When you write “mindfulness meditation serves as a means for developing compassion and empathy.” Are you lumping compassion mediation in with mindfulness meditation?
Dear Johnathan, you wrote, "Believing is fundamentally social, but beliefs will differ. The sacred is universal, but lines of the sacred will be drawn differently. We are all on auto-pilot by default, but people will be relatively ‘awake’ or ‘asleep’ to differing extents." By auto-pilot do you mean the non-conscious orchestration of human behavior, including our perceptions of objective reality? Are you relatively 'awake' because you know the words Johnathan Rowsan, or are you sleeping-walking within a cognitive illusion that parallels the optical illusion of the sun appearing to rise above a horizon at the birth of each new day? Are these the two perceptual worlds of which you speak?
You also wrote, "Spirituality therefore has some universal forms and structures but varying content." Do you mean the universal reality of being-in-time? Or the varying content of that reality that sees humanity have 40 different calendar 'concepts' of time within a period you probably think of as the year 2023, with numbers ranging from 5 to 5783.
"Universal forms and structures but varying content," indeed, within our linguistic conventions now ripe for transcendence, if only we could conceive of these vernacular (spoken by ordinary people) vocabularies as boundaries to spiritual transformation?
You ask "where to begin?" Perhaps with a confession of the epistemic confusion inherent in the 'make-believe' nature of spoken language's, those sounds and symbols of our mother tongue that by virtue of 'repetition,' as you rightly point out, we simply take for granted.
Is it time to make the existential effort to become 'reality-wise' about the sheer miracle of life within a universe that is overwhelmingly hostile to our existence, and do more to fathom God's 'riddle-me-this' gift of consciousness, by attending to science's 'uncover, reveal' apocalyptic spirit and its post-1990 revelations about our unseen 'operating-system,' to 'feel' the reality of being nervous in service of Creation? Was the coining of the two-part Greek word Apocalypse, meant to refer to the capacity of our conscious mind, and not a catastrophic event, as popular opinion has it?
Is a sad truth, that young people today probably know more about their smart-device's operating system that they do their own nervous system? Which, btw, is not all about the brain, despite Iain's hemisphere hypothesis. And was, like other ascension philosophers, the Nazarene calling out our epistemic confusion when he responded, "I speak to them in parables, because seeing they don’t see, and hearing, they don’t hear, neither do they understand?" Had she/he, or the many N. T. writers read, "All this time we have been repeating the words 'know,' 'understand.' Yet we do not know what knowledge is." ― Plato, Theaetetus.
And in the context of how “It is time to reveal humans as the beings who result from repetition. Just as the nineteenth century stood cognitively under the sign of production and twentieth under that of reflexivity," can you conceive of having the kind of reflexive, self-hypnotic mind-sight, R. D. Laing hinted at with his "we are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy?"
Agree with your premise but think you spend too much time analyzing (academic speak) why habits accomplish goals versus focusing on the why/how of goals themselves. Namely meditation - have been doing it on/off for 20 years and am still not very good because like you I have a curious 'monkey' mind that has a hard time just being quiet. As for how the mind works - very mysterious - two things to come mind - (pun intended) a quote wrongly attributed to Mandela but is from presidential hopeful and spiritual guru Marianne Williamson, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us". And the strange phenomena of folks who are struck by lightening occasionally having new amazing abilities, whether it be creative like playing classical piano pieces or doing complex math - with no training at all. Similar concept of complex math theorems/laws that humble mathematicians/physicists now admit are merely discovered and not invented by the human mind. Seems everything is already upstairs in our skull and is merely waiting to utilized by us if we can unlock through practice or other miraculous ways that defy explanation. Another famous quote paraphrased from Michelangelo - 'the sculpture is already inside the rock - it's the artist's job to do the work to find it'.
Sounds like Jesus: "You don't pour new wine on old wineskins."
In terms of absolute Real Intelligence, the ability to find all optimal different ways to reach the same goal.", how do the two hemispheres' thought systems compare, according to William James's definition?
