Mod+ 256. DR. DONALD DEGRACIA, WHAT IS SCIENCE?

t wanted to bounce a couple of things off of the author since we got you here :)

I think it's important to try and understand the global economy game that the US is playing... and we all go along with / derive huge benefit from.

again, I just don't know if this is true... I mean, the net is also the greatest propaganda tool ever invented. And the "power elite" have much more experience and resources than we could ever imagine. Case in point, ISIS:
http://www.corbettreport.com/who-is-isis-an-open-source-investigation/

So, I don't think the economy or the state of world politics matters much other than huge fact that this massively corrupt system has worked in our factor and you and I have been privileged enough to have the time and money to do, and learn, and grow. Personally, I feel really blessed .

Hi Alex!

Wow! Thanks for joining the fray, thanks for reading Experience and thanks for your perceptive (as usual) comments. And, I like James Corbet's stuff too!

I am kicking around how to address these issues on my blog without turning into an Alex Jones type rant. I'm not there yet and still thinking about it. In general, with respect to these types of issues, I tend to favor Webster Tarpley's general viewpoint, but even his is limited in that it does not explicitly include the inner realms. There are many layers to these types of issues and I can't summarize easily. So I will just try to address head on your two points.

1. Yes, I agree, we benefit from the havoc the US is wrecking (and has been wrecking) on the rest of the world. It is like being a Roman Citizen during the Roman Empire. Having such position of relative privileged of material wealth, I think we are obligated to do what is in our power to counteract the negative aspects of our culture. For a single individual, that power is very small indeed. The internet helps amplify it and level the field a little bit. But what to do? I think you and me, and the people here are all doing things already. You have the cojones to stand up to the ignorance and fallacies that pass for legitimate learning. I try to do my little bit by spreading ideas around that I think will help. Everyone here probably has something they are doing. But in the big picture, there are vast societal forces at work that we are just slaves to, and the best we can do is be as aware as possible, and if they are bad forces, try not to let them play through us and our actions.

2. Yes, I agree about the Spy vs. Spy aspect of the internet. But in spite of this, Experience, What is Science? and all my other writing is now there for anyone in the world to grab if they have a computer and internet. Same with your work. So there is a leveling influence at work. But these things move slowly relative to our individual lives. A good parallel for the internet is the printing press. Within a couple decades of its invention, the protestant reformation occurred in Europe because all of a sudden, people could read the Bible in their native tongue. The Catholic Church in Rome simply lost control (This was not all grass roots, and people like Tarpley make a convincing case that the power elite of the day were behind these events to gain even more power). The repercussions still reverberate strongly today in the world. However, within a relatively short time, the power elite took overt control of the medium of printing, like the rich and powerful Elsevier family in the Netherlands. The rich and powerful continued consolidating power over printing, like the newspaper families in the USA at the turn of the century and like we see with Rupert Murdock and his ilk today.

So yeah, the rich and powerful do what they can to get control of things. They are attempting it now with the internet, and with some clear successes. However, it's not like it used to be. ISIS, Julian Assange, and stuff like that gets unmasked very quickly now. There is value to Alex Jones barking like a dog. And again, I point to your work. When I wrote Beyond the Physical in 1990, it was unthinkable to take some "famous" author and call them out for all to see. Now you are doing it every two weeks! To me, its just amazing.

So yes, the power elite have experience and resources in deception and propaganda. But Humanity as a whole has God and the Human Spirit, and these are way more powerful than any rich family. But again, these are long term forces. Individual people get mowed over like the grass. Look at Bruno being burnt at the stake, or the persecution of Paracelsus or Galileo. People who are agents for progressive forces always take the risk of getting crushed. But the forces themselves keep on keeping on no matter what, and people's sacrifices today do make a better tomorrow.

