Fred has asked some of the most prominent researchers into Buddhist meditation why they don't take the PC research seriously.
The response is always along the lines of: show me a Western theory that suggests that it is important, and I will. Anomalous measurements that are consistently found in the right circumstances, apparently aren't of interest to "real" scientists -only stuff guided by theory. Of course, everyone knows the story of John Ellis, Director of Research at CERN, who, as a junior researcher at CERN, found some weird flaw in his cloud-chamber photographic plates, and rather than dismissing it outright, he went back and found similar flaws in other plates that he had missed. He then went around and fished many, MANY examples of similar flaws out of garbage bins, always happening in specific circumstances, and published. Everyone else had dismissed it as being of no interest because no Western theory predicted what was on the plates, so they assumed that it was trash. It got a write-up as the cover article of Discover, and made his career. L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> wrote : But see my comments. She doesn't take PC research seriously. I've seen her mention it in passing, but she doesn't even attempt to incorporate it into her world view. Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. Are you sure she hasn't read it thoroughly and just taken not it seriously as a useful aid in the quest for understanding consciousness? Which is what she and everyone in her book "Conversations on Consciousness" wants after all. Why this refusal to engage with the TMO if it is doing such great work in this field? Are they hampered by the association of idiots like John Hagelin and his "Physics of yogic flying"? Or is the research not up to scratch or maybe just trying to explain something that everyone else has passed by as not important enough to worry about. Or is it really because they just haven't had the mindexpanding wondefulness themselves and think you must be joking? I doubt that, most of these dudes have taken drugs or done meditation, you can't want to get into this field without experiencing the mind in all it's occasionally bizarre glory. It won't be because of its religious associations though, that never bothered anyone before about anything. Susan does meditation herself. Maybe she just isn't aware of this latest stuff. Write to her and see what she says about it. Maybe there's a reason other scientists don't take the TM worldview seriously that you and I are unaware of. She's much like James Austin, who misreads/misquotes the PC research and then fits the misread/misquote into his theories on meditation presented in his books. Literally, his books read like this: Travis' research says xy and therefore... In reality, Travis' research actually says xyz, but Austin misses the last little bit that completely invalidates his interpretation. Of course Travis' own writing style doesn't help. In the abstract of the article on Transcendental experiences during TM, he says: "The subject/object relationship during transcendental experiences is characterized by the absence of time, space, and body sense" He fills in the details in the body, by quoting the Katha Upanishad: "“The Self is without sound, without touch and without form…You will know the Self when your senses are still, your mind is at peace, and your heart is pure.”" He then confuses teh issue again by providing a description of lack of sensory perception, that is accompanied by a graphic listing "no thought" and ends up describing PC as "That leaves the bottom right cell—sense of Self with no mental content," without re-emphasizing that PC is without any kind of perception at all -sensory, thinking, intuition, whatever. It's small wonder that Austin and company get confused. Travis leaves wriggle room so that they can pick and choose whichever description of PC best fits their own pet theory about the state. Of course, if people read articles carefully, they would note the occasional use of references to lack of sense-perception and at least speculate about what was meant, but instead they choose the least disrupting interpretation to use in their books and blog-entries. L http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25457 http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25457
