What force dances one
into this lovely state?
Light & ecstatic,
Blissful but calm.
Each breath a drug
that sends delicate
shimmers rippling
through the universe.
What force, indeed?
The Dance [Free Verse]
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Tag Archives: Consciousness
BOOKS: “Jñāna-Yoga: The Way of Knowledge” by Ramakrishna Puligandla
Jnana-Yoga–The Way of Knowledge by Ramakrishna PuligandlaMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Google Books Page
This is one of the most useful books I’ve read on the topic of Jñāna-yoga — the approach to yogic philosophy employed by the studious / inquisitive (in contrast to Bhakti-Yoga [the yoga of those for whom faith and devotion works] and Karma-Yoga [the yoga for those for whom a course of self-less action appeals.]) There are Jñāna-yogic Hindu sects and Buddhism — in general — can be thought of as a school of Jñāna-yoga. The author draws from the teachings of both, principally Sankara for Hindu thinking and Nagarjuna for the Buddhist approach.
A word of warning, the author is a scholarly philosopher, and so — while not as unreadable as many works of academic philosophy — it will be a slog for those who are not used to reading scholarly writing.
That said, Puligandla does a fine job of laying out what he views as the central tenets of Jñāna-yoga in a concise fashion and reviewing them at the end. This is not to say I would agree with all that he proposes, herein. In particular, his Chapter 3 conclusions about consciousness are insufficiently justified to be considered core principles of Jñāna-yoga (in my view.) Of course, the beauty of Jñāna-yoga is that it not only doesn’t insist upon coming to the same conclusions, it generates explanations as to how it’s perfectly possible / reasonable to come to different conclusions (see “The Principle of Superimposition,” herein.) Furthermore, since the author is reporting the ideas of Sankara and Nagarjuna, I can’t really hold these ideas against him.
If you’re interested in Jñāna-yoga, and can handle scholarly prose, I’d highly recommend this book.
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“A Slumber did my Spirit Seal” by William Wordsworth [w/ Audio]
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
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Music Appreciation [Free Verse]
Not by hearing or listening,
but by feeling the rhythm,
body / mind resonating to it,
being effortlessly attuned to it:
That is how the music transports one --
how it changes one's mind.
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BOOK REVIEW: The Romance of Reality by Bobby Azarian
The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity by Bobby AzarianMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Amazon.in Page
Out: June 28, 2022
This book presents a metaphysics based on the relatively new (but increasingly mainstream) sciences of complexity, chaos, and information. It boldly explores some of the major questions that consume both philosophers and scientists, such as: how life came to be, what life’s purpose is (to the degree it has one,) what consciousness is and does, and how come we live in a universe finely-tuned to generate and support life? (Particularly, if one doesn’t like explanations that are audacious and unprovable like “god did it” or “there are infinite parallel universes.”)
The book starts out in territory that is fairly uncontroversial among physicists, arguing that life comes about (and does so with striking speed – i.e. fast abiogenesis) by a process through which nature moves the ordered / useful energy that Earth has in abundance into disordered / useless energy (e.g. waste heat,) a process that runs on rules not unlike Darwinian evolution (molecules have an informational existence that allow something like hereditability [passing down of “blueprints”] and mutation [distortion in copies, some of which will make the molecule or organism more efficient at using energy.])
The book then ventures into territory that is quite controversial, arguing that life has a purpose (beyond the tedious one of moving low entropy energy into a high entropy state,) and that purpose is to be an observer – i.e. to be the first stage in a self-aware world. I should point out a couple things. First, when I say this part is controversial, I mean that it couldn’t be called the consensus view, but that’s not to say that these ideas don’t have a following among some high-level intellects. Second, I think we need people to consider ideas that might seem a bit “out there” because there is a danger of not progressing because we’re trapped in morass of assumptions. Science has quite a few self-appointed guardians who mock as pseudo-science any idea that strays from scientific consensus or from a rigidly reductionist / materialist / Copernican worldview. The author doesn’t abandon a scientific point of view, even though it might seem he does to some because he abandons the nihilistic view that’s taken as a given by many in the scientific community (i.e. that life is a happy accident without purpose, significance, or influence on the universe – and that life consists of automata, playing out programs — devoid of any kind of free will.)
I don’t know how much of Azarian’s metaphysics will prove true, but this book was superbly thought-provoking and opened up to me whole new vistas of possibility about the big questions of philosophy and science. I’d highly recommend it for readers interested in the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
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BOOK REVIEW: Expanding Consciousness by Mario Beauregard
Expanding Reality: The Emergence of Postmaterialist Science by Mario BeauregardMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Amazon.in Page
Beauregard aims to persuade readers that the materialist view of consciousness is irredeemably irreconcilable with observed reality. In this objective, he fails. (He’s not alone. There are too many unknowns for the rational skeptic to take a firm stance on the nature of consciousness.) What Beauregard succeeds in doing is cataloguing research findings that could be interpreted as suggesting there is more to consciousness than materialists can account for.