And this even gets to a very deep issue that Experience deals with, and is perhaps the weakest point in that book (I might as well say it before you do!). The theme of that book is that Maya is a mindless striving that ultimately goes nowhere. And, in the ultimate scope that is true. The Sun WILL go nova one day. The Earth and all of us will die. The entire universe will fade away trillions of years from now. But, in the meantime, there is also some kind of process unfolding in time, this Maya thing being discussed above. We can see it as a bizarre process that creates relative existence, but we can also see it as God's Will, or the Divine Plan, and it is making some kind of pattern that is great beyond our wildest dreams. Leibniz saw this and discussed it. This was really his idea of the "Best of All Possible Worlds". But you and i, in the form we are in now, won't see it. We can only imagine it as an ideal. We are all only stepping stones to it.

I think. I am not sure. I see both possibilities right now: the meaningless of Maya, and the indescribable beauty of God's Divine Plane. It is what I am worrying about right now. How to reconcile these two pictures.

Thanks for bringing this to the surface, Alex.

Best wishes

Don
 
Has anyone ever done the science of yoga - or any other discipline from shamanic to esoteric - without knowing what they should expect?

It seems to me that if there is to be an inner science, you'd have to have people follow the steps while being ignorant of the revelations they'd receive.


Hello Sir! Just a quick comment. If you read Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, we does indeed discuss what to expect along the various stages of yoga. This also is the main reason for the Guru in yoga. It is the idea that you can only really learn from someone who is already farther along the path than you are. There is great concern in yoga about this because once one enters the inner realms, there is great potential for failing. There are temptations and "soul snares" (for lack of a better term) at every step of the way.

Thank you, Mr. Patel.

Don
 
Good post Michael.

Beyond that, it's not clear to me what separates that which is Maya from that which isn't. How does a Whole like Brahman become the Many, the various individual (and apparently illusory) subjective perspectives existing in this world (or beyond)?

This is exactly the issue I try to address in Experience. I'm certainly not smart or experienced enough to know for sure, but I try to bring together different ideas from people who do talk about this issue, such as Alan Watts and Swami Krishnananda, who I think have valuable things to say about the issue.

Thanks, Sir

Don
 
Thanks for the article, Don, which I will read with interest and may comment on later. The topic of the corruption of modern science is frequently discussed here at Skeptiko. I think your own president Eisenhower foresaw it in his farewell address:

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields…”

“Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity...”

“We must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Nothing to add to that except: Pay attention to the above, Everybody. -Don
 
Has anyone ever done the science of yoga - or any other discipline from shamanic to esoteric - without knowing what they should expect?

It seems to me that if there is to be an inner science, you'd have to have people follow the steps while being ignorant of the revelations they'd receive.

No, I can't say I've done anything formal under the tutelage of a teacher, though that's not for want of trying to find one, really. But yes, I think the theme of not knowing what to expect is an important part of the discipline. Teachers in Sufism, for example, are notoriously cagey about what they will tell students, and may even intentionally mislead them for their own good. Expectation can be the enemy of making progress, so maybe best not to create it in the first place. Tasks or exercises may be allocated without explanation, with students having to discover truths for themselves. Teachers don't want the usual conditioning mechanisms to kick in: they're not in the business of indoctrinating, in fact are dead opposed to it.

Even in ordinary teaching of academic subjects, canny teachers won't indoctrinate, e.g. by always starting with an exposition of standard theory. Rather, they will start where possible with practical investigation, allowing students to theorise for themselves, only later providing accepted theory which students will be in a better position to evaluate. One may have to provide some basic information to enable investigation to occur safely and productively, but the education process is potentially more involving, and the lessons more meaningful, when students are encouraged to explore for themselves. I must emphasise that this is distinct from constructivism: the teacher shouldn't be promoting the idea that one way of doing things is as good as any other.

Example: tell people the rules about writing a sonnet (how many lines, how many syllables per line, the placing of the stresses and the rhyming scheme), and allow them to construct a sonnet of their own. Then, look at the results, and compare them with well-known sonnets, encouraging discussion and identification of why those work so well. As an amateur sonneteer, I can tell you that there's nothing like trying to write a sonnet of one's own to come to appreciate the genius of the great sonneteers. That's an example from the humanities, but similar principles could be applied in the sciences, too.

