So, its almost Easter again. As an athiest the Christian celebration of Easter doesn't mean much to me, but as a cultural point of reference it feels like something that I should be a part of. I've decided that from now on I'll treat it as a celebration of the changing of the seaons. Sometimes I wish I lived close to a place where those tree-hugging, earthy-crunchy people live, they usually have nice fresh perspectives on celebrations like this. So I think I'll starting having a small party at the times of the solstice and equinox. We'll offer burnt animal sacrifice, burn pungent incense and consume lots of beer. Yah, right, IOW, grill some steak, have some good cigars and drink beer.
Today was uneventful, but good. I played video games with the kids, took them to the library, skimmed through a book called '8 minute meditation' or something similar, colored Easter.. er, I mean, Vernal Equinox eegs with colored pencils and dye, printed some photos from Christmas.. er, I mean Winter Solstice vacation (I can see that this is going to take some getting used to), and made a short entry on this blog thing. As if anyone besides myself cares. But thats not really the point.
The meditation book was interesting. The author claims that the daily 8 minute meditation sessions he advocates are sufficent to achieve the 'be here now' state (for lack of a better term. This could probably also be described as the Clear Light or any number of other terms). He spends quite a bit of time on the initial stages, wherein one is attempting to clear one's mind of subvocalized thought. Fortunately my on-again-off-again meditation practices have made me quite proficent with this already. The book describes this in terms of 'catch and release', but I found more effective the Buddhist concept of picturing oneself as a mountain and the occasional thought as a small cloud scuttling by. The mountain is unaffected by and soon left behind by the cloud. The author goes on with several other meditation techniques, most of which I found farily intuitive, or designed to allow one to more effectively disregard physical discomfort. Unfortunately I didn't get to the last section of the book in which he describes some possibly interesting combinations of techinques. I'll skim that section next time I'm at the library.
A few months ago I stopped by a local spa and took a half-hour soak in their flotation tank. This is basicly a bathtub 4 feet wide and tall and 8 feet long, filled with 96degF water that has been saturated with an epsom or sea salt solution to increase bouyance. The inside of the tank is black and sealed against external light and sound. When immersed in the water one's body floats like a cork, with the ears just submerged. The conditions are highly effective at isolating one from sensory input. By remaining still with arms over the chest or above the head (if left at the sides the elbows tend to rise and twist out at an awkward angle that quicks makes the sholders unconfortable) I found that conditions were perfect for deep meditation. It was interesting that I found it difficult to meditate with eyes open, although it was just as dark outside as inside my eyelids. Near as I can tell my brain knows when my eyes are shut and when they are what I percieve as visual input switches from what my eyes see to some kind of internal screen. Its hard to describe. The blackness I see with eyes open in a dark place is different from that of closing my eyes. I suppose its common, so I expect the reader probably knows what I mean. Since I always practice my meditation with closed eyes I found it impossible to achieve a deep state of meditation with my eyes open, even in this very isolated place. Eventually I started to get board. I generally don't meditate longer than 15 or 20 minutes, so I'd guess that no more than 10 had passed before I started to get ansy. I found that the body seems to start to get starved for input after a while. Not anticipating this I figited enough to give it the necessary input. I believe that next time I'll have to exert better control and remain absolutely motionless. The isolation tank did not assist in bringing about an easier 'clear-light' state (a state I rarely reach in meditation, I think I've reached it maybe 4 times in several years). I think that with some practice with the tank it would be a fairly powerful meditation aid (not to mention being a highly effective relaxation device). With more time I'm quite certain one would start to see the hallucinations or visions often attributed to isolation tanks of this sort.
It concerns me when people who experiance hallucinations, be they induced by drugs or physical rigors or isolation, take their visions at face value. Rather than considering that their mind is 'playing tricks' or is simply not working as they are used to, people frequently will leap to what I consider to be unfounded conclusions. For example, experiances of perceiving a god-like being are not uncommon. Some people take this as evidence of the existence of such a being. However, the same individual will disregard similar induced effects, such as 'breathing' of walls or crawling of the grain patterns in wood. Why accept one as real and one as imagined? A sense of the profound is also very common. Often this sense is taken as evidence that one is seeing 'Truth' or the divine. I rather think that it is this sense that takes even the most mundane bits of existance and lends to them the sense of profound truth. Often as one returns to normalcy one can't remember exactly what it was that was so profound. I believe it is because nearly everything was, and so there was no one thing to recall, no special thing one can point to and say, 'there, that is the thing that holds the Truth of the universe'. For some, this might point to the idea that it is indeed everything that holds this truth. I rather believe that it is an artifact of our mental processes. Sometimes these experiances are called 'mind expanding'. But I wonder. Might it be instead that they are mind reducing? Our normal mental processes are capable of grasping an incredible amount of information with very little effort on our part. But if one were to reduce that capacity to the point where only one single, fundamental fact could be retained, what would that feel like? I think it would be a single spark of being that hung on to that one defining property: 'I Am'. Beyond that point lies only the unconscious mind, capable of action and reaction, but not of self-awareness. Balancing oneself on the edge of this abyss this one single idea, 'I Am' fills everything and would be quite profound. I wonder if we as infants experiance a transition from unthinking thing to self awareness at some point.
About Me
- Codesuidae
- Programmer, lover-of-knowledge, arm-chair philosopher and general under-achiever. I'll work hard at anything once. After that its pretty hit-n-miss. I'm more of an explorer than a cartographer.
