Re: Paw.Patrol.On.A.Roll-CODEX Without Human Verification
Stephanie Dejoode
If you are a strict moslem and you experience your enlightenment in a moslem context, the mystical model of the world that gets slammed into your head when you finally look at the Universe in that way, will be in conformity with the dominant culture around you at the time.
Since it was something like a religious experience but not the presence of a personal god, I naturally looked towards the Eastern religions. Zen, zazen meditation actually gave me even at the first try a brief period of vibrant awareness, but my knees hurt so much from sitting in half lotus that I ran away nearly crying.
Finally I found my way to a Vajrayana, Tibetan, Kagyu center, of the Ole Nydahl type. I stuck there simply because Ole is a charismatic, manly in the good sense, attractive man and thus he tends to attract seriously hot female students. Almost everybody, men and women, were pretty, party animal types, who dance and drink to sunrise, strongly hedonistic types, literal opposite of the monastic way of boring puritanical renunciation. To the extent that at larger parties in the meditation center we have set up a sex room for couples wanting privacy.
However, Ole, despite looking like Dolf Lundgreen starring in a super-soldier movie, actually expected us to be good guys and take ethics and karma seriously, not necessarily the kind of aultristic do-goodery like feeding the poor, but he was very positive that the only luxury a boddhisattva cannot afford is anger. Even though he criticized Islam because of how they treat women, there was never an ounce of enmity in his way of talking. He was just very sad and feeling for them about how people can be that misguided and harm both others and themselves.
After that I fell back to materialism. I flirt with Catholicism because they allow righteous anger and think it is compatible with love, but the idea of a personal god is just something I cannot swallow. In my mind the nonpersonal is obviously superior to the personal.
Often being miserable involves self directed ill will. Ill will directed at others fuels this process because, necessarily, you are directing ill will towards yourself. At least, the versions of other people that you are hating are fabrications your mind has constructed and by feeding anger you are essentially venting toxic waste into your mental ecosystem.
This is not to say that one cannot attempt to prevent harmful people from behaving harmfully. This does not even mean that one cannot take action that causes harm in order to prevent greater harm from being done. The fundamentally important thing are the intention to prevent suffering, and rationally acting on that intention without delusion.
I continue to meditate irregularly (maybe 3-4 times a week, for 20-30 minutes). One of the benefits of meditation might be that, as others have noted, you are better able to recognize these thoughts as passing (or, at the more advanced level some people experience, not having any thoughts at all).
Emotions tend to have sensory correlates, and those emotional-sensory links can lead to feedback loops. Feel a specific sensory experience, think the associated thoughts, those thoughts further bolster the sensory experience.
For many years I had back pain that was coupled with anxiety; anxiety would trigger back pain and the back pain would trigger anxiety. I took years to break that link. I did break it (or at least seriously weaken it) by doing a lot of strength work for my back. I also paid close attention to my back (and the specific detailed experience of pain in the moment) so that my mental map of that area became more precise and accurate; eventually it became specific enough that it no longer blurred into my lower gut which is were the anxiety feedback effect is worst.
I also paid close attention to my back (and the specific detailed experience of pain in the moment) so that my mental map of that area became more precise and accurate; eventually it became specific enough that it no longer blurred into my lower gut which is were the anxiety feedback effect is worst.
Funny thing: I actually experienced that feedback cycle too. I had anxiety, which caused muscle tension and back pain, which caused further anxiety. I attacked the anxiety through loving-kindness meditation, and the back pain almost entirely went away. I get occasional flashbacks if I have too much caffeine or something, but now back pain is rare enough to be a noticable event.
There are a couple of rare cases of ACE inhibitor induced psychosis (not saying your experience was psychotic, just that this is a proof of concept that ACEIs can affect the brain). See Neuropsychiatric Consequences Of Cardiovascular Medications. Most plausible proposed mechanism is that they shift sodium and potassium levels in the blood, but this paper mentions that they can also affect hydrolysis of opioid peptides in the brain.
