto represent an incomplete and provisional snap-shot of physical reality--- could be used as a synecdoche for whatever is the psychological state de jure amongst meditative spelunkers.LOL
This situation has the unfortunate and wholly illusory effect of elevating something like meditation to the status of an operational franchise to Quantum Mechanics---or some such of a thing.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 17, 2014 - 09:18am PT
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I don't know what Pastor John's beliefs are. We haven't discussed it because I don't really care one way or the other.
It's a liberal church, in any case, but my job there is to schlepp food and talk to crazy people so that can hold coherent conversations long enough to obtain public housing, not reform this church or that.
BTW - he's the most mindful person I know, but I know plenty of same.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 17, 2014 - 09:19am PT
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but my job there is to schlepp food and talk to crazy people
And you're not?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 17, 2014 - 09:24am PT
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JL:
What a fantastic world we live in.
Pay attention to the use of words. JL is no dummy.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 17, 2014 - 09:30am PT
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Sharp eyed reader ^^^^
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 17, 2014 - 09:38am PT
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Perhaps that's why I'm good at it, although I haven't seen any demons lately.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Dec 17, 2014 - 10:25am PT
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Interresting article on the school attack and pakistany politics. IMO the taliban are not true religious followers (no kidding!); they are just soldiers (killers) in a civil war.
HFCS puts more emphasis on the religious identity because that is how they justify their heinous acts. to say liberals are trying to justify the taliban is a fantatsy of yours. They are not the religion they are just civil war killers. Nasty as$$$$es that is for sure but don't say they are true followers of islam.
What about the sufi's?; any info I have seen on them always seems positive; HFCS, see if you can google something terrible about the sufi's might be difficult to do ?
Despite school atrocity, the Pakistani Taliban is weakening
Analysis: A permissive attitude toward other extremist groups is undermining Pakistan’s strategy
December 17, 2014 8:39AM ET
by Rob Crilly Everyone knew it was coming, but no one could guess just how barbaric the Pakistani Taliban's revenge would be.
For six months and one day, the Pakistan Air Force had bombarded the group in North Waziristan while ground troops rifled through its hideouts as part of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, the military’s long-awaited offensive against the armed groups that have brought years of misery to the country and the region beyond.
Tuesday’s massacre of 132 pupils and 16 staff at a school in Peshawar was the bloody blowback. But the question it poses for Pakistan’s leaders and their Western allies is whether the Peshawar massacre represents a worrying resurgence of violence or it's a sign that the Pakistani Taliban — a local umbrella body separate from the Afghan Taliban (which, incidentally, condemned Tuesday’s attack) — is a spent force, weakened and reduced to attacking soft targets.
Amir Rana, of the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies, said the Pakistani Taliban has been under intense pressure, losing foot soldiers in battle and to political splits. The movement’s leadership was rocked, Rana notes, by a massive suicide attack last month on the Wagah border crossing with India, near Lahore, that killed at least 55 people. Responsibility for the blast was claimed by Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a new breakaway group that includes a number of senior commanders.
School massacre challenges Pakistan’s squabbling leaders
Analysis: Pakistani Taliban attack highlights security challenges facing politicians locked in ceaseless power struggles
“The TTP needed something to claim,” he said, using the acronym for the movement’s full name, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.
The renewed bloodletting was hardly expected at the start of 2014, when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, backed by all the major political parties, opened peace talks with the TTP.
Two sets of interlocutors met and set the ground rules for government negotiators to meet Taliban commanders in North Waziristan. They agreed to a cease-fire, albeit one that was frequently interrupted.
A major attack on the Karachi airport in June, when 10 gunmen wearing suicide vests attempted to seize planes filled with passengers, was too much for the authorities to overlook. The talks were abandoned, and within days the military launched Operation Zarb-e-Azb – “Strike of the Prophet’s Sword” — in an attempt to gain the advantage.
Day by day, the military updates its toll of what it says are casualties suffered by the Pakistani Taliban. The total, according to the army, stands at more than 1,200. None of the details can be verified, however, as the region remains off limits to journalists.