Cleverly, Beauregard begins with the most compelling evidence and concludes with the most audacious, controversial, and unvalidated findings. That most compelling evidence is the role of mental attitude and beliefs upon health outcomes. It’s firmly established that mind state has a huge impact on health and health outcomes. From the placebo effect to a health outcome premium to those who pray (and believe there is a god that takes requests,) thought matters. Unfortunately for Beauregard, it’s a huge leap to say this means there is some sort of spirit force that acts on the material world. If one begins from the realization that the human body (and those of other animals) is really good at self-repair within certain limits and given certain conditions (and that among those conditions is the ability to dampen the stress response and trip the rest & digest mode,) then one needn’t call on anything supernormal / supernatural to explain the influence of thoughts on healing.
I don’t have the time or inclination to systematically go through the strengths and weaknesses of all the arguments, but the one I mentioned stands as an example of what is good and bad about the book. On the positive side, I think Beauregard accurately reports on some interesting findings, but then he uses them to bootstrap the position that materialism can’t work ineffectively. I found myself thinking “that does not follow” a great deal. Either there wasn’t enough known to draw a conclusion, or – as in the case of healing – there are competing hypotheses that work as well but without the need to appeal to anything so complicated or unproven as a web of consciousness.
Beyond healing, the book goes through findings that suggest the possibilities of extrasensory perception, telekinesis, and an afterlife for consciousness (e.g. near death experiences [NDE.]) In some cases, this evidence is strong but quite limited (usually limited both in the degree of effect and in understanding of what causes said effect,) but in a few cases the evidence is anecdotal and / or completely unvalidated. The same variation exists when Beauregard takes on competing hypotheses. In a few cases, I found myself thinking his refutations had compelling elements or bases, but in other cases the refutations seemed to be – at best – big stretches. [I expected an extensive refutation of the finding that OBEs (out-of-body-experiences, a common feature in NDEs) have been found to be triggerable at will using physical processes (electrical stimulation) to material (brain tissue,) but did not get it. To my mind, this finding is a challenging – though not damning – counter to postmaterialist arguments.]
If you’re interested in a cataloging of findings that suggest the possibility that there is more to consciousness than materialists propose, this is a fine book to check out. However, don’t expect a persuasive holy grail of persuasion, but rather a mixed bag that ultimately shows no more than the fact that there is a massive amount that we don’t know about how consciousness works.
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Rock at the End of the World [Haiku]
rock swells from sea, a perfect perch to think on the world's end
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BOOK REVIEW: Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch
Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book consists of a series of topical micro-essays – the shortest being a simple sentence and the longest being a few pages, with the average being about a page. Lynch is most well-known as the director who created such works as “Eraserhead,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Blue Velvet,” and “Twin Peaks.” As the subtitle suggests, the overarching theme of the book is the nexus of meditation and creativity. While many of the essays explicitly touch on how meditation influences consciousness, which in turn influences the creative process, not all of them do. Some of them are more biographical or about the filmmaking process – including discussion of technical considerations (what is the optimal type of camera and how high definition can be too much definition for its own good) and what a neophyte such as myself might call the managerial considerations of movie direction (how to best get one’s vision across through the actors.) Along the way, one glimpses how Lynch shifted from his first artistic love, painting, into the world of cinema.
Lynch is a long-time practitioner of Transcendental Meditation (TM,) which is a mantra-based meditation in which the meditator silently repeats a mantra given to him or her by a teacher. The central analogy posed by Lynch is that meditation expands the consciousness and this allows one to catch bigger fish (more profound and creative ideas) through one’s art. He’s not suggesting that the ideas come directly within the process of meditation, but rather that meditation facilitates one’s ability to deepen the pool and pull up bigger creative fish.
He does engage in a fallacious form of thinking that I’ve critiqued in other books, and so I figure I should mention it here as well – even though I found it a little less troubling because of his free flowing “artsy” approach to presenting ideas. But this fallacious bit of reasoning goes something like this: “See how science is talking about this confusing issue and admitting that no one fully understands it yet? And see here how these scriptures are describing this nebulous idea with a few kernels that sound vaguely similar to what the scientists are talking about? From this we can conclude that they are – in fact — talking about the same thing, and that the ancients actually understood this all in much greater detail than we do today.” He does this mostly with reference to the unified field theory (which still hasn’t unified gravity into its ranks, let alone establishing some kind of oneness of all things.) It’s what dear old Dr. Sherrill used to call the “firstest-is-bestest” fallacy, which is thinking that back in the day they knew everything any we are presently just stumbling around in the dark trying to get back on track. [One should note, there is an equally fallacious counterpart that he called the “outhouse fallacy,” which assumes that because people in the past didn’t have indoor plumbing that they were complete idiots.]
For cinephiles, the book provides a lot of interesting tidbits about Lynch’s filmography. [For non-cinephiles such as myself, some of this will make sense, and some of it won’t. I occasionally had to make a Google run while reading the book to figure out some obscure reference about one of his movies.] For those interested in meditation, there is a great deal of fascinating thought about how creativity happens and how it’s advanced by having a meditative practice.
