Mr. Hamilton, reconciliation is not the proper word. Once rather simple and obvious effects are discovered, cataloged, and more or less explained by science, the more subtle aspects are often very difficult to sort out. The leading edge of any scientific discipline is rife with contradictions and ambiguous evidence. Meditation is a difficult subject because there are some physical effects, some psychological ones. And a number of things about meditation are unknown. One of the greatest problems is meditation systems have "devotees" which have strong emotional ties to their discipline, and strong emotional ties and beliefs can override scientific processes because a certain result is desired rather than whatever the result happens to turn out to be. Perhaps the best research would be done by those who do not care about the result of the research except that it follows rigorous scientific protocol. Quite a number of philosophical points in meditation lore are really beyond the ken of science as they do not seem to be testable. Meditation is a key technology in those spiritual circles that deal with the concept of enlightenment. The tool is for that, not for health or well being even if some of that is a byproduct. The byproducts of meditation are not what it is for; what it is for is to make possible the realization that consciousness/awareness lies as the ground of experience, and life is just a succession of experiences. As everyone is conscious, that consciousness underlies experience would seem to be an obvious fact. It is, but it is too obvious, and the implication of that is understanding the nature of consciousness turns out to be a much more difficult difficult subject to investigate, for it seemingly has no properties that can be seen, felt, or measured directly. It is as if it is not there, even though on the basis of our experience we know it must be there. Spiritual systems tend to elaborate on the nature of consciousness way beyond what is justified rationally. This is particularly true when spiritual systems institutionalize, and many different people with a wide variety of understandings get involved in maintaining the system. It is as if weeds grow up in the system and whatever truth was there to begin with begins to get obscured by this overgrowth. This often happens even when the teacher, the central figure is alive. Not all teachers are really pure, and that defect sometimes leads to their downfall, or eventually to some subtle corruption in the followers, which then leads to the downfall of the institution. My advice is to pursue the main goal, enlightenment, and only give passing notice to whatever else seems to be taking up people's attention in the system. Enlightenment is simple: you are awareness as is everything else. This is little to do with holiness, specialness, grand experiences, or health or world peace. You could be at death's door with illness and still know you are awareness, or in a foxhole in the middle of a pitched battle, and still know you are awareness. Unity means there is no other. That means you do not have a relationship in unity, because there is only one thing, and you are it. Note this does not mean "the person" is in unity. The person is an aspect of unity, it is the unity that knows what the unity is. Your person is an object in the field of awareness, and the mind and intellect in the person has to come to terms with this. Enlightenment is not about your personal life. The ego, while still existing, has to be perceived as not real, that you, the person, are not the center of attention, rather the whole is the center of attention, and your person hood is just like a chair, or a dog, or a TV-set in the field of awareness. If this is not what you thought enlightenment would be, perhaps a body could get a job pushing burgers over the counter at McDonald's. But even there, there is the counter, a customer, your hands pushing the burgers and fries on the tray to the customer, all in the field of awareness, life just like for everyone else, but just that lack of knowledge that this is all what you in the largest sense are, means the activity seems to lack something and is unfulfilling, whereas just that knowledge, if you had it, would mean the same activity is just the unity maintaining its balance as wholeness. It is all very simple, unspectacular. You gain nothing, but what you lose is significant. You lose the ability to fantasize that there are options to reality. The problem is people think there is an option or options other than what is happening now. That there is something better. It is when this fantasy goes away, that self realization has a chance to click over. The purpose of meditation is really to exorcize the unreal options the mind entertains about the experiences it has. They bubble up as thoughts, spontaneously, without our trying. Those thoughts tangle us up in unreality. Eventually the mind becomes silent, and those intrusion into direct experience become less and less frequent. When the mind is silent it does not judge or evaluate in terms of some ideology or other, it simply sees the way things are, and accepts that.
On Sunday, July 2, 2017, 5:58:54 AM EDT, dhamiltony...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife] <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> wrote: Good to see that in the end you have reconciled all this skepticism of the published science of meditation in meditation. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <archonan...@yahoo.com> wrote : Comments below in text. From: "dhamiltony...