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Consciousness and the Paranormal
- Thread starter Tyger
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S
smcder
Guest
@Constance
at first it pasted a whole page of poems I think - so I deleted ... see if this is the one
Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.
Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to
Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea
pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and
loving.
I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my
hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to, my
people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.
Thich Nhat Hanh
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at first it pasted a whole page of poems I think - so I deleted ... see if this is the one
Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.
Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to
Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea
pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and
loving.
I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my
hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to, my
people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
S
smcder
Guest
Metta and Tonglen are practices of extraordinary power that can transform the mind and dispose one to right action.
it is said the practice of Metta alone may result in enlightenment.
Thich Nhat Hahns genius was in recognizing the need to move Buddhism out if the monastery and off the cushion and into the world. in my own experience in a helping profession the hardest the rarest thing was compassion - people focused on fixing problems, not many know how to be present with a hurting person
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it is said the practice of Metta alone may result in enlightenment.
Thich Nhat Hahns genius was in recognizing the need to move Buddhism out if the monastery and off the cushion and into the world. in my own experience in a helping profession the hardest the rarest thing was compassion - people focused on fixing problems, not many know how to be present with a hurting person
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I'd love to read that short story.
S
smcder
Guest
I'd probably have to rewrite it - that was a few computers ago. ... I think it would be fun and might take it on ... a good way to write about my meditation practice too -
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I hope you do find time to do that at some point. I'd be interested in all of it.
I'm going to look up the two practices you name and find more to read by and about Thich Nhat Hahn. Thank you for these references.
S
smcder
Guest
for Metta "loving kindness" - Sharon Salzberg offers clear instruction - John Kabat-Zinn is good and Tara Brach ... for Tonglen, Pema Chodron ... Thich Nhat Hahn writes beautifully on this too and all have guided meditations widely and freely available on the web which is a good way to start.
I'd be interested to know what you find out and experience.
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I'd be interested to know what you find out and experience.
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On second thought, I think it might be best to read the following book first before diving into Mind in Life:
Amazon.com: The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (9780262720212): Francisco J. Varela, Evan T. Thompson, Eleanor Rosch: Books
Book description: "The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience. The authors argue that only by having a sense of common ground between mind in Science and mind in experience can our understanding of cognition be more complete. Toward that end, they develop a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology and situate it in relation to other traditions such as phenomenology and psychoanalysis.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Damasio is one (like Jaynes) who makes a distinction between experience (mind) and conscious experience (conscious mind). Interesting that Damasio implies "self" is primary over "experience" as I believe the brain stem theoretically evolved before the cortex.
Mind is the universe experiencing itself, conscious mind is ourself experiencing the universe experiencing itself.
S
smcder
Guest
I'm not espousing this view (nor am I denying this view!) but it gets at what I mean by the implications or consequences of the views that we take. I realize the positions illustrated here are in historical context and I'm not implying that any particular person holds these views - but it illustrates the ethical consequences (and possible secondary gain) of philosophical views
...
The propositions that the world is eternal, that the world is infinite, that the Tathagatha exists after death, and that the self is independent of the body reflect the view of existence.
The propositions that the world is not eternal, that the world is finite, that the Tathagata does not exist after death, and that the self is identical with the body reflect the view of nonexistence.
These two views were professed by teachers of other schools during the time of the Buddha. The view of existence is generally the view of the Brahmins; that of nonexistence is generally the view of the materialists and hedonists.
When the Buddha refuses to be drawn into the net of these dogmatic views of existence and nonexistence, he has two things in mind:
1. the ethical consequences of these two views, and
2 the fact that the views of absolute existence and nonexistence do not correspond to the way things really are.
The eternalists view this self as permanent and unchanging. When the body dies, this self will not die because the self is by nature unchanging. If that is the case, it does not matter what this body does: actions of the body will not affect the destiny of the self.
This view is incompatible with moral responsibility because if the self is eternal and unchanging, it will not be affected by wholesome and unwholesome actions.
Similarly, if the self were identical with the body and the self dies along with the body, then it does not matter what the body does. If you believe that existence ends at death, there will be no necessary constraint upon action. But in a situation where things exist through interdependent origination, absolute existence and nonexistence are impossible.
