RE: Sadhu Sanga forum

[Vasavada, Kashyap V]

Dear Tushar,

Thanks for your e-mail. I have very high respect but very limited knowledge about Sri Aurobindo. Last year on our trip to south India we visited Aurobindo ashram and we found it very nice peaceful place. I am interested in relating physics to the non sensory world which our sages talk about. But I have never met anyone who has experience about Samadhi, astral body etc. I have not even talked to anyone who has met anyone with such experiences. I have been in U.S. since 1960 and of course it is not practical matter to go to India and search for such people! In our visit to the ashram, I inquired if there are such people around. No one could point me to one. Similar thing happened in our visit to Raman Ashram. At both places they said just meditate. You will get your answers! That may be very well true. I can also read about such experiences in books, but that is not very satisfactory from a scientific point of view. Anyway, do you think Sri Aurobindo had such experiences about Samadhi and astral body etc.? I would like to hear about your opinion on these matters.

Best Regards.

Kaashyap

 

From: Tusar Nath Mohapatra [mailto:tusarnm...@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2017 11:35 AM
To: Vasavada, Kashyap V <vasa...@iupui.edu>
Subject: Sadhu Sanga forum

 

Dear friend,

I glance through your posts on Sadhu Sanga. I'm curious to know whether you are aware about Sri Aurobindo and if your worldview has any connection with his ontology?

Thanks, 

Tusar

[Tusar Nath Mohapatra]

Dear Kashyap,

1. A new book by Arun Shourie is making waves and I give below links to two important reviews from which one can draw some impression:

Deconstructing Arun Shourie's “Two Saints” | IndiaFactsIndiaFacts

indiafacts.org › deconstructing-arun-sho...

Arun Shourie’s new book, “Two Saints” explores an interesting, but not unknown, area of spirituality wherein mystical experiences, their mechanism and effects are investigated in the light of modern neurology and psychology. ... 

Shourie's 'Two Saints' Is An Important Book, But Neither Original Nor Thorough - Swarajya

https://swarajyamag.com › books › shour...

Arun Shourie's new book Two Saints: Speculations around and about Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Ramana Maharishi uses this occidental heritage to study the religious experiences ...

2. Sri Aurobindo used to record his experiments and experiences which can be read at:

10 / Record of Yoga - I

11 / Record of Yoga - II

http://incarnateword.in/cwsa

3. Further, a good book on the subject is:

Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Aurobindo

by Debashish Banerji

4. Since arguments over physics is gradually turning a war on Sadhu-Sanga forum, Sri Aurobindo's formulations on Consciousness should receive more attention, in my opinion.

Wishing you all the best,

Tusar (b.1955)
June 11, 2017
https://selforum.blogspot.in/2017/06/consciousness-and-immortality.html

[Paul Werbos]

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 7:00 AM, Tusar Nath Mohapatra <tusarnm...@gmail.com> wrote:

4. Since arguments over physics is gradually turning a war on Sadhu-Sanga forum, Sri Aurobindo's formulations on Consciousness should receive more attention, in my opinion.

Thank you, Tusar, for reminding us. I apologize for contributing to a bit of imbalance in the recent discussions. 

Your post reminds me of a major presentation in 2005 or 2006 by a leading neuroscientist, at a conference. 

An engineer asked me: "What did he just say?" My translation:"I have just done a set of experiments, which tell us we need to revise our understanding of the two higher centers of the human brain, the two areas which represent the real cutting edge in the evolution of the human brain. The two deep questions which humans are now struggling with are: (1) where did I leave my car this time in the parking lot?; and (2) what was I trying to do anyway?" For the record, the areas he was talking about are orbitofrontal and... whatever. I was amused a few years later to hear that some neuroscinetists really are using the "parking lot" problem as such in experiments now. 

But, yes, what WERE we doing anyway? Certainly the development of yoga and other means to try to elevate human consciousness to higher levels

is a mission of first order importance, and I thank you for reminding us of that.

One other discussion on the list has talked about the goal of becoming a Buddha, and entering a transcendent state where "one knows everything."

Some yoga schools talk of rising to the astral level, to the mental level, to the level of cosmic consciousness, and in some cases beyond that, in some cases to a kind of "ocean consciousness."

For reasons I have discussed before here, I also think we are called to learn how cope with (and coherently structure) ever more complexity in the information we take in, not only from five sense but from other inputs. 

One day, my wife said: "Paul, you are always talking about how you need to learn to drink from a firehose of information. But it's not a firehose. It's an ocean."

That was a very important observation. When we feel we are coping with a complex time-series "in our face," like what we see in CNN and such, we are putting blinders on and reducing our level of consciousness. Really, it is a vast four-dimensional ocean of information, near and far, in four dimensions that we are drawing on (and in some ways more dimensions, related at least to "quantum parallelism", which has substantive spiritual connections).

