On Feb 7, 2009, at 1:46 PM, Duveyoung wrote: > You guys have book-ended an issue. > > My favorite theory about meat-robot-programming is that 27 > repetitions are required to get something to "sink in." So here's > about the 20th time that I'm going to bounce this ball called > "Identification." Hee hee. As usual, I'll repeat, repeat, repeat, > but it's for yer own good! Honest!
An object or pattern we identify with and keep in our neural circuitry--or our consciousness--depending on whether you adhere to a materialist or a consciousness-based view seems, to me, to simply be tied to two things. One is that we perform an action or observe an object an we feel a sense of satisfaction in having performed the action or engaged the object with our senses. Part of this might be called the 'sense of play'. When we throughly enjoy something, we not only get so absorbed in it time seems to fly, but we also seem to be able to retain it in memory much more easily. This is because there are endorphins released that encourage our nervous systems to want to have that experience, to remember it and to attach to it. Conversely we now know that traumatic experiences--aversive experiences--are locked into our memories due to the release of adrenalin at the time of the imprint occurring. Because of this reality we now also know that a common blood pressure med can help some people escape these adrenalin imprinted memories by breaking that neurochemical circuit. Since we now know from research in meditation that the mind can and does change the brain. It's also simple to extend this to other patterns of habitual cognition. What you think habitually, your brain becomes. You're locked in. But thanks to neuroplasticity, we can use the mind and effective meditation techniques to change the brain and release patterns we do not find useful, helpful or ones that allow destructive emotions. In many ways we are essentially "virtual selves" (to use the term of Buddhist biologist and neuroscientist Francisco Varela) not that much different than the millions of people enslaved by the Matrix in the movie of the same name. Varela believed, and I'm sure many meditators of different traditions might agree, that the neurological accomplishment of lived human virtue (where it becomes a part of who and what we are, hard-wired in), what he called "ethical know-how" is related to progressive, firthand acquaintance with the virtuality of self. To him, and to many like myself, transformation goes hand in hand with lived ethical expertise. If ethical know-how is not increasing, then real transformation is not occurring.
