Thanks, Lawson. I think it'll be so much fun when we can see all these abstract states, such as absolute faith, right there in the fMRI.
On Saturday, April 12, 2014 4:07 PM, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote: IF you have absolute faith in samadhi, that is, if your samadhi is unshakable, regardless of circumstances, then the ability to float might manifest. And placebo might be related to that in some way as there are overlaps in which brain circuits are activated during placebo effects and during the practice of the TM-Sidhis.. There are also overlaps in the brain circuits that activate during pure consciousness and during mind-wandering, so placebo being related to siddhis practice is like saying that pure consciousness is related to mind wandering. Or something. L ---In [email protected], <sharelong60@...> wrote : Lawson, thanks for the additional definitions of shraddha. Could you say more about your last two sentences? I'm missing your main point somehow. On Saturday, April 12, 2014 5:12 AM, "LEnglish5@..." <LEnglish5@...> wrote: "If you had the faith of a mustard seed, you could move mountains." shraddhaa is translated as "Faith" which can mean trust, or belief without proof. The Hebrew word translated as "faith" means something along the lines of "strong [in God]" and the Greed word means something like "intuitive knowledge." "Grok" in the original sense of the Martian word for "drink" seems to contain a bit of the same feel. In the context of the siddhis, how about "absolute stability" of samadhi? The placebo effect might be related to that, in the same way that mind-wandering is related to pure consciousness. L ---In [email protected], <cardemaister@...> wrote : They might be called to be based on placebo, because, IMU, faith (shraddhaa) is theconditio sine qua non of samaadhi. As an analogy, I'll try to explain in English, how I seem to recall to have learned to bike (at about 7 years of age). It might have been the very first time I ever tried to ride a bike. It was a women's bike, the one of the mother of a friend of mine. I just started to ride and kept on, believing, that a couple of other boys were keeping the bike upright. As a stopped, I noticed they were about 30 yards behind me! So I learned to bike because I, falsely, believed I couldn't fall (because I believed the other boys were running behind me keeping the bike upright)! So, in a sense my belief was the placebo that instantaneosly helped me to learn to ride a bike?? Wikipedia: Placebo effect and the brain Functional imaging upon placebo analgesia shows that it links to the activation, and increased functional correlation between this activation, in the anterior cingulate, prefrontal, orbitofrontal and insular cortices, nucleus accumbens, amygdala, the brainstem periaqueductal gray matter,[84][85][86] and the spinal cord.[87][88][89][90]