I've forgotten a lot of the lab work we used to do in secondary school and university, probably because it was usually theory-led. But I've never forgotten something we did in primary school when a teacher asked us all to bring in a souring bottle of milk. We made butter by shaking it, which we spread on crackers, some of which one of us (me, actually) took to the staff room for other teachers to taste. That was good old (and very Irish) Mrs. Malloy, and I remember more of her lessons than most other teachers I've come across in my time. She was absolutely mesmerising. I suspect the same can be said of genuine spiritual teachers.
 
but that doesn't give enough respect to the "practical level." I think there is a lot to gained by trying to integrate the wonderfully rich and very deep wisdom of yoga with the practical aspects of living, being a good person, raising kids/family, being a good friend. I have the intuitive sense that this is more than "just maya." It seems to me that the best quick and dirty measure of ones attachment/non-attachment in/to maya is how they deal with the "practical level."

The strange blending of Buddhism and Atheism (only in the West :)) that Allan Wallace brilliantly counters in the article seems to fit here: http://fpmt.org/mandala/archives/ma...ted-visions-of-buddhism-agnostic-and-atheist/

Yes, as you can see in my other post to you, I am struggling with this issue. And its not that I disagree at all with what you say. I mean, in Experience, I talk about the "art of life" and this is exactly what you are describing, and am 100% on board with what you are saying. Of course any sane person wants harmony in life. My issue tho is deeper than this. It is just that I see two contradictory pictures (meaningless/maya vs divine plan) and feel a very strong need to resolve or reconcile them. Experience is just a step in this direction. At the moment in my thinking, the two are held in balance, and I think that is what Experience is trying to get at. We WANT to see life and existence as good. We need a good dose of the other side of the coin, I think. Again, contrast. What does good mean if we don't really know what bad means?

Anyway, this is why it is good to talk about this stuff. So thank you, Alex, and everyone here, for having this (these) discussions.

Best,

Don
 
I've now read the article, Don. I won't comment so much on your critique of the book, not least because I haven't myself read it, but I read with interest your comments on academic tenure in the U.S. I don't think we have the same thing exactly in the UK, or at least don't call it by the same name, though it's probably true that academia is becoming more and more staffed by people on temporary contracts with less security than in the past.

It strikes me that tenure is a double-edged sword...

You raise important, serious and legitimate issues.

If I had to pinpoint a single factor affecting these things the most, it would be the massively unequal distribution of wealth in the world. When an infinitesimal fraction of humanity owns almost everything, this is such a perverting and distorting influence that nothing escapes its "gravitational pull" (if you will allow my mixed metaphors). I could go off a lot on this point, but won't because its getting late. But again, you raise important points.

Thanks, Michael
Don
 
An end to maya would mean an end to all existence, for maya is everything that is not Brahman. It is everything that has a name. Yoga begins at the true realization of the nature of the illusion of maya, for maya itself will always remain inscrutable, as you say. Full realization of the illusion of maya is the start, not the end of yoga. In a sense, when one is ready to begin yoga, one is already dead.

You are filled with ideas about what the fairyland of enlightenment is. About what maya is. About the best ways to live life. These ideas are the very blinders that inhibit one from seeing that ALL is maya. And maya is illusion. Ideas are lenses that obscure our vision. I know that is anathema to many and that is fine. There is nothing wrong with living in delusion in maya. It is quite unavoidable.

Taimni speaks to this in the intro to God, Man and the Universe by saying that it is something we will never understand, but it is the most important thing to think about and we are compelled to think and wonder about it, even though we will never understand it. Seems like another way to say what you are saying here. -Don
 
Don. Not sure if you are still reading this thread, but the book Experience was really great. You turned me on to some new avenues.

Your thoughts about paranga cetana and pratyak cetana reminded me completely of the Mandukya Upanishad. You are probably already familiar with it, but if not, have a look.

http://www.stillnessspeaks.com/sitehtml/jamesswartz/mandukya1.pdf


Thank you so much, anon! That is very kind of you. It is interesting how the main themes here are echoed in Experience. The conversation here is giving me very much new info to consider.

Don
 
We are most free when we are what we are supposed to be.

I agree with that. One old idea is that we have free will, but it's mostly to do what isn't in our best interests to do. When we go with the flow ("surrender to the will of God") and don't try to control the situation (by the intrusion of ego), often things unfold in an effortless manner and it seems we can't put a foot wrong. I think we've all probably experienced this on occasion.

