At the risk of being the object of pejorative attention, I have to say I found the following rather interesting.
Vaj wrote: >I do not see a need to apply separate and autonomous intelligent agency to >such "beings". What they represent to me are simple neural or >consciousness-based user interfaces which present themselves within the >context of human intercommunication styles. IOW, humans are used to >communicating with mouths and ears and characteristic human armoured body >language cues. Consequently our nervous systems project similar user >interfaces onto other neurologically projected constructs. Thus we see angels, >demons, gods, etc. that seem to possess human characteristics, but in fact >this is merely an user interface presented in a form we can understand and >interact with. Such imagined entities in fact possess no real independent >reality, they're "empty" as they're only compounded, acquired neural >projections acquired by certain tribes, or gene pool affiliations, over vast >epochs of human time. Vaj also wrote: >The conclusion I've come to is that mental techniques, if that's all they are >(throwing in some simple pranayana exercises and some basic asanas don't >really count for much, other than some fun), can attach you to your own mental >models of reality. Slowly, over time, you invest more and more energy in this >"mental body" (manamayakosha), which is actually an illusory body. It's not >real. Thus you have TMers who become trance channelers or mediums who, >convinced of the importance of this reality, report back messages from their >new found world. The messages bubbling up for the unconscious are taken as >messages from important disincarnate beings, anxious to impart their supposed >wisdom. Some beings get so caught up in their believed reality they make >livings out of communicating back to earth these "important" messages. Some >may imagine they walk with their guru-hero or receive other important >messages. Others mental life may begin to impinge on their waking reality, and >like induced Synesthesia they believe they see visions. Their mental life and >their subconscious spills over into other parts of their life. I encountered someone who said she saw angels, but seemed unable to give a description of what she saw. (This same person was wholly shocked by the murder at MUM some years ago, which indicated to me she had a very rigid conceptual framework for her interpretation of experience) My mother believed in angels and other entities, and when I was about four, I think, described a book which had reproduced photographs of fairies. Some five decades later I ran across the book. It was by Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame, and it contained these photos, taken by young girls in the early part of the 20th century, showing paper cutouts of fairies dancing. The girls in old age finally admitted they faked the images which took in the credulous Doyle. My mother also had a book, written in the 1940s showing drawings of angels that someone claimed they saw. What was interesting about these drawings was the 1940s hairstyles that these drawings of angels had. If one looks at the differing variations of how the word 'angel' has been interpreted and portrayed through the ages it is difficult to believe that such a wide variety of inconsistencies represents a real entity behind them. Earlier representations of angels did not have wings. Later, winged versions seem to be aerodynamically incompetent. If one picks a simple physical object, say a rock, or a quantity of water, we find a much greater consistency of representation over time, but then everyone can see or feel these objects. We all have these interfaces, these conceptual frameworks. If we see through them there is nothing we can say because representation drops away; we cannot live without them if the body has to interact with the world about it and has to think in concepts. Even if the representation conceptually drops away (enlightenment) the nature of the senses still determines how we experience the outer world and our inner world. Vaj mentioned synesthesia, a very real difference between individuals in how they perceive certain elements of their experience. Synethetes might experience what I would see as a table of black printed numbers as a table of numbers that have different colours for each number, or at least some of them. Or, they might hear sounds when they look at the numbers. This may have to do with some kind of cross wiring in the neuro connexions of the brain. Some may see things others do not see. In experiments concerning near-death experiences, researchers at the University of Kentucky have discovered that those with a propensity for this kind of experience tend to have a variation in conscious states called REM intrusion, in which dreaming sleep is not walled off from waking, but blends into waking or intrudes into waking sometimes. This would mean that the illusory imagery of dreams could in fact occur while a person is awake, supposedly in daily activity. Any one could have this experience if deprived of sleep long enough, but to have REM intrusion as a matter of fact condition of normal experience would mean that not only would a person experience as the result of input to the senses, but of input generated by the brain coming in from inside rather than from outside. Not knowing that this internally generated illusion is not 'outside' would naturally lead to the interpretation that there are concrete entities without. >Thus the spiritual ego grows. Confront one of these folks about this growing >new ego, and you'll unleash a torrent of negativity at you. You see, they >believe it's spiritual. This is a stage I believe (opinion = belief) everyone goes through. Adopting a spiritual stance in life initially involves a process where we replace some of our shtick with new shtick, we replace former beliefs with new ones, we abandon some of our older attachments and because the capacity for attachment does not instantly vanish in the wind, we get stuck in a new 'perceived as better' set of attachments. We can become very obnoxious to our friends and family when this happens. A spiritual path is an illusion whose purpose is to undo itself, but when the edifice starts to crack away and the process begins to produce tangible results is anyones's guess. For some it happens quickly, for others it takes longer, and for some, maybe it never happens. >But really, they've merely taken an illusory realm as "real" and enslaved >themselves. The enslavement becomes even more pernicious as thought-forms get >subtler. In Zen, there is a phrase 'the stench of enlightenment'. It refers to those who have had a realisation, even a very deep one about the nature of experience. One