Re: Now Way OT Re: Shadow Complex cheaters

The alMIGHTY N wrote:

Your analogy comparing gravity and a belief simply doesn't work, you
cannot choose to believe in gravity, it simply is there.
And if you practice sitting quietly and meditating for extended periods of time
over several years, you can find that the fundamental nature of your being (and
the universe in general) becomes "simply there" for you to observe objectively,
and it will be as real to you as when you watch gravity cause a pencil to fall
off the table.

What you learn from sitting quietly and meditating is how to sit
quietly and meditate. To assume that primitive creatures such as
ourselves could somehow unlock "the fundamental nature of... the
universe in general" just by thinking really hard in silence is, for
lack of a better word, arrogant.

Well, that's easy to say when you haven't done it. And by the way, you've got it all wrong. The point is not to "think really hard". Just the opposite. The point is to *stop* your brain from thinking so that you can experience your true nature without slapping on humanly-constructed concepts. To think of that possibility as "arrogant" seems to already assume something about our nature -- namely, that "spirit" is somewhere "out there" independent of human nature itself (like a Judeo-Christian God) which we cannot experience directly and must rely on faith or the word of others to understand. That's an awfully big assumption. Wouldn't you rather find out for yourself?

If you take even just two random people and have them following the
teachings of Buddha and meditate for years, they'll still have two
different experiences because what they're experiencing is
introspective and personal. What I learn and realize from years of
meditation is going to be different from what someone else will.

Talk about arrogant -- how can you possibly claim to have knowledge about something which you have no experience with? In fact, masters of meditation who study for years have quite similar experiences.

Gravity involves the world of matter, so of course it is different because it relates to a physical science and you and I can both point to the same external, physical phenomenon and talk about it much easier than matters of metaphysics. But just because metaphysics does not deal with the physical world of matter does not mean that the sensory experiences you can have through trained meditation are any less "real" than your sensory experiences of the physical world.

Anthropology is a science, but if you repeat the cultural studies of previous researchers you will not find the *exact* same results because you will not be studying the exact same group of people at the exact same point in time. But that doesn't make it a non-science -- there is still a level of verifiability that can be done with the soft sciences. Or maybe anthropology is a religion?

You say that everyone's experience is going to be different, but what about their experiences are similar? There is quite a lot of research and documentation showing that when you tease out cultural differences, trained meditators actually experience quite a lot of similarities. Is that just coincidence? Hmmm.

Anyway, no real point in continuing this discussion/argument further. I think anyone still reading the thread understands where I'm coming from, and they will either agree or disagree. Hard science folks are always threatened by practices which cannot be verified through "objective" external measurement in the same manner as the hard sciences. But that doesn't make these other aspects of the universe unreal. It just makes them harder to get a handle on.
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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Who made God?
    ... Reading the likes of Hesse's Siddharta, ... Meditation hones both the senses and the intellect, ... "How are the mystical and science compatible? ... I guess mystics can say ...
    (uk.religion.christian)
  • Re: Now Way OT Re: Shadow Complex cheaters
    ... meditation are any less "real" than your sensory experiences of the physical world. ... not be empirical, but they are not based on faith either (except, to go back to the point above, the "faith" that we are directly sensing reality, which is required to hold up *any* branch of science). ... I was just saying that the study of meditation can help bring to light aspects of reality that we normally don't see because we are too caught up in all of the thoughts and sensory overload that rule our lives from day-to-day. ...
    (alt.games.video.xbox)
  • Re: Now Way OT Re: Shadow Complex cheaters
    ... meditation are any less "real" than your sensory experiences of the physical world. ... not be empirical, but they are not based on faith either (except, to go back to ... required to hold up *any* branch of science). ...
    (alt.games.video.xbox)
  • Re: Mr Dawkins new book?
    ... |> something that is certainly achievable through meditation alone, ... debates between Bohm, Father Bede Griffiths, Krishnamurti, Sheldrake, ... Ilya Prirogine, the Dalai Lama, Hawking and some others I've forgotten. ... But the key memory I have is not so much of the overlap between science ...
    (uk.religion.christian)
  • Re: (off topic ?) Dalai Lama NYT op-ed on Science and Buddhism
    ... > SCIENCE has always fascinated me. ... World-class scientists have generously coached me ... > to explore how meditation might alter brain function. ... > Society for Neuroscience today in Washington. ...
    (soc.culture.thai)