The most notable ancillary matter is an appendix of interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. Lynch has a foundation that works to bring meditation into the educational process and the two former-Beatles support its efforts enough to do an interview. The McCartney interview stays more on the topic of meditation — particularly the Beatles’ interaction with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the creator of TM and a guru who taught the band both during a visit to the United Kingdom and in his own home base of Rishikesh. The Ringo Starr interview is actually much more about the musical history of Starr and the band.
I enjoyed this book. It’s a quick read. It’s a little all-over-the-place, but not in a bad way. A lot of the writing has a stream of thought feel that seems appropriate to the subject matter. If you’re interested in the films of David Lynch the book definitely has some inside insight for you. If you are interested in the meditation and the mind, you’ll also receive some good food for thought. If you are just looking for a way to spur creativity, it’s also worth a read.
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My Year of Discovering How Weird the Mind Gets, Part XII [Narrative Transportation]
This is the belated final posted of my 2019 project on altered states of consciousness. I was traveling during the latter half of December and, hence, my tardiness.
During 2019, each month I gave special attention to studying some state of consciousness that exists outside of the normal waking state. (Of course, the folly of believing that there is one “normal waking state of consciousness” is one of the major lessons learned from this exercise.) My investigations included: meditation, hypnosis, lucid dreaming, sensory deprivation, psilocybin consumption, and various others — a number of which were variations on inducing a Flow state.
In December, because I was traveling so much I was reading even more than usual, and it occurred to me that there is a kind of reading in which the mind behaves differently from the norm. I’m not talking about all reading, but — specifically — when one gets lost in story. There’s run-of-the-mill reading, and then there’s the reading in which a hundred pages seem to fly by in minutes, but you realize you’ve lost a lot more time than that. This topic might seem like a dull ending to this project. Being absorbed in story might not appear as enthralling or “sexy” as mushroom tripping or floating in sensory deprivation tank, but the experience can be just as profound.
As I was looking into this, I discovered that there is a term that addresses what I’m talking about, “narrative transportation.” Narrative transportation relates to absorption, which I learned is a factor in hypnosis. That is, how easily does one become completely mentally occupied with an object of contemplation such that one loses awareness of the passage of time and external stimuli. In this type of reading, one is mentally reconstructing the world and events of a story, and that process is demanding of one’s attention. Furthermore, there is an intense emotional experience that one is feeling simultaneous to this mental construction. This doesn’t leave much room for the mind to wander — if the story is intriguing enough to hold one’s attention.
As a reader, one facilitates narrative transportation largely by picking stories that are appealing to one, and by finding extended time periods to read without distraction. However, what’s really interesting is how a writer can facilitate this state through his or her style and method. The most commonly discussed aspects of this facilitation are: the story arc (i.e. arranging events to create and maintain excitement) and building lovable or loathsome characters (either way, just as long as they aren’t tedious or boring.)
But there is another aspect that I think of as readability. How easy does the storyteller make it for the reader to create their own mental story-world? In large part, this has to do with the art of finding the Goldilocks Zone of description. If one describes too little one creates “floating head syndrome” in which the reader (if they continue reading at all) may imagine floating heads conversing in a blank white room. On the other hand, if one spends twelve pages describing the drapes or the weather, one is unlikely to keep readers engaged. Coincidentally, one of the books that I read in December that was educational (though not transportational) was Milan Kundera’s “The Art of the Novel.” In it, Kundera bemoans the tendency to over-describe characters such that one interferes in the reader’s imaginings. He points out that readers learn almost nothing about the physical description and background of some of the most important characters in literature.
And so concludes my year of altered states as I look forward to new adventures in 2020.
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My Year of Discovering How Weird the Mind Gets, Pt. XI [Chanting]
Some people swear by the mind-altering properties [and other benefits] of chanting mantras. I’ve been reading a review copy of Kulreet Chaudhary’s “Sound Medicine,” a book whose play-on-words title says it all. It’s about the way sound is either shown or speculated to have health effects. (Full-disclosure: Some of the speculation gets a bit out there.) Chaudhary is both a medical doctor and an Ayurvedic practitioner, and has an outlook akin to that of Deepak Chopra.
Chanting has never been my thing. I’ve learned about it and done some in yoga training, but I can’t say it ever resonated [no pun intended] with me. However, in the spirit of investigation, this month I did a few one hour and half-hour sessions of chanting. I kept it very basic, chanting AUM as I was taught with equal parts of A – U – and – M.
While I can’t say that I’m sold that chanting is the ultimate practice that achieves outcomes unachievable through other means, I will say that after these sessions I do feel a sense of calm and clarity. I can certainly see why mantra chanting has appeal for so many people, even though I also believe that, sadly, it’s sometimes oversold as something supernatural and the discussions about it are needlessly complicated.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 