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...
The propositions that the world is eternal, that the world is infinite, that the Tathagatha exists after death, and that the self is independent of the body reflect the view of existence.
The propositions that the world is not eternal, that the world is finite, that the Tathagata does not exist after death, and that the self is identical with the body reflect the view of nonexistence.
These two views were professed by teachers of other schools during the time of the Buddha. The view of existence is generally the view of the Brahmins; that of nonexistence is generally the view of the materialists and hedonists.
When the Buddha refuses to be drawn into the net of these dogmatic views of existence and nonexistence, he has two things in mind:
1. the ethical consequences of these two views, and
2 the fact that the views of absolute existence and nonexistence do not correspond to the way things really are.
The eternalists view this self as permanent and unchanging. When the body dies, this self will not die because the self is by nature unchanging. If that is the case, it does not matter what this body does: actions of the body will not affect the destiny of the self.
This view is incompatible with moral responsibility because if the self is eternal and unchanging, it will not be affected by wholesome and unwholesome actions.
Similarly, if the self were identical with the body and the self dies along with the body, then it does not matter what the body does. If you believe that existence ends at death, there will be no necessary constraint upon action. But in a situation where things exist through interdependent origination, absolute existence and nonexistence are impossible.
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Brilliant man. Thanks for posting this video, boomerang. Here is information at amazon about his latest book, Self Comes to Mind:
Description:
A leading neuroscientist explores with authority, with imagination, and with unparalleled mastery how the brain constructs the mind and how the brain makes that mind conscious. Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years researching and and revealing how the brain works. Here, in his most ambitious and stunning work yet, he rejects the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, and presents compelling new scientific evidence that posits an evolutionary perspective. His view entails a radical change in the way the history of the conscious mind is viewed and told, suggesting that the brain’s development of a human self is a challenge to nature’s indifference. This development helps to open the way for the appearance of culture, perhaps one of our most defining characteristics as thinking and self-aware beings.
“Damasio’s continental European training sensitizes him to the reductionist traps that ensnare so many of his colleagues. His is the only one of the many consciousness books weighing down my shelves that feels it necessary to mention Freud’s . . . use of the term unconscious.” —The Guardian (Book of the Week)
“The marvel of reading Damasio’s book is to be convinced one can follow the brain at work as it makes the private reality that is the deepest self.” —V. S. Naipaul, Nobel laureate and author of A Bend in the River
Some scientific heavyweights have dared approach consciousness. Among them, Antonio Damasio has the immense advantage of a dual knowledge of the human brain, as scientist and clinician. In Self Comes to Mind he gives us a fascinating window of this interface between the brain and the world, which is grounded in our own body.” —Le Figaro (France)
“Damasio makes a grand transition from higher- brain views of emotions to deeply evolutionary, lower- brain contributions to emotional, sensory, and homeostatic experiences. He affirms that the roots of consciousness are affective and shared by our fellow animals. Damasio’s creative vision leads relentlessly toward a natural understanding of the very font of being.” —Jaak Panksepp, author of Affective Neuroscience and Baily Endowed Chair for Animal Well-Being Science, Washington State University
From Publishers Weekly
As he has done previously, USC neuroscientist Damasio (Descartes' Error) explores the process that leads to consciousness. And as he has also done previously, he alternates between some exquisite passages that represent the best popular science has to offer and some technical verbiage that few will be able to follow. He draws meaningful distinctions among points on the continuum from brain to mind, consciousness to self, constantly attempting to understand the evolutionary reasons why each arose and attempting to tie each to an underlying physical reality. Damasio goes to great lengths to explain that many species, such as social insects, have minds, but humans are distinguished by the "autobiographical self," which adds flexibility and creativity, and has led to the development of culture, a "radical novelty" in natural history. Damasio ends with a speculative chapter on the evolutionary process by which mind developed and then gave rise to self. In the Pleistocene, he suggests, humans developed emotive responses to shapes and sounds that helped lead to the development of the arts. Readers fascinated from both a philosophical and scientific perspective with the question of the relationships among brain, mind, and self will be rewarded for making the effort to follow Damasio's arguments. (Nov.) (c)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
What becomes clearer as we follow various researchers of consciousness is the poverty of the available language at our disposal in attempting to characterize the complexities of consciousness, mind, and self that we recognize through both neuroscience and philosophy in our time. Damasio's approach in this latest book is immensely clarifying, but I balk at the use of the word 'mind' to refer to unconscious evolutionary operations of the brain. I don't know what other term Damasio might have used in place of 'mind', given the paucity of terminology we inherit historically, to describe the evolution of the brain structures ultimately enabling consciousness, but I wish he could have found one or substituted a neologism to refer to it.
