Kudos to Sal for a clear, cogent and intelligent description of how we fool ourselves into thinking and believing we are more than we actually are.
________________________________ From: salyavin808 <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2014 10:23 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Chopra's Consciousness Challenge.... ---In [email protected], <punditster@...> wrote : On 6/19/2014 1:18 AM, salyavin808 wrote: Let's put it this way - the existence of consciousness can't been demonstrated by physical ontology because consciousness is a spiritual ontology. >>Which is another way of saying you'd just rather not think about it. Or at least will refuse to be happy with the answer. > >Neuroscience doesn't have much to say about spiritual cosmology. It doesn't need to have. All it needs to do is show how a system can create explanatory metaphors, it doesn't matter what the metaphors are, they could be spiritual or mechanistic or a mixture. The proof will come in the testing to see which is the best explanation for our experience. And the human awareness of experience has changed a lot recently. It used to be limited to what we saw and heard, thus the old explanations could be "spiritual" as there wasn't any way of gainsaying it. For instance: believing that the world is fundamentally human consciousness. With greater tools for exploration than our senses we know that the universe is much older than humans, so the Asian spiritual cosmology is dead in the water. It's either that or everything we think we know is wrong. You can't have both. > > According to the early Buddhists (before the schism) adherents of the so-called Consciousness Only school believed that consciousness was the only reality - everything else was just an appearance, not real, yet not unreal either. The authors of the Upanishads worked out a philosophical system that was light-years ahead of Western speculation about the mystery of consciousness. > Light years ahead in accuracy or complexity? You can have the fanciest theory about how the mind works but it's pointless if it isn't correct. are these the guys who said we could fly and become invisible? I'm not impressed. >And, the yogins of ancient India supplemented the philosophy with yoga - a method to experience pure consciousness. According to Eliade, yoga is native to India and appears nowhere else in world civilizations. The idea of a transcendental field that can be known through free will is apparently unique to South Asia. > All of which is explicable with neurophysiology as it is now. Ask Lawson about EEG's and defocused attention. Everyone reading this has had the experience of infinity, do you really think you are experiencing something outside of your head, some sort of timeless, edge of the universe thing? Or are you seeing an altered state of the part of the mind - as dependent on brain functioning as the rest of it - that gives us the inner picture of depth and space that we have? I think the writers of the Upanishads had the same meditational experiences we do and, lacking decent models of brain functioning, gave them these literal interpretations which formed the base of their cosmology. >
