I probably shouldn't even comment, but what's the deal you're on with Grandiosity? I'm a bit curious?
Nonsymbolic consciousness, as I understand from reading your post, seems like sunyata without karuna! Sunyata and karuna together, bodhicitta, is what is really needed, according to Buddhism, the Mahayana anyway. Sunyata is the antidote for substantialism while karuna is the antidote for nihilism, do you see?
But Guru Padmasambhava covers this in his upadesa, Introduction to Awareness: Natural Liberation Through Naked Awareness; naked awareness is, I think, your nonsymbolic consciousness. It's the sound of one hand clapping. What does THAT mean? It means the clapping sound self-liberates like the crow's reflection in a pond self-liberates when the crow flies away. We build a table and say, "Hey, that's a table!," but what we have built is not the table, rather, it's the basis of designation for our concept of table. We see the table but then when we look away the table comes with us, it doesn't self-liberate. Why does the table come with us? Because the self-construct is the seed which catalyzes the crystallization of the belief system. The table is really part of our self, if you think about it. This is why, right after talking about the pond-dwelling crow, Guru Rinpoche says, "Bewilderment does not come about due to these appearances, but it does come about due to their subjective apprehension." The nature of mind is open and accepting of anything, really. It can be transformed in any way and remain invariant - pure, total symmetry. Appearances are like density gradients in this open state, waves in an ocean, and we reify these gradients, taking them as real. This alienates us from what IS real, the nature of mind.
This is all fine, but you need karuna, I would say; you need bodhicitta. This is what the Dalai Lama teaches, certainly.
Okay, so I read your son's post, or most of it. Zarathustra Amadeus Goertzel, the living prophet! So maybe the higher levels bring in karuna, I don't know.
What matters to me is working with the subtle body; working with mind alone, mind training, will take you to relative bodhicitta, what Herbert Guenther describes in his Chapter 7 of Dawn of Tantra, but it won't take you to Ultimate Bodhicitta. Here's the deal as I now understand it. I told you in my previous comment here about the Heart of Yoga and the primary reason I found that book helpful was due to Sri Desikachar's explication of these technical terms, technical terms in the yoga sense. As sentient beings we always carry with us this indestructible drop, a subtle consciousness which is our Buddha nature or omniscient mind; this drop is half red and half white. Upon conception we receive from our mother a red drop, which resides at the base of the spine, and from our father a white drop, which resides at the crown. We use the agni, the fire in our belly, to destroy the kundalini, the blockage of the central channel. This allows the red drop to rise up the central channel to the crown where it unites with the white drop and once together these drops "melt" creating an ambrosia which drips down and merges with the indestructible drop. This is called realizing the child clear light and this is what I have experienced and erroneously called the Kundalini awakening. This is still not true enlightenment. True enlightenment is called blending the mother and child clear lights and this is very difficult to attain. Generally speaking, this can only be achieved via Tukdam meditation or with the sexual yogas. During Tukdam meditation these yogins and yoginis are clinically dead, according to Western science, but their bodies do not decay, rigor mortis does not set in, they emit pleasing odors, etc.. What they are doing is blending the mother and son. His Holiness has started two Tukdam projects, one with Richard Davidson up at the U. of Wisconsis and the other with a Russian who has one PhD in theoretical physics and another in neural anatomy. They both witnessed a Tukdam subject whose body did not decay, etc., for 37 days. His Holiness thought this indicated unnecessary attachment on the part of the yogin! Too funny . . .
Oh, wait a minute! I know I always over-simplify things, but I was thinking recently about patterns. Patterns, Gregory Bateson's differences which make a difference, are contextual, correct? It seems to me that one could almost always define a context with an entropy measure, could they not? And then, why could we not define a pattern as any density gradient which causes said "contextual entropy" to deviate from maximum? And then define structural complexity as the number of distinguishable density gradients divided by the number of distinguishable events? Like, for example, the English alphabet in English text, clearly it's a pattern with the context entropy being the Shannon entropy. This is maximum when random, i.e. the probabilities are all the same. But the English alphabet has 21 distinguishable density gradients, giving the alphabet, in that general context, a structural complexity of roughly .8, which is pretty respectable. Of course, any specific English text could deviate from the general and there are other patterns in your typical English text, coming from the grammar and semantics and what have you. So, you just calculate all of these structural complexities and sum them to get the structural complexity of the text itself. What am I missing here?
Good post. A lot of the "non rigidity" and "flexibility" of mind is very similar to buddhist traditions, eg the teachings of thich nhat hanh and pema chodron
Yes I think so. I think Jeffery was trying to come up with a term different from those used in any particular spiritual tradition, to highlight the cross-cultural universality of the phenomenon.
In 2013 I published an article called "A scientific approach to silent consciousness" in Frontiers. It reflects four decades of meditation and thinking about this stuff, and it's all I have to say on the topic.
I probably shouldn't even comment, but what's the deal you're on with Grandiosity? I'm a bit curious?
Nonsymbolic consciousness, as I understand from reading your post, seems like sunyata without karuna! Sunyata and karuna together, bodhicitta, is what is really needed, according to Buddhism, the Mahayana anyway. Sunyata is the antidote for substantialism while karuna is the antidote for nihilism, do you see?
