Does "cosmic" consciousness still work when you are under an anaesthetic?
I'm guessing not. The main worry about this research is that the existence of different attentional states somehow implies that the cosmology as presented by Marshy and his vedic tradition is correct. By cosmology I mean that consciousness is some sort of unified field that is beyond us reachable by us as a kind of method of gaining insight into the workings of physics. I don't think it is at all. What we most likely have here is continual meditation developing a type of awareness using a different section of the brain. It's like when we use NLP techniques to develop new neural networks to achieve different results in life than our social training equips us for. We are immediately aware these modes even if unfamiliar. The evidence is that consciousness is spread out through the brain, meditation may very well be altering the way we perceive it by creating an "empty" neural network for consciousness to observe, as opposed to something active that people usually achieve when they learn something new. Calling it "cosmic" is muddying the waters I suspect. More data on how consciousness works is needed, luckily that is piling up all the time. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> wrote : The criteria the Fred used to find his subjects in CC was that they had to have continuous integration of transcendental experiences (TE) with waking and sleeping for at least 1 year. The "Cont-TE" group. Two other groups were chosen as well: people who intended to learn TM but had not yet started and had rare (less than 1 per year -the "Rare-TE" group) transcendental experiences, and people who had been practicing TM for a while, but did not report frequent transcendental experiences outside of meditation (between 1 and 10 TE per year -the "Occas-TE" group). A semi-structured interview and two measures of TE were used to substantiate subjects’ self-reports of inner experiences. The two measures had been developed by non-TMers to measure frequency of transcendental experiences in the general population: Hood’s M-Scale from [Hood, R.W., 1975. The construction and preliminary validation of a measure of reported mystical experience. Journal of Scientific Study Religion 14, 29-41] and Baruss’s Physical-Transcendent Scale from [Baruss, E., Moore, R.J., 1992. Measurement of beliefs about consciousness and reality. Psychology Reports 71, 59-64] Group means for M-Scale were: Rare-TE:/18.19 +/-6.47; Occas-TE:/39.59 +/-3.15; Cont-TE:/60.79 +/-0.61. Group means for the Physical-Transcendent Scale were: Rare-TE:/35.79 +/-5.21; Occas-TE:/61.49 +/-4.71; Cont-TE:/84.19 +/-2.96. Various EEG and other physical measures were done as well as interview questions. The results were reported in two different papers: http://www.totalbrain.ch/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/brain-integration-progress-report.pdf http://www.totalbrain.ch/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/brain-integration-progress-report.pdf http://www.totalbrain.ch/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/eeg-of-enlightenment.pdf http://www.totalbrain.ch/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/eeg-of-enlightenment.pdf L