That means we move with the whole, know our place in the whole. This is at least the ideal. This is why I often think to myself that little Christian prayer "God give me the wisdom..."

I agree it means we move with the whole, but not so sure it means we know our place in the whole, though to be fair you've said that's an ideal rather than necessarily the reality.

The prayer, in my thinking at least, may be misplacing the wisdom. We don't have the wisdom: God has it, and by "surrendering to His will", we are placing ourselves in resonance with the overall telos behind all manifestation. Frankly, I have my doubts as to whether there's a great plan in play and everything is determined in minute detail. Rather, if one acts in accord with the telos, things will unfold for us with greater facility.

Unfortunately, this seems inimical to a lot of Western thought, where the paradigm is to be forceful and go all out for it: a culture of narcissism that is actually encouraged and is contributing, I feel, to the decline of our societies, because it doesn't actually lead to satisfaction, indeed, most often quite the reverse.

Lego sets used always to be supplied as collections of bricks, and there was no prescribed way to build a robot or a house. Some sets provided today have to be assembled in a fixed way. I don't think God's Lego set is like the latter. Yes, there are certain limitations in how one can connect the pieces, but apart from that, there's any number of ways to skin the same cat. I think God would be bored witless if He'd laid out in meticulous detail a scheme for exploring His own potential.

One of my pet peeves with the Abrahamic religions is that their God is nauseatingly boring, a paint-by-the-numbers kind of guy. Nah. I think He's having fun: all He knows is where He wants things to be heading, not precisely how He's going to get there.
 
You raise important, serious and legitimate issues.

If I had to pinpoint a single factor affecting these things the most, it would be the massively unequal distribution of wealth in the world. When an infinitesimal fraction of humanity owns almost everything, this is such a perverting and distorting influence that nothing escapes its "gravitational pull" (if you will allow my mixed metaphors). I could go off a lot on this point, but won't because its getting late. But again, you raise important points.

Thanks, Michael
Don

To a point, I think Capitalism is beneficial. It's certainly brought a lot of benefits to a large number of people in the West. But I would agree you can have too much of a good thing, and that like anything else it can be abused and cause great suffering, particularly in the undeveloped nations.

I just struggle to think of a more effective economic system; societies that don't apply it tend to end up even worse off. It needs controlling in some degree, but again, I struggle with the idea of governments doing that: all indications are they're just as corrupt, and even less accountable, than financial institutions.

A saving grace is that if everyone ends up too poor to buy things, then in the end, Capitalism won't work. I'm leery about the idea of "distribution" of wealth, as if some entity exists that does that, or even could do that. All the signs are that many organisations founded on well-meaning principles also end up corrupt money-grubbers.

It'll change, I have no doubt: but in its own sweet way, and organically, in accord with universal telos. One can only hope that that doesn't happen only after much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
 
I don't think they're illusory per se: I think they are very real, but perceived and interpreted in different ways. As to how Brahman, or mind-at-large (MAL) in Bernardo's terms, is one but manifests as many, I believe I've recently posted an opinion about that somewhere, either here or on Bernardo's forum. To reiterate, MAL is the one and only consciousness there is. Each of us is a process in MAL that in and of itself has no consciousness, though it's often good enough for government work to think in such terms.

A given process (what we think of as soul or essence) allows for a more or less restricted viewpoint of that one consciousness, so there are a multiplicity of possible viewpoints. We can't (ordinarily at least) multitask like MAL can, and have difficulties imagining how "the one can be many". We identify ourselves with the process we are, which seems independently unitary. Which could just as well be rephrased by saying that MAL simultaneously identifies itself with each of the processes that that we think of as ourselves.

You're a process in MAL; so am I, and so is everyone else. There's just the one consciousness, but a multiplicity of processes, and it is the processes that can evolve. MAL consciousness is and always has been the same and unchanging. Evolution just brings the viewpoint of processes closer into resonance with the consciousness of MAL. We are the ways that MAL/Brahman can come to experience itself in the great game of existence, or Lila (playground of God), which Don Salmon informed me is the Hindu name for the game.