It's possible that I'll change my mind about that formulation after reading Self Comes to Mind, but for the present it seems to me to be a mystification. In the works of the phenomenological philosophers we experience the dawning realization of how consciousness discloses the chiasmic relationship through which it expresses nature while simultaneously standing apart from nature, introducing something new and qualitatively different in nature. What consciousness expresses, what it becomes through historically lived experience in the sedimentations of cultures and ideas {thinking}, is also 'information' that is added to and entangled in the holographic structure physicists recognize at the level of physics, the physical. But the information we add is not merely physical but also mental, emotional, purposeful, value-laden, and intensely felt, both at the individual and collective levels of our species life. As such it cannot be explained by physics with its sedimented materialist, objectivist, mechanistic, and deterministic presuppositions.
ps: 'experience' is another term that is inadequate to cover both unconscious and conscious being. We'd need another term to make the distinction between 'what happens' and 'the feeling of what happens' (the title of Damasio's most recent book before Self Comes to Mind)..
If amazon's book description of Damasio's Self Comes to Mind, which I quoted two posts back, is accurate, Damasio is still missing the way in which the "lived world" experienced by embodied consciousness contributes directly to the development of consciousness. Here's the first sentence of that description:
It sounds as if Damasio, like most neuroscientists, still sees consciousness as produced solely by the brain rather than recognizing that the long process of the development of consciousness took place in and through interaction with the world present to and encompassing incipient consciousness in its prereflective state -- a tactile, tangible, sensually communicating world in which evolving consciousness recognized its own 'situation', i.e., its situatedness in a milieu occupied by things that could constitute obstacles as well as efficacious means of survival, and occupied by others like oneself who could navigate and survive better in this world by working together. There is also the growing emotional responsiveness of our primate forebears to consider as a contributing factor in the development of consciousness, originating in the interpersonal bonds produced in the experience of nurturing the young and in the comfort found in pair bonding. And we should add, though we haven't yet discussed it, the aesthetic responsiveness of incipient embodied consciousness to the visible beauty of the natural world that calls consciousness toward it, draws it outward in ecstatic wonder and pleasure. Neuroscience, informative as it is about the brain, will not be able to provide an account of consciousness until it contemplates the bodily bearing of consciousness, the experience of the whole creature as it finds itself in a world and feels itself a native of that world . . . up to the point at which it realizes its difference from the rest of physical being by virtue of its consciousness and begins to think that in some significant way it is not a native of this world. And then higher-order thinking begins.
It sounds as if Damasio, like most neuroscientists, still sees consciousness as produced solely by the brain rather than recognizing that the long process of the development of consciousness took place in and through interaction with the world present to and encompassing incipient consciousness in its prereflective state -- a tactile, tangible, sensually communicating world in which evolving consciousness recognized its own 'situation', i.e., its situatedness in a milieu occupied by things that could constitute obstacles as well as efficacious means of survival, and occupied by others like oneself who could navigate and survive better in this world by working together. There is also the growing emotional responsiveness of our primate forebears to consider as a contributing factor in the development of consciousness, originating in the interpersonal bonds produced in the experience of nurturing the young and in the comfort found in pair bonding. And we should add, though we haven't yet discussed it, the aesthetic responsiveness of incipient embodied consciousness to the visible beauty of the natural world that calls consciousness toward it, draws it outward in ecstatic wonder and pleasure. Neuroscience, informative as it is about the brain, will not be able to provide an account of consciousness until it contemplates the bodily bearing of consciousness, the experience of the whole creature as it finds itself in a world and feels itself a native of that world . . . up to the point at which it realizes its difference from the rest of physical being by virtue of its consciousness and begins to think that in some significant way it is not a native of this world. And then higher-order thinking begins.