The military claims to have killed a key Al-Qaeda operational commander in the course of the offensive and to have captured the 10-man gang responsible for the failed 2012 attempt to kill Malala Yousafzai.
The TTP has reportedly come under intense pressure in what it had come to consider its safe havens in Afghanistan. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that commanders said they had been targeted by drone strikes and by Afghan troops.
“Previously, they would avoid visiting areas where our people were staying and even provided food to some of our people, but now they’re creating problems,” a Pakistani Taliban commander said of Afghan forces.
Rana’s research center in Islamabad credits the offensives with putting the TTP on the ropes, resulting in a 30 percent drop in attacks across Pakistan.
The movement’s decline may have begun with last year’s U.S. drone strike that killed Hakimullah Mehsud, the TTP’s charismatic leader. His death sparked a bitter succession struggle, eventually won by Mullah Fazlullah, the man who allegedly ordered Yousafzai’s assassination.
Fazlullah's power base was in the Swat Valley rather than among South Waziristan’s Mehsuds, the clan that has dominated the TTP ever since it formed in 2007. As a result, the new leader has struggled to bind together the movement’s mishmash of gangsters, sectarian groups and Al-Qaeda-linked cells.
The most embarrassing split came in September, when Fazlullah’s own spokesman, Ihsanullah Ihsan (or at least one of the men using that pseudonym), announced the creation of Jamaat-ul-Ahrar by a number of powerful Mehsud and Wazir commanders. At a stroke, the Taliban lost a significant amount of its firepower.
But Tuesday’s carnage in Peshawar was designed to send a clear message: The TTP is far from a spent force. “The pace of attacks has gone down, so their capabilities are under pressure,” said Shashank Joshi, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “But they are showing they retain the ability to launch spectaculars even after the government offensives.”
The movement may be weakened, but it remains at the center of a radical network that stretches across Pakistan, he said, helping them operate in places such as Punjab, well beyond their traditional heartland.
Critics note that the Pakistani authorities don't treat all extremist groups as equal threats. It is frequently accused of adhering to a good Taliban/bad Taliban policy, distinguishing between groups, such as the TTP, that directly threaten the Pakistani state and those that are useful to its foreign policy objectives, such as the Haqqani network or Lashkar-e-Taiba, which direct their violence at Afghanistan and India, respectively. Even the Afghan Taliban remains integral to Pakistan’s goal of balancing India’s influence in Kabul.
Sartaj Aziz, a foreign policy adviser to the Pakistani prime minister, seemed to confirm those fears last month when he was asked why the military was not doing more to target other militant groups. “Why should America’s enemies unnecessarily become our enemies?” he told BBC Urdu.
Targeting one group such as the Pakistani Taliban, critics argue, makes little difference when so many other armed groups can operate freely. So while leaders of the Pakistani Taliban are being killed by drones, Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks, is free to preach every Friday in Lahore, despite a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head.
Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, said he hoped the Peshawar attack would lead to a re-evaluation of Islamabad’s relationship with armed groups. “If this time things are to change, then it has to result in a national consensus as to who is the enemy,” he said.
On Wednesday, the prime minister signaled a change in approach, announcing a new committee that would devise a strategy to root out violent extremists.
“There is no difference between good Taliban and bad Taliban,” Sharif said at a press conference in Peshawar. Such comments have been heard before, without much having changed. If the Pakistani Taliban can continue to operate with like-minded armed groups in sanctioned havens, its current strength or weakness may be irrelevant.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 17, 2014 - 10:26am PT
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WB: It's a good one :-)
It is.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 17, 2014 - 10:32am PT
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Does it surprise anyone (besides @BenAffleck) that the Taliban killers in Pakistan, while killing 141, shouted "Allahu akbar"? God is great?
Michael Shermer tweet, minutes ago.
HFCS puts more emphasis on the religious identity because that is how they justify their heinous acts.
that is how they justify their heinous acts.
That is correct.