Apologies Michael, but the kind of explanation I'm thinking of is the kind we'd expect from a materialist trying to solve the Hard Problem, or a follower of Aquinas explaining from the ground up why the Cosmological Argument is a valid argument for God's existence.

To simply say each of us is a process in M@L seems to assume that it makes sense an individual consciousness - or the illusion of said consciousness - would arise from Source Consciousness. In the same way materialists have to explain how nonconscious matter produces consciousness, Holistic philosophies have to explain why an individuated process would come to see itself as arguably separate from the centers of localized consciousness around it. Perhaps this is where varied practices offering gnosis come in, but I have issues with the whole concept of inner science that I think need to be settled before we can accept any conclusions from internal gnosis as universally valid.

Also not clear why M@L is unchanging - this leads into the issue that an illusion of change is still a changing illusion. At least the God some Scholastics assert is unchanging is [sorta/somewhat] disconnected from creation, whereas for Holistic philosophies God/M@L/Whatever is Everything. As I've said elsewhere, the closest comparison we seem to have to Whole-becoming-Many is Dissociative Identity Disorder which is definitely a change.

Don't get me wrong, I like Holism (Freya Matthews' Holistic Panpsychism in particular), but this is Whole->Many issue is definitely something that needs a solution akin to the [solutions to] problems faced by other paradigms.
 
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Apologies Michael, but the kind of explanation I'm thinking of is the kind we'd expect from a materialist trying to solve the Hard Problem, or a follower of Aquinas explaining from the ground up why the Cosmological Argument is a valid argument for God's existence...

I still haven't grokked exactly where you're coming from, Sciborg. That's okay, but it does make communication difficult. I'm not blaming you for that: maybe it's just me being a little dense. I'm not saying I'm certain of my ground, mind: just putting forth my current opinions for whatever they're worth, which could be little. A week next Wednesday, they might be different.

I think MAL is unchanging because if it changes, it's either evolving or devolving, and if it's doing that, then it couldn't, in my way of thinking at least, be the ultimate. Unless one thinks there is no ultimate, but instead an infinite chain of causes--beyond MAL, there'd be something else, and beyond that, something else again--but at some point I think it has to stop, and that's what I'm calling MAL.

Look at it relatively simply, just at the human level. Each normally functioning human being can be viewed as a system with lots of processes going on in interrelated ways. That doesn't mean we have dissociated identity disorder. On the contrary, we're an integrated package of processes that act together in an integrated fashion. We can say that even though science is very far from being able to describe all the processes and all their interrelationships. We've probably written about the first ten pages of a billion-page encyclopaedia about them, and in the completed encyclopaedia, what we've written so far would probably be substantially amended.

I'm sorry I'm talking metaphorically about this, but I've little choice. MAL or all-that-is isn't dissociated simply because it's capable of a multiplicity of manifestation. It's an integral whole that from our viewpoint we can describe as comprising many processes working in concert. Granted, "process" is just a word, a limited and limiting attempt to describe something in terms that are inevitably coloured by my local experience and conditioning. But what the heck, words are all I've got (and all you've got, too) when we try to communicate in writing.

We can't explain the hard problem of consciousness in materialist terms, full stop. We can't explain it at all, in my view, unless we postulate the existence and primacy of MAL, which just is what it is and can't be reduced to a simpler explanation. It's where the buck stops. For whatever reason or none at all, it is what it is and does what it does, and that manifests itself from various, limited viewpoints, as multiplicity.

I'm not saying it couldn't not manifest itself in multiplicity. But if it didn't manifest in multiplicity, no process would be around to be having conversations like this. MAL would then simply exist in splendid isolation. A hadith qudsi has it it that God wanted to be known, and that's why it initiated the multiplicity of creation. To reiterate, if it hadn't wanted to be known, then no processes would be around to argue the toss.

This implies, of course, that in and of itself, MAL is capable of formulating a desire and of initiating the creation (which seems to follow an evolutionary schema) to fulfil it. You could say that in a sense it is dissociating itself, but why would you think in terms of disorder rather than an intelligent and sensible means to an end?

