zachadamcook wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2017 10:55 pm
I must admit I felt defensive once your replies came in because. . .
Forums are great for bringing geographically disparate groups together, but when all exchanges begin and end in these artificial deciding to sit down and write a letter form, it can feel like a lot of things that are easily understood in person can be wasted in writing. Glad your content that we're all on the same page working this through together.
zachadamcook wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2017 10:55 pmAfter reflecting on this the only thing I will still stand by is the claim that meditation and yoga have many benefits. Also meditation and yoga do have scientific facts to back up their benefits. When I said "prana" I meant the information that carries life. Things like blood, electromagnetic aspects of the body, and other things. Doing yoga helps regulate these things and helps the body regulate the channels that carries these things.
Most widely known is that meditation and yoga reduce stress and depression. Have you heared of any of this?
Taking up the habit of learning to calm your mind and switch headspaces is a fab skill as well as turning your body into a rubber band over a year aha, better blood flow and decreased resting heart rate, I bet you could even see higher rates of cancer prevention with people getting to know the contours of their body well, noticing enlarged lymph nodes and such from twisting and stretching for long periods every day.
I would like to gently push back on you using 'prana' from another angle, which is a lot of Indians aren't overly keen on people dressing up their pseudo-science in Hindu words to sound cooler because it keeps alive the image of India as "land of dreamers and mystics." When in reality India like Greece and China had thriving schools of philosophy from materialist to buddhist, and every virtue ethic in between. See Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism.
And yea the pseudo-science stuff is especially important to sending out the right vegan message as a lot of people looking to restrict their diet for mental health reasons like anorexia or physical/terminal illness might come to the vegan 'scene' with higher hopes than warranted from misguided advocacy, and otherwise not listen to medical facts.
Vegan blood on vegan hands (re: difficult video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z4G0biL9B4
Thought you might like this video on transcendence, I watched it way back but left an impression so transcribed it for easy consumption:
Transcendence and Spirituality with Sam Harris
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0B-cUSX57Q
Full Transcript:
Several questions on meditation and one thread I think I should pick up on here, is this connection between, anything we might talk about in terms of self-transcendence, words like transcendence, words like spirituality and the notion of supernatural things.
Is there any any kind of spookiness that we must believe in or endorse in order to practice meditation or grant some legitimacy to these claims, I think we have to we have to make a really clear distinction between describing the character of one's experience and making claims about the way the cosmos is and this is really where a lot of conversations about really any conversation about meditation and spirituality and science tends to go astray.
You have someone like Deepak Chopra who is a, you know for all intents and purposes a pseudo scientist and a charlatan, who makes claims legitimate claims about the character of, the experience of meditation, it's possible to feel that you're one with the universe and to lose your sense of boundary with the universe, it's possible to have really wonderful oceanic experiences of consciousness, or experiences that seem like just pure consciousness, where sense-data fall away and it just seems like you are consciousness prior to anything else showing up in terms of the character of your experience.
But someone like Deepak then moves from those experiences to making claims about consciousness giving birth to the universe, that we are the one mind in which the universe is arising, metaphysical and even physical claims for which there is no warrant, and so you have to be very slow to extrapolate from what you experience in the in the darkness of your closed eyes to what is true of the nature of the universe.
And so people have been offered a kind of false choice between pseudoscience on the one hand, of the Deepak Caporeon flavor and a kind of pseudo spirituality or a pseudo mysticism because it is not true when most scientists and even most atheists and secularists say well we we're spiritual, if spiritual means I love my kids, I've experienced a beautiful sunset, I'm in awe the beauty of nature, I'm you know when Einstein says that it's just it's a miracle that the laws of nature are rationally intelligible and they're mathematically beautiful, this whole sort of picture of awe and wonder that that that scientists can attest to, if that's spirituality well then I'm spiritual too and it's really nothing left out.
There is something left out, that whole picture, as valid as that is, in terms of describing the scientific impulse and rather ordinary experiences of beauty in the world, that is not what a mystic, a real mystic or contemplative experiences after his 10th year in the cave doing nothing but meditate. I mean that is not the highest possibility of human consciousness being attested to by all of the religiously confused people over the ages who have talked about being one with the universe, there is another, there's a spectrum of experience that we have to acknowledge that many millions of people have experienced, that is a hell of a lot more interesting in the end and transforming of the human personality than just being in awe at the beauty of nature.
