---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <noozguru@...> wrote :
I was hoping that a friend who has for years been watching FFL and is a tenured psych professor would finally begin posting here. He's well aware of the research into consciousness and some of the things that beginning to come to light out of what is really happy chemically and electronically with our brains. Some of this research is due to concerns of wireless technology on our minds. I know they've linked up the calcium in our brains being effected. And maybe to the chagrin of some of the astrology naysayers the effects some of the radio waves that the planets emit. If astrology could prove that it worked then we wouldn't need the radio waves to justify it as it would have been one of those mysteries we were aware of but couldn't explain. Instead it seems like an ancient idea that failed scrutiny but is still searching around for evidence so it's adherents can say it has a science-y underpinning. Why would radio waves emitted by planets care what time we were born? How much weaker would they be when, say, Jupiter is at one end of it's orbit and we are at the other, do you take this into account? How is something as weak as an interplanetary radio wave going to affect us when there are so many stronger ones swamping us all the time and having no discernable effect? Tantra seems to work because we are like radio transmitters/receivers. We seem to have the ability to transmit waves that can have an effect even at a long distance. On 01/14/2015 12:00 PM, anartaxius@... mailto:anartaxius@... [FairfieldLife] wrote: The subjective introspective method(s) also do not seem, in themselves, to foster the development of critical thinking about its own issues, and when these methods become institutionalised it usually seems the exact opposite happens, at every turn critical thinking is opposed and suppressed. A word search of the Bible in English translation reveals the word 'intelligence' only appears in relation to military intelligence, information related to a military campaign. Intelligence as the ability to learn, apply skills, and as a measure of intellectual capacity is nowhere to be found. In the TMO of course the word intelligence is praised, unless you turn its guns on finding flaws in the movement's philosophy and behaviour; then one becomes subject to not an intellectual rebuttal, but an emotional attack against one's supposed 'negativity'. In regard to other points in the posts below, I would also agree that consciousness is now once again a hot topic among philosophers and scientists. The dialogue has changed now that new tools for investigating the brain are at hand, and certain things about human intelligence that once seemed unique are now known to be shared by other animals besides us, and with computers. Machines can be aware of their environment and move within their environment on that basis. Why then would that somehow be different than what we do even though machines are vastly simpler than us? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> mailto:no_re...@yahoogroups.com wrote : ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> mailto:s3raphita@... wrote : Re "If the subjective method had half the scrutiny given to science . . . ": I agree with your post but one point you miss is that science has itself tended to avoid tackling subjective experiences as it wants to stick with measurable, objective, shared data. So you get ideas like Behaviourism in psychology which never discuss introspective content. Or Dennett who denies we even have mental events. Science doesn't do justice to what it is actually like being a human being; whereas spirituality isn't self-critical enough. That's been historically true enough but it's all changed now. Consciousness is the hot topic these days, and not just with the mystical crowd luckily. It's only a matter of time until this intriguing little mystery is all wrapped up. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <curtisdeltablues@...> mailto:curtisdeltablues@... wrote : It occurs to me that although there is often talk on this site about the limits of science and its methods to ascertain the full reality of life, there is rarely a discussion of the limits and issues concerning the subjective approach to knowledge coupled with interpretations of ancient scriptures by the same people who are so critical of science limits. While the methods of science get a pretty thorough working over as deficient in certainty, the subjective approach gets a wide pass on scrutiny of its inherent issues and problems. And while science is its worst critic for all the ways that it can be lead astray, (the whole method is a series of stopgap measures for people's tendency to F things up) the subjective approach applies quite a bit of effort to deflect a similar critique of its issues. (The Guru Gita is basically a scripture devoted to scaring people off questioning the master's word. (If God is angry with you the Guru can save you, if the guru is angry with you, no one can save you!) The biggest human cognitive gap I see is that we have a tendency to be very certain of things that turn out to not be true. And perversely, we gage the likelihood of something being true by our enthusiasm for the idea as well as how long we have held it. It creates a blind spot that you could drive a Vedic truck though. The certainty that people hold the notion that their experience in meditation is an experience of a trans-personal reality has so little evidence. Not just scientific evidence, but even good reasons other than "it feels that way" or the scriptures tell me so. The test of the trans-personal nature of what we experienced in meditation was the sidhis. This was a pretty good test IMO and if it had succeeded it would have gone a long way in shifting the Maharishi's claims from speculation of a religious nature to something society would need to take seriously. The movement acts as if this proof system that they choose was successful because they have misdirected attention from things we could easily verify (he flew or he didn't) to a statistical morass of highly complex social systems that no laymen can follow. There are many sidhis aside from flying that would be testable. But none of them have panned out. The movement still hangs its epistemological coat on the hanger of anecdotal experiences of finding a parking space when it was needed. If the subjective method had half the scrutiny given to science, would it look so promising as a method to really know about reality for someone who actually cares to distinguish fact from fancy?
