On 6/19/2014 9:33 AM, Michael Jackson [email protected]
[FairfieldLife] wrote:
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.
>
The only way you can think is by being conscious. You got fooled into
believing that consciousness is a by-product of physics - however, there
is no physics without intelligent self-consciousness. Unless you want to
deny that you are self-conscious. Go figure.
>
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*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.
