---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote :
I found this quite interesting. In retrospect, most of the flashy experiences
I had occurred during a seven-year period prior to and during my first few
years of TM. After that everything moved at a much slower grind. I had deep
open internal experiences, but no longer. At one point the CC experience was
very strong for some time and then departed. A sense of vast internal space. No
hum, but there was (and still is) a tape-hiss like sound, mostly in one ear,
perhaps the artefact of the one rock concert I ever went to.
It's funny how this works, I used to go to gigs all the time, I was even a big
fan of Motorhead, probably the loudest sound ever heard. I saw them at the
legendary Hammersmith Odeon once and it was so loud you couldn't tunr sideways
to the stage as it was like being stabbed with in the ear with a javelin. Punk
gigs were as raucous and I played in my own heavy heavy band for a while. Yet
my hearing is really superb, go figure. Maybe I got a siddhi after all!
But this hum was internal and everywhere at the same time. Most odd.
At the threshold of sensory experience is noise, like film grain or tape or
amplifier noise. When it is very dark, or the environment very silent, one can
experience directly the signal to noise in sensory processing. During the inner
silence of the CC experience, at that point, that internal space was what I
felt I was, but that sense of course disappeared with the evaporation of that
particular experience. This particular stage is commonly described clearly in
many traditions, perhaps because the contrast of silence versus activity is
greatest in the state; once the system starts to integrate more, that contrast
fades and finally vanishes.
Today my experience is really silent, but the sense of internal awareness as
distinct from the world is completely gone. So the idea of the Cartesian
theatre really does not compute for me, as there is an extraordinary dilute
sense of self now. It no longer feels as if there is a me watching. If there is
a 'watcher', i.e., awareness, it seems equally distributed 'inner and outer'
even though the term inner and outer doesn't cut it any more. Even though I now
meditate more than I ever have there is little sense of contrast with the
non-meditative periods and the feeling that meditation produces some special
state is pretty much shot now. There is a near total breakdown of the sense of
an individual self, which I think is really cool, but apparently it can be
unnerving to some people. Maybe we could call it 'narcissistic neutralisation'.
I can tell that I'm a long way from that because I read it with horror. The
ol' ego still clearly rules the roost in me. It's interesting though, and
obviously I can't imagine it because that would involve the bit of me that does
the imagining being less than it is. Or did I get that wrong? The obvious
question is: how do you know the "self" is reduced compared to the past? Seems
like there must be another self monitoring it.
That's what consciousness is like to me, a hall of mirrors. You can spin round
as fast as you like but you never catch yourself looking at yourself. But there
is always somebody watching, until I go to sleep and the whole biological
system shuts down. It seems like we do some radical re-plumbing to achieve all
this, or is consciousness only a tiny part of what the brain does that seems
vast because it's constructed to allow us to move about in this vast world and
is thus more amenable to changes from drugs and meditation etc..
Meditation appears to have a value still, but not to get to some other state
of experience, experience is the same before, during, and after meditation. It
seems aside from a general resistance to feeling agitated, a lack of obsessive
thought, experience is the same as before I began meditation and cramming my
brain with spiritual terminology, as if everything is coming full circle, and
the alternative delusion of the spiritual path (as opposed to the delusion
prior to the spiritual path) is fading into the background. To state it
illogically, things are different but nothing has changed.
I do a few different types now. TM isn't always my favourite and in fact I
avoid it at certain times. A learnt a few mindfulness techniques that really
hit the spot without all that heady "transcending" and shaking and 10 minute
rests you have to endure with the Marshy way.
As to what it's doing I don't really know, I just like the freshness and
occasionally profound awareness. Can't say it has transformed my reaction to
stress, not as much as other things I've done. I'd reword the brochures if I
was in charge.
The real challenge is to find a way to describe this scientifically. I have
often thought that meditation produces common signalling in different parts of
the brain ('coherence') and as different parts of the brain have different
tasks and relate to different experiences, this common signalling could be
interpreted as a unifying background to all the other activity in the brain.
Also I think there is an assumption that a scientific explanation of spiritual
experiences must have a clear resemblance to how experiences are described
subjectively and described in spiritual literature, that a scientific
explanation must somehow verify the metaphysical explanations that have been
fostered in the past and present, and that may be an entirely wrong assumption.
It is already pretty clear that the sense of self, scientifically, has no
corresponding physical reality as an entity, that it is rather an interpretive
reality perhaps related to computational processing in the brain, that groups
certain experiences under an umbrella category — this is called bundle theory —
and in fact one of the achievements of spiritual practice is to disrupt the
individuality bundle into its separate components and regroup the components
under a 'larger' umbrella that is not a human psyche.
Agreed. I think the fact that consciousness has only just begun to be studied
scientifically means that the mystics can still call the shots in some ways
that can't be directly challenged except in that physics doesn't allow for
quantum consciousness and that sort of thing, at least not as a parallel of the
mystical explanation offered by Marshy and the Hindoos. But what we have about
location of thoughts and thresholds of consciousness, the reticular activating
system, EEG's etc means it's going to come together, somehow.
Maybe Penrose was right with his "Orch-or" theory of consciousness is which
probably the worst name for a scientific theory ever, but at least it doesn't
evoke the sort of vague but grandiose imagery that the mystics do. Shame it's
been rubbished by the rest of the scientific world but it did offer some
original thought, but I still don't see how it answers the central problem of
subjectivity.
The more theories there are to test, the faster progress will be made I think.
But I am also convinced it will be science that provides the explanation as we
can't tell ourselves what is going on inside, all we get is our opinions of our
experience and the ego trick seems to ensure that we are always wrong about it!
The Sam Harris Book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
becomes available on September 9, 2014
Some quotes attributed to Maharishi (only one of which I have heard before):
CC is a pathetic state.
CC is enlightened ignorance.
CC is boring.
GC is distracting.
UC is lonely.
From: "TurquoiseBee turquoiseb@... [FairfieldLife]"
<FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com>
To: "FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, September 5, 2014 8:28 AM
Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: For Salya
I just *knew* there was a reason to keep reading FFL, when most evidence
would suggest otherwise... :-)
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.
Exactly. A sense of space, but not time. I don't necessarily get the "residual
neural humming" thang, but that may be because I have such a bad case of
tinnitis that I'd never hear the humming over the constant high-pitched whine.
:-) :-) :-)
Someone raised on more Zen or Taoist literature might interpret the same
experience as the Void. Nice experience, and all...but as you point out, does
it really "mean" anything at all?
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. But suppose you weren't inclined to
neurophysiological explanations and took it at face value, you might think that
your mind had gone beyond (transcended) the normal world and experienced some
sort of underlying explanation for how our brains work normally. I can see how
the mythology arises from experiences like this, the idea that it's how we
really are underneath all the day to day crap. But we are still just talking
about something happening in our heads, it don't happen without me being fed
and rested.
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." :-) :-) :-)
And it doesn't form part of physics because the physical world isn't like
that. I used to describe the CasUF idea as an analogy but when discussing it
with a physicist I know he said it wasn't an analogy at all because the
physical world just isn't like that. An analogy is a point-for-point copy and
this idea breaks down too early to qualify.
I was told by our "raja" to go on purusha because these experiences of mine
woul stabilise and I'd be a seer!
See above. Isn't this 'Raja' echoing the exact same sentiment as my imaginary
'seer'? :-)
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'm still looking forward to Sam Harris' new book -- an atheist neuroscientist
who meditates and has had as many high spiritual experiences as anyone on this
forum...trying to reconcile these two ways of seeing the world. It should be
interesting.
Thanks for continuing to post thought-provoking links and comments.