has an experience of awakening, but it is new, unexpected, and the mind grasps at straws in a vain attempt to understand the experience. So even though the ego has now received its fatal blow, it is still going to take some time for the process to settle down and unwind into the strange mystery that the spiritual path was an illusion, and that everything is normal and ordinary from then on. When Vaj used the word 'manamayakosha' in the second paragraph quoted above, I did not know what it meant. I had to look it up. The reference I found was Hindu rather than Buddhist, but the Hindu was of course the source of the word. It seems the work 'kosha' means sheath. In the reference I found there were five of these 'sheaths'. Physical - Annamaya kosha Energy - Pranamaya kosha Mental - Manamaya kosha Wisdom - Vijnanamaya kosha Bliss - Anandamaya kosha Self - Atman These koshas are defined as the appearance of the nature of experience in this reckoning, and they are all regarded as illusion. The 'Atman' regarded as illusion? Why not? This is the basis of TM Transcendental Consciousness, Cosmic Consciousness, and God Consciousness, all potential experiences prior to total realisation, the 'Self' experienced as solitary, experienced as separate from activity, experienced as separate from activity in a glorious transformation of the outer world; but it goes away in unity. When Atman = Brahman, Atman is gone. The fiction of self and Self and all the spiritual baggage dissolves. The words like Atman or Brahman are no longer applicable. These words are the traditional 'thorn to remove a thorn', or 'words of ignorance to remove ignorance' as Maharishi once put it. They are part of the intermediate interface that one has to put up with on these spiritual paths that use these terms. They are not real, but their apparent reality, if one is not too stuck, is intended to move one along the illusory path to its own self dissolution. Even quoting terms like this to explain something could be an indication one is stuck on those terms, could be some aspect of subtle attachment. Vaj continued: >From what I can tell, people can get stuck in this for a lifetime. I seriously >doubt that creating karma at subtler levels of our limited being is going to >help anyone in the long run. Indeed such people, relying on a steady diet of >their own subconscious often become overtly or subtly vain, narcissistic, >prone to hypomania and numerous personality disorders: sure signs of >not-transcending much at all, but instead trapped by the causative factors of >a mental technique and acquired beliefs. I would agree with this, but it is difficult to say just what causes one to get stuck. It is all kind of mysterious. I was stuck for a long time, and that dissolved, but now I am probably unaware I am stuck in some other aspect. My only clue of progress is I am becoming less and less concerned about whether I am in any particular state, or whether that means anything, and am becoming less concerned about whether others are enlightened or not, or need to hear about enlightenment. Of course writing on this forum kind of blows off that idea to some extent. Everyone here wants to say something about their experience, about what they know or think they know. I am not immune to this disorder. Vaj finished with: >I bet Robin remembers of two brothers in FF who could channel in tandem (with >their eyes closed). One would stop and the other would pick up with other left >off. Wonderful people really, very fine people. But none of their predictions >ever came to be. It's like Scotty had beamed them into a disconnected dream >world from which they reported back wonderfully sounding facts, unrelated to >the world we actually lived in! There was a woman in Fairfield I knew who consulted yearly with Maharishi Jyotishis for something like ten years about marriage. She did get married, but the the predictions of the previous nine years failed. Barry wrote a few succinct paragraphs about these comments by Vaj. >Barry wrote: >I really like your use of the term "user interfaces" here. It's so much less button-pushing than the usual "anthropomorphic projections" explanation. The matrix we're trying to tap into is infinite and attributeless, like the matrix of electronic ones and zeros that make up the Internet. We can't really *interface* with the ones and zeros, so we invent user interfaces like the Firefox browser I'm using to type this in this cafe. It's the way I choose to perceive a reality that is in reality nothing but an enormous matrix composed of ones and zeros. >Some spiritual seekers seem to feel the need to invent a user interface of gods and goddesses and Big People In The Sky and sentient intelligences that run everything to allow them to interface with infinity. >Call me crazy, but I'm content with daily life, and the wonderful characters I run into in that life. Can't get much more infinite than that. :-) Here is an example of Barry's interface, talking and reveling in daily life and ordinary non-meditating humans, kind of promotes this idea; this is his shtick. My shtick is different, but it is still a shtick. One can get conceptually a lot more infinite than daily life in my opinion, but daily life is what we all must live nonetheless. Judy wrote: >Lovely wishful thinking, Barry. You're projecting your own terror that your fellow TM critic may be exposed as a liar regarding his qualifications as a critic. And you're also projecting your own terror at the idea that I'm not the TB you keep trying to portray me as. Judy also has a shtick. I have never been able to grasp how Judy interprets what Barry says represent some kind of experiential terror in his own experience. I would see that as her own projection, her own interface. And that is my own interface interpreting her words as representing an internal, and perhaps unconscious interface she has regarding her experience of the world. But I find it peculiar that she seems to map this idea onto others as if it were a fact rather than a supposition. That I say this is also a supposition, and I believe she tends to deny this happens. I think life would be kind of dull if we did not have some kind of unawareness to plague us now and then, to give us the opportunity for a jolt or surprise. As for Vaj being a TMer, I find this ambiguous because he does not use or seem to understand the TM lingo very well, which leads me to doubt. This does not obviate that he may make valid criticisms of TM concepts or practices, but it does indicate he is into some other practices and ideas that he definitely prefers. Maybe he has a really bad memory. But I do hope he, Barry, Judy, and I all realise we are treading on illusory waters. Let us hope they are shallow enough that we do not drown.