Further, I put this emphasis on the religious identity because I've conducted study/scholarship in traditional fundamentalism in the Abrahamic religions going back 30 years now.
The obstructionists here are the novice naysayers and denialists - really in many respects no different from what we've seen re evolution the past couple decades. The ignorance/naivete is just as thick and embarrassing.
But it's all coming to a head now (1) thanks to this internet-driven info age; (2) thanks to the educated millenials everywhere participating. Exciting times.
IMO the taliban are not true religious followers (no kidding!); they are just soldiers (killers) in a civil war.
With all due respect, this is the equivalent of... IMO, evolutionary biologists aren't true scientists, they're just partisan hacks in just another ideology.
Only you know how much attention you've given over the years (decades) to the Abrahamic religions, in theory and practice, in belief and conduct.
But the mix-up between Affleck and Harris a few months back on the Maher show vignetted the issue/problem: it was an encounter between an utter novice (charismatic yes) and an expert. Clear to anyone with life experience in the subjects.
When a Muslim says to you he would like to please Allah by smiting infidels, there's a good chance he actually believes what's he's telling you. It's not just myth to him. The Quran is not just medieval literature. It's not just exaggerating. He's telling you what he actually believes as part of his inner operating system that informs him how the world works, what God Allah wants from him, and how he should live.
Like Harris says, what's stunning is just how many non-religious people have a problem understanding this. Those people lucky enough to have been raised outside fundamentalism one way or another - besides taking a moment of gratitude - should wake up. Wake up to this side of belief. Wake up to this side of human nature.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 17, 2014 - 11:05am PT
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Hey but PSP you've got Ben Affleck on your side, I don't underestimate the power of that there.
Bears repeating...
to say liberals are trying to justify the taliban is a fantatsy of yours. They are not the religion they are just civil war killers. Nasty as$$$$es that is for sure but don't say they are true followers of islam.
With all due respect, you are way out of your depth here. Wrong, wrong wrong from all sides, on all levels. Junior High (if that). Grade F.
Hey, why not just let loose and call Muslims a race, criticism of Islam racism and/or bigotry (v popular); and why not just let loose and call me an "Arab basher" like Lgo did a couple months ago. Should make you feel better? Righteous?!
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 17, 2014 - 11:09am PT
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The weird thing is, I can't see an altruistic end game to it. How is the value of meditation enhanced by such nonsense, exactly?
It does served to elevate the messenger to enlightenment alpha status, in their own mind, anyway, which provides a convenient platform for the recreational put down so often practiced by such self styled brahmin.
This ego-driven attempt to make meditation a competitive sport is the very antithesis of the whole point of mindfulness - a wholly connective practice - which leads me to believe that, despite their untold hours of dutiful practice, some of our local gurus seem to have entirely missed the point of their decades of toil.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 17, 2014 - 11:16am PT
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This ego-driven attempt By Tvash is the very whole point of his very poor fund of knowledge to something he does not have a real clue about at all.
Just your plain projections, mental speculations and false ego driven drool as usual.
HFCS is your partner in crime also ........
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 17, 2014 - 11:18am PT
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HFCS - your strawman army has amassed on our shores again. Do some Muslims, like many of their Christian and Jewish counterparts, also do good works to make the world a better place? Is not the action of the individual the thing?
Guess not, eh?
If not - let's see that data.
Same rules apply. That's the beauty of science.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Dec 17, 2014 - 11:24am PT
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recreational put down so often practiced by such self styled brahmin.
Yes this is the elephant in the room at the end of the day. I suppose we are all conditioned to regard "enlightenment" as having a behavioral or moral component which transform for the better the individual who espouses such advancements or achievements.
Why should we meditate or worship 6000 gods when at the end of the day we join in slinging monkey turds along with everyone else?
Again, this is undoubtedly the result of conditioning and overblown expectations. We should really not be too surprised when we discover the village priest has been dinging farmer's daughters , or sons, all along. Or that the guru next door with a charming exterior is a lust killer working on his 50th victim
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