According to Iain McGilchrist the LH is sequential thinking, well documented in his work with the split-brain hypotheses. In a value relational network of locally connected branches, optimising the least action distance to each individual branch in the network is achieved by sorting all branches by fixing them one by one in order of distance from the Origin. In this complete optimisation we end up with a matrix of shortest distances to each node in the network. That only tells us the cost to get to different destinations. A bureaucrat's idea of intelligence, a straightforward calculation? Fits well with Iains understanding of computers usefulness only as calculators without any means of intelligence. It clearly doesn't fit James's idea of intelligence. More an intelligence of grabbing abstract values. Yet, it is used to find a shortest route/way to get to a destination, ME-referential.
Now, what if we use the opposite thought direction, optimising upstream from the destination? Would we not get the distance from every branch startpoint to the destination?
We-referential, or as Gebser puts it in his book title:"The Ever-Present Origin." in an all-at-once timeless emergent simulation. An Attractor Field. A gravitational attractor field, Electromagnetic attractor Field, Thermodynamic attractor Field and a Vacuum attractor Field.
But electromagnetism is known to be a stronger force than gravity? Electromagnetic attractor fields are nondual dualities of mind/logos and spirit. Mind is the electronic action the reaction of which is the spirit. Newton's third law, the law of the universe! This has its parallel mechanical solution in solving the problem of complexity in a transport network, an all-at-once nondual mind spirit duality.
We-referential of cause is RH. But it is also mechanical reductionistic.
If we could only persuade the Transportation community of this amazing transformation potential of being awakened. Even IONS would presumably receive this amazing paradigm with open hands. Before they exhaust themselves by trying to reverse engineer this so-called singularity, as perceived also by Kurzweil to reverse engineer. GOD BLESS HUMANITY, Brother Nelson.
When you write “mindfulness meditation serves as a means for developing compassion and empathy.” Are you lumping compassion mediation in with mindfulness meditation?
See for example,
https://cultivarlamente.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2021_Roca_JAD_Meditation-mechanisms.pdf
***
https://theconversation.com/mindfulness-meditation-can-make-some-americans-more-selfish-and-less-generous-160687#:~:text=Specifically%2C%20briefly%20engaging%20in%20a,less%20generous%20with%20their%20time.
Thanks for writing
Dear Johnathan, you wrote, "Believing is fundamentally social, but beliefs will differ. The sacred is universal, but lines of the sacred will be drawn differently. We are all on auto-pilot by default, but people will be relatively ‘awake’ or ‘asleep’ to differing extents." By auto-pilot do you mean the non-conscious orchestration of human behavior, including our perceptions of objective reality? Are you relatively 'awake' because you know the words Johnathan Rowsan, or are you sleeping-walking within a cognitive illusion that parallels the optical illusion of the sun appearing to rise above a horizon at the birth of each new day? Are these the two perceptual worlds of which you speak?
You also wrote, "Spirituality therefore has some universal forms and structures but varying content." Do you mean the universal reality of being-in-time? Or the varying content of that reality that sees humanity have 40 different calendar 'concepts' of time within a period you probably think of as the year 2023, with numbers ranging from 5 to 5783.
"Universal forms and structures but varying content," indeed, within our linguistic conventions now ripe for transcendence, if only we could conceive of these vernacular (spoken by ordinary people) vocabularies as boundaries to spiritual transformation?
You ask "where to begin?" Perhaps with a confession of the epistemic confusion inherent in the 'make-believe' nature of spoken language's, those sounds and symbols of our mother tongue that by virtue of 'repetition,' as you rightly point out, we simply take for granted.
Is it time to make the existential effort to become 'reality-wise' about the sheer miracle of life within a universe that is overwhelmingly hostile to our existence, and do more to fathom God's 'riddle-me-this' gift of consciousness, by attending to science's 'uncover, reveal' apocalyptic spirit and its post-1990 revelations about our unseen 'operating-system,' to 'feel' the reality of being nervous in service of Creation? Was the coining of the two-part Greek word Apocalypse, meant to refer to the capacity of our conscious mind, and not a catastrophic event, as popular opinion has it?
