On Jul 24, 2008, at 12:03 AM, curtisdeltablues wrote:
Curtis, think you are going a little overboard with your rejecting a
lot > of yogic science.
I just said it is faith based, and it is. I don't share your faith.
What you're not getting is that yogic "science" is not faith based at
all: it is direct experience based.
You'd find it easier to understand this if you had a teacher who had
experientially guided you through the various stages of meditation.
Just because you were burned by a false guru is a bad reason to
assume that other meditative teachers are not authentic. But it is a
reason to be suspicious.
It appears to me that since you did not have the benefit of such
training, you go to the opposite pole of experience: objective,
verifiable materialistic experience and embrace that as your belief:
faith in science. And clearly science is also faith based. We don't
replicate every peer-reviewed we see published; we take it on faith
that it's "good science". Similarly in terms of internal states, we
rely on the authenticity of the teacher and the authenticity of his
or her experience. The problem of course is, in either case, if you
have a crooked scientist or a fraudulent yogi your very basis of
inquiry is inherently flawed.
In the same way that external validation can take place, so can
validation of internal states. I think you should be open to the fact
that you may have been "burned" by a fraudulent internal scientist
("yogi"), but just as a fraudulent scientist does not invalidate all
of scientific inquiry, nor does a fraudulent yogi invalidate all
verifiable internal states.
Also similarly, when a faulty or fraudulent scientist attempts to
present bad science, peers should be made aware of the error, so too
should fraudulent yogis be exposed for their mountebankery. It's
unfortunate that such persons exist, but they do. In your own example
it's forced you to be averse to a whole dimension of inquiry, the
internal ones. This is however a natural response to abuse. You've
been wounded in some way and so you (or any of us) react accordingly.