2 comments:
Good to see that you are getting into the celebration of things. Also good to see that your meditation practice is bearing fruit. Wish I could say the same of mine. As far as your discussion of people trusting their experience during visions (hallucinations if you must), I offer the following: If you wish to entertain the possibility of your mind playing tricks on you, then why does that not also come into play when considering physical evidence? What you are asking those of us interested in experience outside the normal day to day physical existence to do is be extreme skeptics, which, I admit, has a certain appeal. However, when you maintain this position, you soon find that knowledge stops. If you cannot trust your experience, then you cannot know anything. This is the origin of the now famous statement 'Cogito ergo sum' or 'I think, therefore, I am.' Descartes methodically examined all of his different types of beliefs and realized that ALL of them were subject to the possibility of falsehood. This is what is referred to in analytic philosophy as 'hyperbolic doubt' or extreme skepticism. What every philosopher realizes after mulling these ideas around for a while is that 1)skepticism is a valid possibility and 2) The fun stops if you actually consider skepticism as truth. Once you come to the conclusion that the only tool you have (your mind) with which to experience is fooling you and you therefore have no way of knowing what is true and what is not, then you cannot continue to do, or say, anything. There is a famous Greek philosopher who is said to be the father of skepticism whose name was Pyhro (forgive my atrocious spelling). He was so convinced that skepticism was the truth that he refused to assert anything. People would come from miles around to ask Pyhro questions and all he would offer would be some ambiguous action like wiggling a finger. Some found this extremely wise. Others, like myself, find this to be total lunacy.
I agree that skepticism can be taken too far. My presumption is that in a healty, unstressed, 'normal' condition most humans have a natural capacity to build a mental model of their enviroment that is accurate to the resolution of our senses and experiance. This capacity is necessary for the species to survive. One must be able to gather food and avoid hazards; to this end, accurate information about the environment must be gathered and processed.
As intelligent, creative beings we have invented technology that extends our ability to percieve beyond the limits of our natural equipment (microscopes, telescopes, teledildonics, etc). However, for now at least, these things are just devices that modify the environment, our base sensory equipment is still the same (except in very few cases where electronics are directly interfaced to our brains to repair faulty hearing or vision).
There are also psychotic disorders that can cause the mental model of the world or ones reations to it to be inconsistant. One must be careful to consider if one is suffering the effects of such an afflication, which can be difficult, or, at least in principle, impossible. People afflicted with such disorders tend to be unsuccessful dealing with the normal challenges of life and generally end up in treatment facilities, living on the street, or dead (or Senators, which may actually be worse).
A commonly known conjecture in philosophy is that of Descartes' demon, a malevolent entity that can manipulate ones mind (this is analogous to the 'brain in a vat' as well as Plato's 'Allegory of the Cave'). Such a demon could make intelligent decisions about the manipulations in order to make one act in a certain way. Presuming the demon did not make mistakes, it could choose to remain perfectly undetectable.
Such a demon is not an interesting device to me, because it is by definition indistingishable from the natural workings of the mind. It might as well be said that everyone I dislike has such a demon causing them to behave such that I dislike them, and that they are all actually quite likable people, save for the demon of course. The perfect demon can be dismissed because if it does exist, it cannot be detected or distinguished from normal mental behaviour.
Psycotic disorders fortunately do not behave like an intelligent agent making directed decisions about how one should behave. Instead they tend to be more recongnizable as erratic behaviour. One could understandably have difficulty immediately recognizing such behaviour in oneself, and so must rely on critical long-term self-observation and the opinions of others.
It is accepted that evaluation of the reliablity of sensory input and ones own mental processes are error-prone and situationally dependent.
With some reservations, one can be confident that under normal conditions our sensory input and resulting mental models of the world are reliable, at least to the resolution required to allow species survival. Systematic exceptions such as optical illusions tend to be species-wide and well documented. They also tend to not reproduce reliably in all situations so that they are easy to recognize as faulty input.
When exploring one's mental processes, particularly with chemical aids, I believe that it is much more difficult to recognize or reproduce the 'optical illusions' one encounters, and so one is much more likely to draw faulty conclusions about what one is actually observing.
This is not to say that it is not a useful thing to do, just that any observations should be subject to much analysis, repetition, and, of critical importance, documentation, before one classifies them as 'knowledge'. The study of philosophy prior to this type of exploration is probably helpful, as it would help to develop one's ability to structure and analyse information, as well as open interesting avenues of inquery.
Exploration of the mind is a unique field because it is an attempt to document the capabilities of a device that we have used for all of our lives. During the course of our normal lives we don't often consider the limits of the capabilites of our bodies. By virtue of having grown up using them, we have a good sense of what we can and cannot do, and we generally operate well inside those limits (top performing athletes excepted). It seems that although we have grown up using them as well, our minds are much more difficult to quantify. This may be due to a number of things, perhaps the skill required to observe other people's minds and the non-sensory methods required to observe ones own mind.
Anyway, while your point is valid, internal and external observation are both subject to flaws, I think that we are simply inately better suited for accurate external observation. I hope that through efforts such as your own as well as those of recent and ancient history (the Tibetian Book of the Dead sprints to mind, as well as numerous modern texts on meditation) future generations will have a more secure knowledge base upon which to found 'technologies' of the mind. I believe that our command of the mind is currently quite primitive and that observation and documentation as well as generating interest in others are required if the state of the art is to be advanced. That, and we need to hunt down and kill the followers of Dianetics.
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