But Guru Padmasambhava covers this in his upadesa, Introduction to Awareness: Natural Liberation Through Naked Awareness; naked awareness is, I think, your nonsymbolic consciousness. It's the sound of one hand clapping. What does THAT mean? It means the clapping sound self-liberates like the crow's reflection in a pond self-liberates when the crow flies away. We build a table and say, "Hey, that's a table!," but what we have built is not the table, rather, it's the basis of designation for our concept of table. We see the table but then when we look away the table comes with us, it doesn't self-liberate. Why does the table come with us? Because the self-construct is the seed which catalyzes the crystallization of the belief system. The table is really part of our self, if you think about it. This is why, right after talking about the pond-dwelling crow, Guru Rinpoche says, "Bewilderment does not come about due to these appearances, but it does come about due to their subjective apprehension." The nature of mind is open and accepting of anything, really. It can be transformed in any way and remain invariant - pure, total symmetry. Appearances are like density gradients in this open state, waves in an ocean, and we reify these gradients, taking them as real. This alienates us from what IS real, the nature of mind.
This is all fine, but you need karuna, I would say; you need bodhicitta. This is what the Dalai Lama teaches, certainly.
Okay, so I read your son's post, or most of it. Zarathustra Amadeus Goertzel, the living prophet! So maybe the higher levels bring in karuna, I don't know.
What matters to me is working with the subtle body; working with mind alone, mind training, will take you to relative bodhicitta, what Herbert Guenther describes in his Chapter 7 of Dawn of Tantra, but it won't take you to Ultimate Bodhicitta. Here's the deal as I now understand it. I told you in my previous comment here about the Heart of Yoga and the primary reason I found that book helpful was due to Sri Desikachar's explication of these technical terms, technical terms in the yoga sense. As sentient beings we always carry with us this indestructible drop, a subtle consciousness which is our Buddha nature or omniscient mind; this drop is half red and half white. Upon conception we receive from our mother a red drop, which resides at the base of the spine, and from our father a white drop, which resides at the crown. We use the agni, the fire in our belly, to destroy the kundalini, the blockage of the central channel. This allows the red drop to rise up the central channel to the crown where it unites with the white drop and once together these drops "melt" creating an ambrosia which drips down and merges with the indestructible drop. This is called realizing the child clear light and this is what I have experienced and erroneously called the Kundalini awakening. This is still not true enlightenment. True enlightenment is called blending the mother and child clear lights and this is very difficult to attain. Generally speaking, this can only be achieved via Tukdam meditation or with the sexual yogas. During Tukdam meditation these yogins and yoginis are clinically dead, according to Western science, but their bodies do not decay, rigor mortis does not set in, they emit pleasing odors, etc.. What they are doing is blending the mother and son. His Holiness has started two Tukdam projects, one with Richard Davidson up at the U. of Wisconsis and the other with a Russian who has one PhD in theoretical physics and another in neural anatomy. They both witnessed a Tukdam subject whose body did not decay, etc., for 37 days. His Holiness thought this indicated unnecessary attachment on the part of the yogin! Too funny . . .
Maybe you would find the Six Yogas of Naropa interesting: https://www.shambhala.com/the-practice-of-the-six-yogas-of-naropa-2393.html.
The book compiled by Jeffrey Hopkins based on oral teachings from His Holiness is good but doesn't go overly in depth: https://www.shambhala.com/authors/g-n/jeffrey-hopkins/the-heart-of-meditation-3594.html
Donald Lopez, Jr. writes some really good books too! For instance: https://patricktreardon.com/book-review-the-tibetan-book-of-the-dead-a-biography-by-donald-s-lopez-jr/
So there you go! I'll leave you alone now.
Oh, wait a minute! I know I always over-simplify things, but I was thinking recently about patterns. Patterns, Gregory Bateson's differences which make a difference, are contextual, correct? It seems to me that one could almost always define a context with an entropy measure, could they not? And then, why could we not define a pattern as any density gradient which causes said "contextual entropy" to deviate from maximum? And then define structural complexity as the number of distinguishable density gradients divided by the number of distinguishable events? Like, for example, the English alphabet in English text, clearly it's a pattern with the context entropy being the Shannon entropy. This is maximum when random, i.e. the probabilities are all the same. But the English alphabet has 21 distinguishable density gradients, giving the alphabet, in that general context, a structural complexity of roughly .8, which is pretty respectable. Of course, any specific English text could deviate from the general and there are other patterns in your typical English text, coming from the grammar and semantics and what have you. So, you just calculate all of these structural complexities and sum them to get the structural complexity of the text itself. What am I missing here?
Good post. A lot of the "non rigidity" and "flexibility" of mind is very similar to buddhist traditions, eg the teachings of thich nhat hanh and pema chodron
"nonsymbolic consciousness" sounds like what has also been called "sient consciousness" in Asian traditions. Is that correct? Bernie Baars
Yes I think so. I think Jeffery was trying to come up with a term different from those used in any particular spiritual tradition, to highlight the cross-cultural universality of the phenomenon.
Thanks, Ben.
In 2013 I published an article called "A scientific approach to silent consciousness" in Frontiers. It reflects four decades of meditation and thinking about this stuff, and it's all I have to say on the topic.
Cheers,
Bernie