Is a sad truth, that young people today probably know more about their smart-device's operating system that they do their own nervous system? Which, btw, is not all about the brain, despite Iain's hemisphere hypothesis. And was, like other ascension philosophers, the Nazarene calling out our epistemic confusion when he responded, "I speak to them in parables, because seeing they don’t see, and hearing, they don’t hear, neither do they understand?" Had she/he, or the many N. T. writers read, "All this time we have been repeating the words 'know,' 'understand.' Yet we do not know what knowledge is." ― Plato, Theaetetus.
And in the context of how “It is time to reveal humans as the beings who result from repetition. Just as the nineteenth century stood cognitively under the sign of production and twentieth under that of reflexivity," can you conceive of having the kind of reflexive, self-hypnotic mind-sight, R. D. Laing hinted at with his "we are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy?"
Agree with your premise but think you spend too much time analyzing (academic speak) why habits accomplish goals versus focusing on the why/how of goals themselves. Namely meditation - have been doing it on/off for 20 years and am still not very good because like you I have a curious 'monkey' mind that has a hard time just being quiet. As for how the mind works - very mysterious - two things to come mind - (pun intended) a quote wrongly attributed to Mandela but is from presidential hopeful and spiritual guru Marianne Williamson, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us". And the strange phenomena of folks who are struck by lightening occasionally having new amazing abilities, whether it be creative like playing classical piano pieces or doing complex math - with no training at all. Similar concept of complex math theorems/laws that humble mathematicians/physicists now admit are merely discovered and not invented by the human mind. Seems everything is already upstairs in our skull and is merely waiting to utilized by us if we can unlock through practice or other miraculous ways that defy explanation. Another famous quote paraphrased from Michelangelo - 'the sculpture is already inside the rock - it's the artist's job to do the work to find it'.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
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Sounds like Jesus: "You don't pour new wine on old wineskins."
In terms of absolute Real Intelligence, the ability to find all optimal different ways to reach the same goal.", how do the two hemispheres' thought systems compare, according to William James's definition?
According to Iain McGilchrist the LH is sequential thinking, well documented in his work with the split-brain hypotheses. In a value relational network of locally connected branches, optimising the least action distance to each individual branch in the network is achieved by sorting all branches by fixing them one by one in order of distance from the Origin. In this complete optimisation we end up with a matrix of shortest distances to each node in the network. That only tells us the cost to get to different destinations. A bureaucrat's idea of intelligence, a straightforward calculation? Fits well with Iains understanding of computers usefulness only as calculators without any means of intelligence. It clearly doesn't fit James's idea of intelligence. More an intelligence of grabbing abstract values. Yet, it is used to find a shortest route/way to get to a destination, ME-referential.
Now, what if we use the opposite thought direction, optimising upstream from the destination? Would we not get the distance from every branch startpoint to the destination?
We-referential, or as Gebser puts it in his book title:"The Ever-Present Origin." in an all-at-once timeless emergent simulation. An Attractor Field. A gravitational attractor field, Electromagnetic attractor Field, Thermodynamic attractor Field and a Vacuum attractor Field.
But electromagnetism is known to be a stronger force than gravity? Electromagnetic attractor fields are nondual dualities of mind/logos and spirit. Mind is the electronic action the reaction of which is the spirit. Newton's third law, the law of the universe! This has its parallel mechanical solution in solving the problem of complexity in a transport network, an all-at-once nondual mind spirit duality.
With love and peace, Brother Niels
We-referential of cause is RH. But it is also mechanical reductionistic.
If we could only persuade the Transportation community of this amazing transformation potential of being awakened. Even IONS would presumably receive this amazing paradigm with open hands. Before they exhaust themselves by trying to reverse engineer this so-called singularity, as perceived also by Kurzweil to reverse engineer. GOD BLESS HUMANITY, Brother Nelson.