If you're looking for some other kind of explanation, well, good luck with that, but presently, I can't come up with anything better than I currently have. You don't of course have to accept it, and it isn't, of course, necessarily true, even approximately. What more can I say?
 
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Don, I'm reading Experience and may comment on it when I've completed it, which should be fairly soon, but I thought I'd draw your attention to this passage before I forgot:

(P. 49):

Actual infinity is the idea that we can hold something infinite in the
finite palm of our hand. Cantor was the first mathematician to formalize
how this could happen. This led to paradoxes that made Russell look like
the intellectual amateur he was, and generated the foundations of
mathematics, which Wittgenstein thought were a complete travesty of
the intellect.

Forgive me, but wasn't it Russell who destroyed Cantor's thinking with the "set of all sets that don't contain themselves as a member" paradox?* And therefore, wasn't it Cantor who was exposed as an amateur in relation to Russell? Quite possibly an inadvertent substitution, but I thought I'd let you know in case a textual correction is in order.

*When I learnt about this from a BBC TV programme quite some time ago, it was explained in the same terms that Wikipedia mentions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_paradox
Suppose that every public library has to compile a catalogue of all its books. Since the catalogue is itself one of the library's books, some librarians include it in the catalogue for completeness; while others leave it out as it being one of the library's books is self-evident.

Now imagine that all these catalogues are sent to the national library. Some of them include themselves in their listings, others do not. The national librarian compiles two master catalogues – one of all the catalogues that list themselves, and one of all those that don't.

The question is: should these catalogues list themselves? The 'Catalogue of all catalogues that list themselves' is no problem. If the librarian doesn't include it in its own listing, it is still a true catalog of those catalogues that do include themselves. If he does include it, it remains a true catalogue of those that list themselves.

However, just as the librarian cannot go wrong with the first master catalogue, he is doomed to fail with the second. When it comes to the 'Catalogue of all catalogues that don't list themselves', the librarian cannot include it in its own listing, because then it would include itself. But in that case, it should belong to the other catalogue, that of catalogues that do include themselves. However, if the librarian leaves it out, the catalogue is incomplete. Either way, it can never be a true catalogue of catalogues that do not list themselves.
 
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Don, I have now finished the book and found it fascinating. My way has never involved Yoga (or Buddhism, either); I've been more attracted by a kind of personal syncretism between Christianity and Sufism, and to be frank, have always found the terminology of Yoga difficult to penetrate. I give you high marks for making things considerably clearer. Beyond that, I'm not quite sure what to say at the moment: perhaps I just need to let it soak in and marinate for a bit because I can see aspects of what you've said that don't conflict with my previous understandings/approaches, and others that might be more at odds.

Oh, and I spotted something else: typos?

(P. 64):

Self-aware Being, drisimatrah, is all that exists. In its pure form it is called Brahman, and as such it is actual infinity. The act of projecting itself into what it can never be is called “Maya”. Maya has no reason, no cause, no purpose. It is the causeless cause sought in all philosophy, and more recently by science. About all that can be said about Maya is that, in infinity, anything can happen, even the inscrutable act of the infinite trying to become finite. There is no cause, no beginning to this process. It happens outside of time and is eternal. The surface mind will simply never understand it. Deal with it and get over it because more important things will be required of your intellect as we proceed.

Re: the two occurrences of the word Maya that I've bolded: I did wonder if you meant Brahman instead? It seems to make more sense to me if that was the case; otherwise, I can't seem to make head nor tail of it.
 
My issue tho is deeper than this. It is just that I see two contradictory pictures (meaningless/maya vs divine plan) and feel a very strong need to resolve or reconcile them. Experience is just a step in this direction. At the moment in my thinking, the two are held in balance, and I think that is what Experience is trying to get at. We WANT to see life and existence as good. We need a good dose of the other side of the coin, I think. Again, contrast. What does good mean if we don't really know what bad means?

These dichotomies have archetypes in the literature indicating a "wholeness" between them. You have already mentioned action/reaction and karma. I suggest that figure and background from Gestalt concepts and yin/yang from the Tao are deep-meaning examples. Actions related to these structures are: focal attention and choice. (but not to get all Matrix about it)

Maya and "divine plan" both require focused attention and making decisions in trying to live the good life. The actions required seem to be part of the wholeness and context of the state of affairs they represent.
 