But not long after that, an IT guy from Vancouver said to us, in a skype group, "Some folks sip from the ocean, say 'It's salty,' and think that that's all there is to the ocean." And so, touch the cosmic consciousness level... is it just bliss or something..., smile... is that the end of it? Not at all. HIgher levels of consciousness DO COPE WITH higher levels of complexity, sometimes all the way to the complexity of the entire earth. I have heard it said that "the Buddha takes on all the pains of the world." There is also a nice "fantasy" allegory by John Lindsay, Voyage to Arcturus, which -- though heavily edited and censored by the Scottish Rite Freemasons at Methuen press --- does give a nice picture of how misleading it can be to imagine that "just smile" is the end of this kind of path. There is a lot of work to be done, at many levels along many trails,  and I appreciate the efforts which Sri Aurobindo and his followers have put in to try to advance that work. 

Best regards,

    Paul

 

[N.Panchapakesan]

Dear Tusar , Paul, Kashyap

I attended the release of Arun Shourie's book on "Two
Saints" in Delhi by the Dalai Lama. I have also bought a copy of the
book and read a few chapters. The Dalai Lama, in his remarks only
said that Ancient knowledge is very valuable and all knowledge has to
be combined with compassion.
The review ,you have enclosed by Rajrishi Nandy as well as the
one by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in Indian Express give the impression that
Shourie has belittled The Swamis' achievements by saying that
neuroscience can explain and duplicate them easily. I do not know if
this is Shourie's aim. Mehta points out that even if neuroscience
replicates the experiences, getting them voluntarily is different
from getting them with help of neuroscience. I think this is an
important point.

My point of view, as expressed in an earlier mail about use
of drugs to help in self actualisation, is that the voluntary effort
is proving so difficult that we definitely need help from (neuro)
science. In my view both spirituality and science are separate (at
least, at the moment) and both are needed for higher evolution of
human beings. This was first expressed in modern time among others by
Swami Vivekananda. Sri Aurobindo thought an evolved higher being is
going to come. Eckhart Tolle, a self actualised person thinks that
spiritual levels of human beings are much higher than at the time of
Buddha. I hope they are right. If not we have to take the help of
science especially medicine and neuroscience science.

In India, especially, we have to accept science as correct
in its applicable area and reserve judgement on miracles as again
Vivekananda has told us.

To that extent Shourie's book helps to bring spirituality and
science closer , I hope .

Panchu


N. Panchapakesan

New Delhi


On 11 June 2017 at 16:30, Tusar Nath Mohapatra

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[Paul Werbos]

On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 5:09 AM, N.Panchapakesan <nargis...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Tusar ,  Paul, Kashyap

      The review ,you have enclosed by Rajrishi Nandy as well as the
one by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in Indian Express give the impression that
Shourie has belittled The Swamis'  achievements  by saying that
neuroscience can explain and duplicate them easily.  I do not know if
this is Shourie's aim. Mehta points out that even if neuroscience
replicates  the experiences, getting them  voluntarily is different
from getting them with help of neuroscience. I think this is an
important point.

I do not know enough about the specific achievements of these Swamis to have an opinion on whether neuroscience could 

duplicate them. But I have seen achievements which neuroscience could not explain.

Actually, there are also many achievements of human and mouse brains which neuroscience COULD explain but

does not exactly explain today. Neuroscience is a big nation in itself, with diversity and complexity like that of India.

Some neuroscientists would wave their hands and say, "this center of the brain does smart things, this task requires smartness, so I have explained it."

Some neuroscientists, in computational neuroscience, would say that there is no real scientific explanation until there is a mathematical model, capable of replicating the capability. But the vast majority of the models they use today do not (or, they hope, "cannot yet", though there is good reason to question that hope) explain even simple learning abilities which we can see in mice, let alone humans.

This past year, I went back to the best empirical data available today on the higher centers of the brain, and found evidence to support a different class of mathematical model, which I developed myself over many years, which CAN explain some of the more basic learning abilities, reviewed in the open access paper:

 Regular Cycles of Forward and Backward Signal Propagation in Prefrontal Cortex and in Consciousness, by Paul Werbos and Yeshua (J.J.) Davis, Front. Syst. Neurosci., 28 November 2016.

HOWEVER, even this class of model cannot explain many things I have seen in first person experience. Before the first convincing experience, in spring of 1967, I would probably have agreed with the reviews of Nandy and Pratap Mehta, that an explanation "must exist" in ordinary, mundane neuroscience.

In a previous post here, I mentioned Hebb's argument, which I rightly agreed with UNTIL empirical evidence became overwhelming. 

(You can find that post by searching on Hebb and Greeley in this email stream.) But more and more, I feel that any truly sane person, even with mundane ideology, will sooner or later have the kind of experience which leads to an open mind, which then leads to honest curiosity and active engagement

about the higher capabilities of the mind. For most people, the risk is what Greeley portrays, a kind of fear reaction which causes people to

kowtow to the supernatural and emit lots of colorless meaningless words while keeping their eyes fiercely shut.