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It's not clear what is meant by existence and nonexistence in these schools of thought. Can you define that?
I agree that 'what we think we are' conditions how we think we should act during this embodied existence. I have not previously been drawn to study and practice Eastern mystical philosophy because it generally attempts transcendence of embodied life in the world through renunciation of the world we are living in. Phenomenological philosophy, esp as developed by Merleau-Ponty, Scheler, Levinas, and others, has attracted my attention because it reasons from the basis of what we can observe and learn about ourselves in this existence, i.e., our essential existentiality, that we have apparent obligations toward others and toward the ecology of this planet that supports all life on it. In others words, because we can take responsibility, it is incumbent on us to do so.
The problem with the two pre-Buddha schools of thought you describe -- both concluding from opposite metaphysical beliefs that we are under no obligation to conduct ourselves morally and responsibly -- is evidently that these ideas in both cases rest on knowledge we do not have -- in fact, on imponderables. We have no way of knowing whether the universe we live in might be infinite; we think we know that it will eventually collapse in entropy; we speculate that a Big Crunch might be followed by another Big Bang, etc., for awhile or ad infinitum. We also have no actual knowledge whether the universe we seem to exist in, or the whole extent of what might lie beyond it, has come from nothing or has come about by design or intention or influence on the part of purposeful lifeforms or beings whose scale and scope we cannot imagine. From the viewpoint of phenomenologists, those imponderables are irrelevant to the question of what we should do with our lives and with the planet whose destiny we now control to a considerable extent.
At the same time, there is obviously value in the value-generating perspectives of most mysticism, most religion, and all spirituality. These major streams of thought flowing forward from our ancient origins cannot be explained simply on the basis of 'fear of death'. They originated in human experiences of something existing beyond prosaic explanation, in our time beyond currently objective scientific explanation. If institutional science were genuinely curious about what can be learned about the nature of reality through human experiential consciousness, especially in manifestations of extrasensory perception, we would not be having this conversation. We would be observing progress being made by science in finally investigating and understanding what can be discovered by virtue of consciousness and mind -- subjects that science has only begun to study.
boomerang
Paranormal Adept
I keep coming back to a great physicist's (Bohr?) statement to the effect that a human being is just an atom's way of looking at itself. The boundary between 'self' and the universe as vast intelligence is a construct of the mind, evolved or emergent for purposes of biological survival. This is a very old thought. But recent work in neuroscience seems to support it nicely.
S
smcder
Guest
I think existence and non existence for these schools is defined above but it's probably not clear and it's definitely in a historical context / the Buddha was critical of these views and if I understand correctly would agree with what you say about what we can't know - this is why he refused to answer certain questions because they could lead to persons not taking moral responsibility - in this case the question of an immortal soul versus a materialist philosophy -
I hope to be able to explain a bit my changing view of Buddhism regarding renunciation - as my meditation practice has deepened recently and as I've focused a but on core teachings (dependent origination) my understanding has changed. renunciation is in terms of letting go, not clinging but engaging in the world in a very open manner. this is historically part of Buddhism but has also developed with Western Buddhism from the 1950s or so ... before enlightenment, chop wood - carry water / after enlightenment, chop wood ... etc so you engage the world without clinging. the same for sensual pleasure - so it's not an ascetic path (though it may be for monastics) the key is not to cling to pleasure or pain .., flexibility is why Buddhism I think has been so successful in the West in the past 50 years - and an emphasis on practice, the benefits of meditation - it's said enlightenment can come from simply following the breath, all if the Dharmma is inherent in the breath - it unfolds from the quiet mind. for me, the cultivation of compassion is important - Metta and Tonglen are both challenging to me as these practices involve extending compassion to difficult people and under difficult circumstances.
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