Don, I have now finished the book and found it fascinating. My way has never involved Yoga (or Buddhism, either); I've been more attracted by a kind of personal syncretism between Christianity and Sufism, and to be frank, have always found the terminology of Yoga difficult to penetrate. I give you high marks for making things considerably clearer. Beyond that, I'm not quite sure what to say at the moment: perhaps I just need to let it soak in and marinate for a bit because I can see aspects of what you've said that don't conflict with my previous understandings/approaches, and others that might be more at odds.

Oh, and I spotted something else: typos?

(P. 64):

Self-aware Being, drisimatrah, is all that exists. In its pure form it is called Brahman, and as such it is actual infinity. The act of projecting itself into what it can never be is called “Maya”. Maya has no reason, no cause, no purpose. It is the causeless cause sought in all philosophy, and more recently by science. About all that can be said about Maya is that, in infinity, anything can happen, even the inscrutable act of the infinite trying to become finite. There is no cause, no beginning to this process. It happens outside of time and is eternal. The surface mind will simply never understand it. Deal with it and get over it because more important things will be required of your intellect as we proceed.

Re: the two occurrences of the word Maya that I've bolded: I did wonder if you meant Brahman instead? It seems to make more sense to me if that was the case; otherwise, I can't seem to make head nor tail of it.

Nopes. I think Maya fits in quite nicely there. I can't frame it in words right now so I apologize.
 
Has anyone ever done the science of yoga - or any other discipline from shamanic to esoteric - without knowing what they should expect?

It seems to me that if there is to be an inner science, you'd have to have people follow the steps while being ignorant of the revelations they'd receive.

I thought of a good example for this. The samatha jhanas. Here you focus attention on a single object until the mind becomes entirely absorbed. There is a state before the first jhana where consciousness gets kind of "smooth" which some call access concentration. The practitioner can end up here for any amount of time, minutes or months (in different practice sessions, of course.) But the boundary into the first samatha jhana is unmistakeable. It is not a thought or a conception that someone can repeat as if mimicking. It is a state of rapture and bliss that seems to well up and then issues forth. It has a distinct beginning and end. One enters it when the mind becomes fully absorbed in attention. Obviously it ends when the mind returns to normal consciousness. There are four initial jhanas, but as many as ten overall. Each jhana is distinct from the next, but on a very subtle level.

This is a fairly good overview:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/gunaratana/wheel351.html

One needn't be religious or spiritual in any way to reach these states. This user on Reddit is a Satanist who basically uses the concentrated attention gained from the jhanas to garner physical attainments.

https://pay.reddit.com/r/Meditation/comments/1u9acp/ama_ive_been_doing_concentration_meditation/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Meditation/...ve_been_doing_concentration_meditation_daily/
 
Don, I'm reading Experience and may comment on it when I've completed it, which should be fairly soon, but I thought I'd draw your attention to this passage before I forgot:

Forgive me, but wasn't it Russell who destroyed Cantor's thinking with the "set of all sets that don't contain themselves as a member" paradox?* And therefore, wasn't it Cantor who was exposed as an amateur in relation to Russell? Quite possibly an inadvertent substitution, but I thought I'd let you know in case a textual correction is in order.

Hi Michael.

First, thanks for taking the time to read Experience and to offer your thoughts about it. That is very kind of you.

As pertains your question, I am currently absorbing a lot of info on this. I have 6 or so books on order and they should be showing up soon, all about Cantor, axiomatics in math, etc. I started a new blog series called "Cantor's Dupes" (that grew from the one footnote in Experience) but am afraid to make it public until I am sure I am not being stupid in the piece, so am reading a bunch of source material for it.