So atheists deny this at their peril because people have had these experiences know that it's not, they're not being captured by this language of what a beautiful sunset, so my argument is that we have to avoid pseudoscience and we have to avoid pseudo spirituality, there is a we have to just become interested in the full spectrum of human experience and talk about it rationally.
Also:
Sam Harris: The Self is an Illusion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fajfkO_X0l0
What one of the problems we have in discussing consciousness scientifically is that consciousness is irreducibly subjective. This is a point that many philosophers have made – Thomas Nagel, John Sorrell, David Chalmers. While I don’t agree with everything they’ve said about consciousness I agree with them on this point that consciousness is what it’s like to be you. If there’s an experiential internal qualitative dimension to any physical system then that is consciousness. And we can’t reduce the experiential side to talk of information processing and neurotransmitters and states of the brain in our case because – and people want to do this. Someone like Francis Crick said famously you’re nothing but a pack of neurons. And that misses the fact that half of the reality we’re talking about is the qualitative experiential side. So when you’re trying to study human consciousness, for instance, by looking at states of the brain, all you can do is correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become that never gives you license to throw out the first person experiential side. That would be analogous to saying that if you just flipped a coin long enough you would realize it had only one side. And now it’s true you can be committed to talking about just one side. You can say that heads being up is just a case of tails being down. But that doesn’t actually reduce one side of reality to the other.
And to give you a more precise example, we have very strong third person “objective measures” of things like anxiety and fear at this moment. You bring someone into the lab, they say they’re feeling fear. You can scan their brains with fMRI and see that their amygdala response is heightened. You can measure the sweat on their palms and see that there’s an increased galvanic skin response. You can check their blood cortisol and see that its spiking. So these now are considered objective third person measures of fear. But if half the people came into the lab tomorrow and said they were feeling fear and showed none of these signs and they said they were completely calm when their cortisol spiked and when their palms started to sweat, these objective measures would no longer be reliable measures of fear. So the cash value of a change in physiology is still a change in the first person conscious side of things. And we’re inevitably going to rely on people’s subjective reports to understand whether our correlations are accurate. So the hope that we are going to talk about consciousness shorn of any kind of qualitative internal experiential language, I think, is a false one. So we have to understand both sides of it subjective – classically subjective and objective.
I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuro-anatomical sense. There’s no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. We know that everything you experience – your conscious emotions and thoughts and moods and the impulses that initiate behavior – all of these things are delivered by a myriad of different processes in the brain that are spread out over the whole of the brain. They can be independently erupted. We have a changing system. We are a process and there’s not one unitary self that’s carried through from one moment to the next unchanging.
And yet we feel that we have this self that’s just this center of experience. Now it’s possible I claim and people have claimed for thousands of years to lose this feeling, to actually have the center drop out of the experience so that you just rather than feeling like you’re on this side of things looking in as though you’re almost looking over your own shoulder appropriating experience in each moment, you can just be identical to this sphere of experience that is all of the color and light and feeling and energy of consciousness. But there’s no sense of center there.
So this is classically described as self-transcendence or ego transcendence in spiritual, mystical, new age religious literature. It is in large measure the baby in the bathwater that religious people are afraid to throw out. It’s – if you want to take seriously the project of being like Jesus or Buddha or some, you know, whatever your favorite contemplative is, self-transcendence really is at the core of the phenomenology that is described there. And what I’m saying is that it’s a real experience. It’s clearly an experience that people can have. And while it tells you nothing about the cosmos, it tells you nothing about what happened before the Big Bang. It tells you nothing about the divine origin of certain books. It doesn’t make religious dogmas any more plausible. It does tell you something about the nature of human consciousness. It tells you something about the possibilities of experience but then again any experience does. You can – there’s just – people have extraordinary experiences.
And the problem with religion is that they extrapolate – people extrapolate from those experiences and make grandiose claims about the nature of the universe. But these experiences do entitle you to talk about the nature of human consciousness and it just so happens that this experience of self-transcendence does link up with what we know about the mind through neuroscience to form a plausible connection between science and classic mysticism, classic spirituality.
Because if you lose your sense of a unitary self – if you lose your sense that there’s a permanent unchanging center to consciousness, your experience of the world actually becomes more faithful to the facts. It’s not a distortion of the way we think things are at the level of the brain. It’s actually – it brings your experience into closer register with how we think things are.
, I am not making any wild claims like...