On 2008-Dec-23, at 22:19, Chris Gehlker wrote: > I think you may be going too far the other way here.
Could just be the ones I've met. The exception is the very experienced one or two I've seen, but they are recognised masters in their lineage, and not just the local amateur society. > Point 1) I know quite a few zen people and quite a few new age/ > pyramid/crystal/labyrinth/pure land folks. Literally only one of the > zen people exhibits the kind of anti-rationalism that AI think we are > talking about here. All of the new agers do. Yeah, the New Agers do. > Point 2) I simply can't reject out of hand the notion that 'Meditate > then Act' isn't the right prescription for *some* aspects of life. > There are occasions, such as knowing the right thing to say when some > bad thing happens to a friend, when intuition trumps having a rational > plan. And a great many of the most intuitive and graceful people I > know practice some form or zen. At least one was very graceful before > she started with zen though so I can't be sure. OK, well, a quick background detour: When Ken Wilber and other researchers were trying to integrate Eastern spirituality and Western psychology, they sort of just stuck Zen enlightenment as a stage, and Autobindo's Intuitive Mind as a stage, on top of the stages known to the West. But after wrestling with that model for 20 years they eventually realised it just didn't work. For example, people with no meditation experience can have spontaneous Satoris. But nobody ever had a spontaneous "concert pianist" experience. People don't suddenly wake up one day knowing French. Or Kung-Fu. There was something fundamentally different between a cognitive stage like "formal operational", that a child could be observed to enter after years of growth, and a spontaneous enlightenment that comes out of the blue and then may disappear forever. So they distinguished these as "stages" and "states". A state is like being drunk, you just fall into it. A stage is like learning to play the piano. No shortcuts, just years of development. Stages and states are related, but there are also different. OK, please excuse the amble through that. The point is that, whilst a Zen practitioner could well be entering some deep *states*, that is not the same as developing to a higher *stage*. Aurobindo describes ordinary intuition as just a sort of clever and rapid guesswork. I mention Aurobindo because he also goes on to describe the nature of the four or so higher cognitive stages beyond ordinary reason and ordinary intuition. He calls them Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind, Supermind. Illumined Mind is characterised by "swift revelatory vision", a "self- light of truth not dependent on the senses". I would imagine that that's the sort of thing people imagine when they think about spiritual intuition. And according to Aurobindo, who apparently got into these stages, that is indeed what happens. So assuming for a moment that all this is broadly what's known, then yes, direct spiritual intuition is a possibility and would indeed be a much higher cognitive ability to exercise in the world, as a basis for action... ... but doing Zen doesn't in itself get you to that stage, because Zen is more about a state, whilst cognition, even spiritual or illumined intuitive cognition, is about stages. As Genpo Roshi keeps saying, much of what he was taught in Zen was "Japanese militaristic bullshit". They were excellent at entering deep states, but the moment they snapped out of it, they were right back to their ordinary stage, their ordinary blue mind and ordinary blue intuition which wanted to act in the world, by becoming Kamikaze bombers. And Wilber & Co. suspect that a number of the Mullahs in the Middle East today have a lot of authority not just because they are good at politics, but because they are having deep spiritual state- experiences--they have been practicing religion all their lives, after all--and their followers recognise this in them. Unfortunately they are at a red-blue stage and so they act accordingly. Spiritual state experience, but militaristic stage action. It sounds like maybe your Zen friends are naturally at a very open minded, easy going, stage in how they think and act. Zen is perhaps what helps them really shine in their natural abilities, the "grace" you describe, like it gets them "in the zone", so their thoughts and actions are not cluttered by egotistical noise. Whatever stage their cognition is at--perhaps they are very world- centric in their outlook--Zen in itself doesn't particularly work on that. It might seem like it does because all their fellow practitioners in their groups have a similar stage-cognition already. > Intuition can't lead you to the right fiscal policy though. For that > you need the best econometric model you can find. But maybe the kind > of intuition that may or may not be enhanced through zen is useful in > formulating that better econometric model once you have honed your > analytic skills to the fullest. Stefano _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