More recently, as more is discovered about dark matter, I feel less and less inner conflict and worry here... objective reality and science are much bigger than the mundane picture of life which people tend to ASSUME is predicted by physics. Even the exploration of "alternative time tracks" during astral travel fits

with the fact of parallel possible scenarios which is inescapable now, even in the hardest core 3+1-D physics consistent with Bell's Theorem experiments.

==========

One quick aside. I have seen informed physicists cite the Bell experiments as showing backwards-time influence. That is misleading, in my view. 

The most classic book on those experiments is by J.S. Bell, The Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, a lot more clear than most things

written on that subject. He explains nicely why there can be appearance of back-time influence combined with ABSOLUTELY NO possibility of actually sending information back through time. Even Yanhua Shih has made mistakes on this point (inspired by his successful quantum delay eraser experiment, published in January 2000 PRL.) New experiments COULD demonstrate backwards time information flow, in my view, and I am hoping that will happen this year. (I am sorry that Delhi did not grasp this opportunity, but US and Germany can take the lead, as has happened before.) It is not really possible to design such experiments without a deep understanding of time-symmetric physics, which it took me many decades of effort to attain. 

Best of luck,

  

   Pual   

  

 

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[Whit Blauvelt]

On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 08:38:12AM -0400, Paul Werbos wrote:
> HOWEVER, even this class of model cannot explain many things I have seen in
> first person experience. Before the first convincing experience, in spring of
> 1967, I would probably have agreed with the reviews of Nandy and Pratap Mehta,
> that an explanation "must exist" in ordinary, mundane neuroscience.

Hi,

What gets left out of science, why, is often fascinating. I'm reading
William Patterson's biography of Robert Heinlein, the science-fiction master
whose books are widely held responsible for luring much of the early NASA
staff into their careers. Of course, those who love the hard science of
Heinlein's early works may differ with the metaphysics of some of his later
writing. But Heinlein himself, from childhood, had extensive memories of
past lives.

To explain consciousness you have to explain memory -- which we can't begin
to yet, at least on the level needed to take a brain and decode memories
from it. But if a child can truly have memories of past lives, that would
strongly imply at least some memory storage is beyond what we conventionally
consider the physical. Can dark matter help?

Best,
Whit

[Norm Silliman]

Whit,

Thanks for letting me (and the world) about the

Robert Heinlein book.

Norm

[Paul Werbos]

On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 9:51 AM, Whit Blauvelt <wh...@csmind.com> wrote:

What gets left out of science, why, is often fascinating. I'm reading
William Patterson's biography of Robert Heinlein, the science-fiction master
whose books are widely held responsible for luring much of the early NASA
staff into their careers. Of course, those who love the hard science of
Heinlein's early works may differ with the metaphysics of some of his later
writing. But Heinlein himself, from childhood, had extensive memories of
past lives.

Some of the folks with the strongest paranormal inputs end up writing science fiction, because it is easier to "say everything"

in science fiction (even if names must be changed and so on). I remember Heinlein from childhood, but for paranormal inputs

I have been more impressed by others, like Dan Simmons and Orson Scott Card, maybe Cixin Liu and Connie Willis, and parts of the "Far Futures" collection. But that is not to say I believe everything they say. Jane Roberts has written many long tomes... but somehow, her simple, readable "oversoul trilogy" science fiction rang true to me more than the tomes did. 

 

To explain consciousness you have to explain memory -- which we can't begin
to yet, at least on the level needed to take a brain and decode memories
from it.

There are many types and levels of memory. The kinds of models I mentioned in last post can explain a wide variety of

mundane memory types. Decoding is another matter. I wince when I hear from transhumanists who hope to download their 

brain minds into a computer, in part because people now expect it would take 10**18 bits -- but for real brain data,

not vaporware, the best I could find (at <=1ms resolution) was 128 channels last year, and even that had major encoding issues to be straightened out. 

Huge amounts of vaporware out there.   Even if they could get the bits all out, the "embodiment" is a central issue as well, much harder than the

wishful thinkers imagine. 

But if a child can truly have memories of past lives, that would
strongly imply at least some memory storage is beyond what we conventionally
consider the physical. Can dark matter help?

In a word, yes. If we are all linked to the noosphere of the earth, made of some variety of dark matter, and even have a part of that system

specially linked to us ("our personal soul" more or less, degree unknown)... memories can reside there as well. If an engineer claimed to have accidentally built such a system, we would rightly laugh at him... but billions of years of evolution in a vast galactic cluster with plenty of free energy can do things

which are highly "nonrandom" (relative to the probability distributions we tend to assume).

Best regards,

   Paul