---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <steve.sundur@...> wrote :
Hey Sal, I must have missed this. Some comments. From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> Consider this. Once, when I was a newbie meditator with no involvement with the movement and no knowledge of Indian literature and philosophy, I was sitting in my TM chair having a "deep" meddy when all of a sudden even the settled mirror-like state I had reached disappeared in an instant and I was this vast space, I mean infinite, and there was this huge humming noise. It lasted a second and then I snapped back to reality in shock with my heart hammering. What conclusions about reality can we draw from that? Or rather, what would you infer? My guess is that with a grounding in Indian literature you might infer that I had experienced the ved. I would agree. What I would most likely disagree on is what the ved is. I know the mystic's explanation, here's mine: Inside my head my brain conspires to create the world we percieve, to do this it needs a sense of depth, and space and movement etc. These come from sense data. It also needs a sense that there is a "me" observing it all. When the brain settles down and the physiology changes different parts of the Cartesian theatre start to switch off, the importance of sense data lessen and the part of the brain that reacts to what it's seeing is partially deactivated without any stimulus. If it can settle down completely all we are left with is the sense of space and some sort of residual neural humming. Wowzer. I must be a simpleton Sal, cuz, I'd settle for just the mystical experience, and not worry too much about it. In fact, that's what happens to me most every day. > Here's the thing, both ideas seem to fit the evidence at the level of experience it's only when you dig into it that you start to wonder which is the best explanation. > What I notice, is that after a pretty intense day, business wise, I come home, catch up with my wife on things, have some dinner, do a little FFL, and then often need to go out again for a few errands. What I find when I go out, is that my world opens up a little. I don't want to say "expand" because that sounds too moodmakey. But, I'm in a different mindset, more relaxed, and I pick up on little details. Sounds rather dull, but I find it interesting. Go figure. Anyway, not exactly what you're talking about. Main point being, I enjoy the mystical, just as it is, with no need to really "unpack" it. > I enjoy the experience whatever the outcome is. I get the impression a lot of people think an experience is reduced by it being explained, I like to know how things work however it turns out. Fathoming consciousness is one of the last great frontiers, which is odd because it's the most important part of our lives. We wouldn't know what was going on without it. > On the other hand, you're obviously more of deep thinker. (-: It's all about what explanations you accept, some ancient authority that didn't know about things like evolution and the laws of physics or something a bit more nailed down and understood in relation to everything else. And preferably not contradicting everything else. That's an important bit. > Like any sudden change in environment - walking round a corner and finding > yourself on a cliff edge for instance - it is experienced as shock with a > good hit of adrenalin to sharpen you up. I remember being at McCormick Place > Convention Center in Chicago many years ago. I had a specific mission to > visit as many vendors as I could to pick up literature for a catalog I was > putting together. I was totally dialed in to that mission, because I had a > lot to do and limited time. I remember getting to the end of an aisle at > an open space, and looking up, and suddenly, unexpectedly, there was Lake > Michigan stretched out before me. Talk about your awareness going from a > point to infinity. > Sudden epiphany, I like it. Gives a day a sense of > perspective and jolts one out of those routines that make us dull. > I > always remembered that. I honestly believe that most of the "literature" of enlightenment appears the way it does because most of the writers were complete narcissists who took themselves and their fleeting experiences Far Too Seriously. It's like, "OMG! I had a void moment! That's so cool. I have to announce it to the world and ramble on and on about what this void moment 'means'. Because it's really GOT to 'mean' something because after all it happened to ME and I am so fuckin' important. I must convince all these other people that MY moment was so cool that it should become *their* goal in life to emulate it." :-) :-) :-) Narcissism is really a theme of yours, Barry. Just sayin' But what would I be seeing if I can have a different explanation form the same data? What's needed is research to work out what is happening and when. I've always said that meditation can help with our understanding of consciousness because this step by step process must reveal something about how our brains work to create what we perceive. I think at some point, we start to pick up on the "story behind the story", which is that everything is interconnected. The insect world, the animal world, the earth, the celestial region. Of course that is as unscientific a statement as there could ever be, > Yes and no. All life on earth is connected, the earth may as well be connected to the sun because gravity aint going anywhere. But does everything rely on everything else in some symbiotic sort of way? No, we are here despite the atmosphere and conditions on this planet, and it was trying to survive that made us smart not any creative intelligence. Life crawled out of a swamp and ended up with us and our experiences. > Some would say the size of the universe and the loss of all our precious beliefs about our superiority makes us mere insignificant specks, but maybe the ugly facts of nature make us the most important things in existence? > and yet, that is what I find I think about more and more. Thanks for sharing your thoughts about things. > Luckily my tea breaks dictate the amount of waffle I can fit into a day.
