Hey, our power just came back after being off since about 10:00 last night.
Talk about a bright light. That just happened when it came back on, and
virtually every light in house was still on.
Anyway, I was thinking about the interest in translating the so called
"mystical" experience into simply a function of a certain type of brain
activity.
That's fine I guess, unless there are other things going on, such as merging
with a blue pearl, and an equisite feeling of bliss, and maybe a sensation of a
heart melting, which you then happen to read about later in some text from long
ago, or in another spiritual aspirant's experience, so there really couldn't
have been much power of suggestion.
On the other hand, maybe it is just as you say, a "Cartesian" event of some
sort. I mean, sure, there is some likely some brain component to it, but it
does make me chuckle some.
On the other hand, if you are predisposed to discard most knowledge that has
come through the ages, just because it can't be proved by where science is now,
then I guess you are pretty much left with what has been discovered,and proved
as of today.
It's a safe road to travel, but I think a little dull. (-:
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote :
snip
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.
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.