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2017 4:39 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: In Statistical Truth, The Call to Spiritual Order,Rally Now to Meditation! People ‘claim’ things like: One: “..the movement's confirmation-bias tainted research”. Confirmation-bias may be a fault of some of the earlier research but evidently not of the replicating studies done in more recent times. That there might have been some confirmation bias in some of the research does not invalidate all the science published on meditating. There is a lot of discussion and rebuttal about this for open minds to consider at TruthaboutTM.org TruthaboutTM.org is a die hard TM site by David Orme-Johnson. It is not in any way scientifically neutral. Anyone who strongly believes that what Maharishi says is true will have a hard time constructing research that is neutral. If you take the position that everything Maharishi said is false, that too would likely create a situation that would taint research, although if you really try to prove some hypothesis false and it survives all those tests, the hypothesis will be in a much better position to be accepted. Social research with large groups is notoriously hard to control properly. Two: “..Maharishi did not even really know if this coherence effect would really work, as it seemed to be based on a rather loose association of a statement by Patanjali with a coherence effect in physics.” The process of science includes taking observation, making hypothesis about observations and then testing the hypothesis. Maharishi was at that the whole time in process from very early on when he left India to go out and teach meditation until his final days. Throughout his long career he would use the large facility of the ™ movement to advance science by this process of from observation making, to hypothesis and testing it. This was large thinking of an inquiring mind. The disgruntled and disaffected may feel and gripe otherwise about him for their own reasons but what he did in persistence at advancing broadly the science on meditation in the last half of the 20th Century and into the 21St Century was monumental in its developmental way. But how you test the hypothesis is the key. That is the brain buster. You not only have to test ways that might show it is right, but also test in ways that would show it is wrong. The ME effect has not been tested this way. One of the problems is non-movement scientists are not horribly interested in this research, as they would likely be more likely to attack both the philosophical explanation and discover experimental flaws in the experimental design. David Orme-Johnson has resisted all attempts by other scientists to get access his raw data for the ME. He is retired now, so of course, not actively pursuing any of this with new research. One thing that would need to be explained is why MUM seems to be doing so poorly while being the center of the alleged positive effects in question. As a university it is a decaying shell of its glory days. Hypothetically the movement explains the Maharishi Effect as a unified field effect, yet there is no accepted unified field theory in science yet. There are many candidates, but none have any experimental evidence to confirm or deny them except those theories that predict the decay of the proton. Experiments have shown no proton decay, which makes Hagelin's flipped SU5 theory unlikely to be true as it predicts proton decay. The movement science overlooks other possible explanations that are not unified field based, such as a magnetic effect, an electromagnetic effect, a chemical effect, social-behavioral effects, and even, there is no effect. Scientific explanations do not start with explanations based on what we have not yet figured out or discovered to be likely true, but on explanations that are currently accepted and then the discoveries grow out from that. Saying the Maharishi effect is unified field based means scientists have nothing to test so it provides no theoretical way to understand the theory. My own experience is there is something going on in those groups, but it could well be the explanation is not what we are being told. It could even be just credulity or gullibility, but this could not be the entire explanation as there are group effects in any group. It is just figuring out what they are. There are many kinds of social phenomena where groups with a common belief get together and act more or less like an organic whole, not all positive. Riots for example. How does this behavior spread so quickly? One could easily hypothesize riots are the result of a unified field effect, the Maharishi Effect, but with a different focus in mind than world peace or enlightenment, the focus being destruction. But how would you prove it? Among things that need to be tested would be how far does the effect extend, and does it fall off with distance (all known physical effects diminish with distance) and what would be the rate of falloff? None of these things are laid out in the ME theory. Which known laws of physics would be involved in such an effect, and how would a human brain manage to activate those parameters? How much energy would it take and how would you measure that to get a scientific result? And your bringing up the concept of heresy (below), does saying that there is no Maharishi Effect, or saying it is not unified field based constitute some kind of heresy in the TM movement? When doing scientific research, other scientists are going to criticize the work. The movement has a rose-colored glasses view of its research. If you go to the NIH website, and read the general overview of meditation research, it looks a lot less positive, maybe a little hopeful that meditation might do some good in some cases. And nothing about group effects. Meditation: In Depth | | | | | | | | | | | Meditation: In Depth This fact sheet provides information about meditation for conditions such as high blood pressure, anxiety, depre... | | | | On the other hand I will be participating in the National Group Meditation on the 25th, even though I do not think it is having any real consequence. It is a kind of social gathering. Meditations seem to be "better" in an environment that supports this kind of thing. Developmental like with Copernicus observing: Although Copernicus' model changed the layout of the universe, it still had its faults. For one thing, Copernicus held to the classical idea that the planets traveled in perfect circles. It wasn't until the 1600s that Johannes Kepler proposed the orbits were instead ellipses. As such, Copernicus' model featured the same epicycles that marred in Ptolemy's earlier work, although there were fewer. Copernicus' ideas, published only two months before he died, took nearly a hundred years to seriously take hold. When Galileo Galilei claimed in 1632 that