That one was in 2005, shortly after the time I first became aware of these differences, which was the reason why I started that discussion. The realization was slightly less shocking for me, because I had some remnants of visual imagination in my childhood. I have none now, and anecdotes suggest that becoming a mathematician can suppress visual imagination in others as well to some extent. I do have the spatial imagination merlyn describes, that is, I can think of positions and directions and shapes and movements.
As a result, external speech that I can hear and understand (even in vocal music) can be distracting from other tasks. If I understand correctly, there are some experiments that can detect whether you have an inner monlog by testing what two tasks you can do at the same time.
Imagine that you have some physical condition, such as e.g. diabetes. You can mitigate it by taking a shot of insulin once a day; and/or by wearing a crystalline amulet made from pure rose quartz and enchanted by a Chi Bender. Those options are not mutually exclusive, you can totally do both. What would happen to you if you became totally convinced that the crystal chi amulet will effectively mitigate your diabetes all by itself ? The answer, as it turns out, depends on whether the amulet is actually effective in real life.
In my opinion, handing out those amulets to people as alternative diabetes cures would be grossly irresponsible, until we have sufficient evidence to suggest that they work at least as well as the insulin shot.
My main point really was that whatever we may think of weaknesses in the research about various interventions for mental health, meditation/mindfulness has a lot more evidence of being effective for mental health issues than amulets, magnets, or crystals.
As I understand it, pain is the information that your nerves send you about the experiences you are having. Suffering is how you chose to interpret that pain and the meaning and emotion you put onto it.
* Pain is an attention signal; things which are very painful, have a tendency to very strongly force themselves into your consciousness.
* Suffering is the extent to which you resist the pain being in your conscious, and dislike it being there.
I mean, people who make supernatural claims about meditation exist, as in the links you provided, but those are weird outliers who are either disavowed or just ignored by the vast majority of meditators.
That is not a credible claim. Daniel Ingram, whose book was reviewed here on SSC, has made such claims. When that review was posted, the comments were markedly not filled with disavowals of Ingram.
Sadly, one may spout nonsense, and engage in epistemically blameworthy rhetorical tactics like the motte-and-bailey, without at all being a predatory, unscrupulous cult-recruiter. There is no need to assume ill intent, or to perceive accusations thereof.
Plus, the way we do cognitive science today still depends overwhelmingly on subjective reporting. Any cool claim made by neuroscience about what they can determine about someone by examining their brain is ultimately calibrated by patients self-reporting about their mental states while their brain state is examined. Subjectivity is here to stay; it borders on nonsensical to talk about learning about reality with subjectivity completely removed (it might be a fun exercise to try).
Hm, okay. Let me try to give a short(ish) explanation of what the notion of no-self is getting at, and how one might arrive at that point independently from a place of rational reflection (which has been done).
Let me try to give a short(ish) explanation of what the notion of no-self is getting at, and how one might arrive at that point independently from a place of rational reflection (which has been done).
Not everyone has a strong sense of themselves in the first place; for many people who do (myself included!), gaining a strong sense of themselves is something that took a non-trivial amount of struggle.
There was a time when I was reading a lot about no-self stuff, and trying to convince myself of it, not just on an intellectual level but on a deeper level. And the thought of having to accept the lack of a self, felt terrifying, because it felt like I would have to accept some kind of a death.
Some people have an insufficiently strong sense of self, and experience this as a problematic condition. Some people, meanwhile, have managed to entirely destroy their sense of self, and (as expected) do not experience this as problematic (and, perhaps, may no longer be capable of experiencing anything as problematic).
Some people have an insufficiently strong sense of self, and experience this as a problematic condition. Some people, meanwhile, have managed to entirely destroy their sense of self, and (as expected) do not experience this as problematic (and, perhaps, may no longer be capable of experiencing anything as problematic).
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