As to Russel, I just have a personal beef with the guy. I just don't like him. He was an elitist. He held eugenics views. He was a silly philosopher. His ideas against British Idealism were, in my opinion, just stupid. He is one of the main drivers of the mathematical philosophies of formalism and logicism, and as I make clear in Experience, I just don't accept that position. The main thrust of "Cantor's Dupes" will be about the toxic influence this viewpoint has exerted in science and mathematics. I think there is a direct connection between Russel's approach and this multiverse mania silliness in current physics, for example, and also with post-modernism in philosophy. These are more and more appearing to me as all beasts of the same stripe.

So, sorry, it will take a lot of convincing to have me say anything good about Russel. I am very happy Godel made him look like a fool.

As to Cantor, I have much more sympathy. The man was driven by thoughts of God in everything he did. I sympathize with that. My real question with Cantor at the moment is whether or not I believe his math. His math completely divided mathematics and eventually led to the split in the field. Today, there are broadly two classes of mathematicians: infinitists and finistists. It is actually a very toxic situation, and it all stems from Cantor's work with infinity.

So no, nothing Russel did per se affected what Cantor did. Today people use Cantor's math, not the "principia" that Russel and Whitehead wrote. There are large swaths of mathematicians that consider Cantor to be a towering figure in the history of math, on par with Euclid or Mandelbrot. Russel enjoys nothing of that kind of respect, and for good reason: he didn't do anything that significant.

Finally, Russel misinterpreted Leibniz, and I am a huge Leibniz fan. Russel critiquing Leibniz is like having an ant critique a human.

So, to summarize, I am trying to get my head around all this now and hopefully over the coming months will end up producing blog series and book about it that will be unique because, as with all my stuff, it will incorporate occult and yogic thinking to help illuminate the issues.

Again, Michael, thanks for taking time to read Experience and for stimulating such an interesting conversation.

Best,

Don
 
Don, I have now finished the book and found it fascinating.

Oh, and I spotted something else: typos?

(P. 64):

Self-aware Being, drisimatrah, is all that exists. In its pure form it is called Brahman, and as such it is actual infinity. The act of projecting itself into what it can never be is called “Maya”. Maya has no reason, no cause, no purpose. It is the causeless cause sought in all philosophy, and more recently by science. About all that can be said about Maya is that, in infinity, anything can happen, even the inscrutable act of the infinite trying to become finite. There is no cause, no beginning to this process. It happens outside of time and is eternal. The surface mind will simply never understand it. Deal with it and get over it because more important things will be required of your intellect as we proceed.

Re: the two occurrences of the word Maya that I've bolded: I did wonder if you meant Brahman instead? It seems to make more sense to me if that was the case; otherwise, I can't seem to make head nor tail of it.

No, I'm talking about Maya. Based on all my readings of Hinduism, Vendanta, Samkya, etc, it seems clear that the following holds:

Brahman = The infinite
Maya = finite stuff

But Maya is within Brahman (as it must be, since Brahman is infinite). They are not separate at all. Maya is something within Brahman, and so is an aspect of Brahman. So, it is the question raised somewhere above: how does the One become the Many, the infinite become the finite? In Hinduism, this process is called "Maya" and I compare it to the Christian "Fall From Grace" described in the tale of Adam and Eve.

The idea quoted above is that we cannot understand what Maya is as a process per se, at least not at the level of the surface mind and ordinary intellect. Yogis claim that one gets to a level where one experiences what the process is and so knows it intimately. But this is a very deep altered state of consciousness that our normal surface mind is too small to contain. So, what I am saying above is that, if we stay confined only to our surface mind, we simply will never understand what Maya is.

So then, I do the stupid task (I say this half joking and half serious) of trying to understand what cannot be understood.

In Experience, I offer the idea that we can make the equalities listed above. and restated Brahman/Maya as Infinity/finite. And then I mix in Krishnananda's insight that this link involves the process he describes as "The Self seeing the Self in the Not-Self". That is, I try to use the regular intellect to further our understanding of the essentially inscrutable process of Maya. I don't know if I succeed per se, but I think it is an original contribution, a different way to bake the various ingredients.

Of course, if you substitute "Brahman" for "Maya" in the above quote, it also makes sense. But I definitely meant "Maya" and am just saying it is some inscrutable aspect of Brahman.

Hope that clarifies. If not, please feel free to keep asking questions.

Thanks, Michael.

Best,

Don
 
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