Earth orbited the sun, building upon the Polish astronomer's work, he found himself under house arrest for committing heresy against the Catholic church. Now that meditation has been researched, it is known there are some effects, but they have not been scrutinized so carefully yet as the research tends to be done by groups that have an emotional and doctrinal stake in the outcome. When initial research is done and the critical eye of good science follows up, the effects reported tend to be less than initially imagined. This happens quite a lot in clinical medical research. The beneficial effects reported in clinical trials are often double what is eventually reported when the medication is in common use, and sometimes many undesirable effects also show up at this stage. You know one of the properties of pure consciousness is it is non changing. If that is so, then it logically follows that it cannot do anything. You seem to be upset with the custodians of Maharishi's knowledge, and yet according to Maharishi, they should be the ones that benefit the most, as "the teacher learns more than the student," and so in decrying their behavior you are basically stating that Maharishi's knowledge does not work, and yet steadfastly uphold certain principles that do not seem to have worked. This is a commonly known psychological trait in groups with a common belief. When there are real challenges to those beliefs, the believers double down on the belief, holding ever more strongly those ideas when they appear to have failed. In spite of everything claimed for meditation that perhaps it cannot claim to do, it is still one of the time-tested techniques used to foster the opportunity for enlightenment, which is really what it is about. As for the siddhis, most of the ancient scriptures tend to proscribe them unless you are enlightened already, and they come to you naturally. If you pursue them, it is to your doom. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : At start of Summer 2017 now, within this circumstance of consequence with the collapse of the Dome numbers meditating it is terrible that the TM Trustees, Raja and their apparatchiks had let it get so bad with the Dome numbers.It is like the very people in charge who, standing in the way holding sway, don’t themselves believe the best of science (even their own!) now published on this. ..there are bodies of studies now authored, collaboratively with other reputable universities and institutions, and conducted independent of the .org, published studies that have extremely high statistical p values and then also aggregated high p values studies, replicated too that correlate the effects of meditating. Gold standard stuff. So the premise is that at a point the plain truth of such a series of extremely extraordinarily high p value published studies in the aggregate simply becomes statistical truth. A type of fact. What they correlate becomes fair ‘rule of thumb’. Unless of course as people may be anti-science or don’t understand science this way they may not grok what is completely current in the cutting edge of knowledge. This does not deny that there was bad or poorly designed or poorly performed science on meditation that went before. However, a sheer weight of the best of science is plainly correlating that it is a statistical truth now and quite fair rule of thumb that meditating has benefits that go with its practice. QED. Hagelin's Premise, A premise large in assertion and direction like a Monroe Doctrine, The Marshall Plan or the Meissner-like Maharishi Effect, now as matter of statistical fact: It is time to rally to meditation by all that the best of modern science tells us is statistical truth and by what we know more objectively in our experience as quite fair rule of thumb. It is quite time now to come together in collective meditation for all that is good. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : In renewed social critique,with the dislocations in society from rapid technological changes like in the ‘social question’ of the 19th Century renewed, is there alternative here to so much of what is in this postmodern time period’s spiritual agitation and conflict-making, like taking a fresh alternative towards looking to the science of radical peace-making? Is it come time for something radical, like a making of peace, going up in magnitude to a much larger scale?To go much higher than 1 percent, 5 in 100, much higher than the square root of one percent of a group meditating. Is it come time now for new critique and something more.In experience Transcendentalism has always been the critique to materialism that has gone out of perspective. Given the stakes, it would seem in the modern now it is time for revolutionary transforming transcendent meditationist action everywhere. QED. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : We are grateful to all those who came answering the call and sat up in their meditations with us in Fairfield, Iowa. It has been our honor to have had those who traveled from distant places join alongside us here in collective meditation in these times. From time in memorium this is called the work of moral courage where people, deeper spiritual people [transcendentalists] do this, come in to groups meditating together for something larger. -JaiGuruYou ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : Yes. It would be far better for you look at the webpage of http://www.truthabouttm.org/ towards engaging a much higher level of understanding of these things. I only know my objective experience with it all which I find statistically certain in many replicable ways for myself. -JaiGuruYou yifux...@yahoo.com> wrote : Thx,....statements like this should be put into a proper perspective. As to the Hagelin Premise where he basically says that peace follows from the ME which is "peer reviewed" and supported by "statistics"; which "peers" is he talking about, and who collected the stats. If Dr. Hagelin is reading this, kindly provide the reference(s) on the peer reviewed journals, if any. ..If you're reading this, Dr. Hagelin, feel free to jump in and rebut. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : Waging radical peace... Hagelin's Premise..
