ha-ha - caffeined. I agree that the 'levels' thing can be really confusing, but I do like that it shows first the lighting inside, spreading to the outside, then illuminating everything, with perception changing appropriately along the way, aka TC evolving to CC, evolving to UC. However I see your point for keeping it simple - Either way, the same process occurs.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <noozguru@...> wrote : Looks like about a 5 shot Americano rap. Tried a Starbuck's Clover yet? ;-) As you know I would agree with you that ranking spiritual experiences is bogus. As I said the other day (as well as many other times) Maharishi kinda confused folks with levels of enlightenment. In many simpler Indian traditions you are either experiencing enlightenment or not. And as Earl Kaplan pointed out in that letter of his he learned what I did visiting India: enlightenment is not that uncommon. On 09/17/2014 10:13 AM, curtisdeltablues@... mailto:curtisdeltablues@... [FairfieldLife] wrote: I have been following the excellent comments on this topic with delight. I loved this book, especially where it helped me draw my own belief lines by disagreeing with it. Overall Sam's book is a huge step in opening up the dialogue for people who are fans of altered states but not into the presuppositions about what they mean. Barry and I have discussed how the ranking of experiences in spiritual traditions seems bogus. This is also my major criticism of Sam's ideas, but I'll start with what I found great about the book. He does an excellent job explaining his perspective on mindfulness meditation, both in techniques and its goals. It answered questions I had about my own irregular practice of mindfulness meditation and how it relates to my previous experience with TM. Without going into details I believe that both practices lead me to the same place mentally. I think the mindfulness meditation has an edge in less unwanted side effects than TM for me, and it seems a bit more efficient. I am not in a position to judge which is "better" or even what that concept would mean in terms of meditation. I believe neuroscience may sort this out someday, but we are a long way from enough information to draw broader conclusions. Till then I say to each his own. Meditation of any kind is nice to have in your human tool kit. (But go easy on the Kool Aid.) I have a bias toward meditation taught without the heavy belief system baggage of TM. I don't think any of that is either helpful or intellectually supportable outside the context of historical interest. Same goes for the Buddhist beliefs and assumptions. As modern people we should admit that we really don't know as much as these traditions posture by assumption about the states reached in meditation. We have an obligation to be more honest about what assumptions we are taking on faith upfront. To stick with any practice you have to have some assumptions. What they are based on is where our intellectual integrity rubber hits the road. People who want to make claims that their internal state is better than mine seem like real boors to me no matter what tradition they come from. If it is so wonderful in there then express something creatively brilliant and I will give you props for that. The section about the relationship with the brain and the concept of self is a fantastic condensation of neuro-research as it applies to our sense of self. It challenges a lot of preconceptions, although I believe it still falls a bit short of Sam's conclusions from it. The science is still young and speculation is still high. But the intellectual challenge of deciding for myself what the research means to my views was fantastic and thought provoking. Finally I come to the part I disagree with Sam most on: his assumptions about the value of the altered states brought about through meditation. I like meditation and feel it has a personal value in small doses. I am less enthusiastic about the extreme form of immersion both Sam and I have gone through in different traditions. You have to be pretty far down your glass of Kool Aid to even want to subject yourself to that kind of exposure. It is both founded on assumptions, and also stokes the furnace of generating more of them. At best it is finding out what can happen to your mind under such extreme conditions, and at worst it is causing you to be altered in a way that is not good, but we don't even know all the implications of yet. Certainly the recommendation from the hoary past don't intellectually cut it for me. That has the epistemological solidity of Dungeons and Dragons role play games. Sam's description of being caught up in and identified with thoughts as "suffering" and experiencing the illusion of the self as "freedom" seems unwarranted to me. It reminds me of Maharishi's condescending letter to the "peaceless and suffering humanity" in its presumptions. They both should just speak for themselves to those of us who do not share their perspective. They are trying to impose a problem on me that I do not have. I agree with Sam that the silent aspect of my consciousness is not a "Self' in the way Maharishi claimed. I found this satisfying because when I tried TM again after 18 years without the belief system I was struck with how bogus this claim seemed to me. I am not sure it is realizing the illusion of self either as Sam claims. It just seems to be a thing we can do with our minds that is satisfying for its own sake and seems to feel like a good place to flow from afterward. Speaking of flow , this concept of flow states in activity holds much more appeal for me than static meditation. I believe we reach the goal of meditation states through many means that force us to act more directly from our more full capacity of our unconscious processes, like performing music or some other art and engaging in intense athletics. I appreciate that Sam acknowledges that we have no evidence for anyone living in a permanent state of perfect anything. I am not so sure this is a bad thing. Sam presupposes that being caught up in thought is a bad thing and is suffering. I disagree. I appreciate all the various states of my functioning and don't have any goal to be permanent state of a particular style of functioning, no matter how pleasurable. It is all part of being human and I think permanent bliss would be another version of hell. The ebb and flow of my ability to act from my highest capacity is part of the dance of being alive. I don't need to stack that deck more than I do already. I am more interested in finding inner capacity from being put in challenging situations that force me to dig deeper beneath my natural lazy comfort/pleasure seeking MO and rise to the occasion. Sometimes that process sucks and is painful, but I can't deny that it sometimes is how I get to my best stuff inside. This is the premise of a great book on flow states I read recently that concludes that we often need an external push to get to our full capacities, not by closing our eyes. Sam's book reinforced to me that I am really more interested in what he calls person hood and Maharishi calls our relative self than I am of any altered state, especially the silent aspect of my consciousness. It is far from the goal of my life to live more silent awareness in my activity. I have all I need to chase my creative endeavors and it is in those that my life has its highest meaning as I define and choose it for myself. Spirituality is like an old girlfriend to me. I have fond memories and don't regret that we gave it the shot we did. ( And I won't be so petty as to mention all my missing CDs when she packed up and left with her things.) But we broke up for good reasons. And we are better off without each other. I can even wish the next person who wants to take on the project of dating her the best. I enjoyed a sweet nostalgia buzz when I read about Sam's 18 hour a day meditation retreats. But in the end I am really glad it isn't me! Here is an interesting perspective from one of the Amazon reviews: 1. Saying that the self is an illusion because it dissolves upon scrutiny is like saying that a chair is an illusion because when we look closely it is composed of atoms. This seems to be a weak claim. How do we know the self isn't just a larger scale of consciousness that gives way to a more reduced version of subjective analysis? For that matter, how do we know that self-transcendence isn't merely a perversion of consciousness that arises as a result of neurological tinkering & is in fact the illusion in the scenario? We can produce various "realities" willfully with the power of mind, as Sam demonstrated with his giant diamond-tomato exercise, what's to say this isn't one of them? 2. Is there any way of establishing that the cognitive and neurophysiological benefits that are assumed to come from meditation are not simply a false correlation and actually come from other behaviors common to a contemplative lifestyle? 3. Is it possible that through meditation what one is actually doing is conditioning oneself to believe that the effects are real and then simply reaping the effects of an extravagantly pleasurable and useful placebo-like product of mind like prayer states? How much do you want to bet that the number of people who can see Sam's giant tomato will be eerily similar to the number of people who report direct experience with self-transcendence and other meditative states? How much do you want to bet that it will be the same people who can see the tomato AND also transcend the self?? 4. There must be some evolutionary purpose for the experience of "self", otherwise it would have abated by now. Should we be concerned as a species with the long-term effects of circumventing this cognitive construct en mass? 5. Neurologically speaking, banishing the self must equate to a certain level of unscheduled tinkering with neurotransmitters and receptors, just because we can modulate the potentials of our conscious experience doesn't mean that those states are fidelitous to some input from our external, or physical realities. Saying you can transcend the experience of the self and saying that the self is an illusion are two separate claims. If I do enough cocaine, I can transcend the experience of being able to feel my face, it is just easier to look in a mirror and find my face than it is "the self" to remind me that it is still there.
