Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: In Statistical Truth, The Call to Spiritual Order,Rally Now to Meditation!

2018-08-23 Thread Sal Sunshine salsunshineini...@gmail.com [FairfieldLife]
What do you mean by “even,” kimo sabe?

Nobody since him, with rare exceptions, has ever been able to touch his wisdom. 
 And nobody has surpassed it.

Sal 


> On Aug 23, 2018, at 4:05 PM, dhamiltony...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife] 
>  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Look, Even The Buddha said:
> Meditation brings wisdom; lack of meditation leaves ignorance. Know well what 
> leads you forward and what holds you back, and choose the path that leads to 
> wisdom.
> 
>  
> Hagelin's Premise,  
> ..there are bodies of studies now authored, collaboratively with other 
> reputable universities and institutions, and conducted independent of the 
> .org, published studies that have extremely high statistical p values and 
> then also aggregated high p values studies, replicated too that correlate the 
> effects of meditating. Gold standard stuff.  
> 
> So the premise is that at a point the plain truth of such a series of 
> extremely extraordinarily high p value published studies in the aggregate 
> simply becomes statistical truth. A type of fact. What they correlate becomes 
> fair ‘rule of thumb’.  Unless of course as people may be anti-science or 
> don’t understand science this way they may not grok what is completely 
> current in the cutting edge of knowledge. This does not deny that there was 
> bad or poorly designed or poorly performed science on meditation that went 
> before. However, a sheer weight of the best of science is plainly correlating 
> that it is a statistical truth now and quite fair rule of thumb that 
> meditating has benefits that go with its practice.  QED.  
> 
> 
> A premise large in assertion and direction like a Monroe Doctrine, The 
> Marshall Plan or the Meissner-like Maharishi Effect, now as matter of 
> statistical fact: 
> 
> It is time to rally to meditation by all that the best of modern science 
> tells us is statistical truth and by what we know more objectively in our 
> experience as quite fair rule of thumb. It is quite time now to come together 
> in collective meditation for all that is good.
> 
> 
> ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :
> 
> We are grateful to all those who came answering the call and sat up in their 
> meditations with us in Fairfield, Iowa. It has been our honor to have had 
> those who traveled from distant places join alongside us here in collective 
> meditation in these times.
> 
>  From time in memorium this is called the work of moral courage where people, 
> deeper spiritual people [transcendentalists] do this, come in to groups 
> meditating together for something larger. 
> 
> -JaiGuruYou 
> 
> ..ought ..the peace movement ought to organize itself along military lines 
> and get down to brass tacks.
> 
> People make ‘claim’ things like:
>  
> One: “..the movement's confirmation-bias tainted research”.
>  
> Confirmation-bias may be a fault of some of the earlier research but 
> evidently not of the replicating studies done in more recent times. That 
> there might have been some confirmation bias in some of the research does not 
> invalidate all the science published on meditating. There is a lot of 
> discussion and rebuttal about this for open minds to consider at 
> TruthaboutTM.org   
>  
> Two: “..Maharishi did not even really know if this coherence effect would 
> really work, as it seemed to be based on a rather loose association of a 
> statement by Patanjali with a coherence effect in physics.”
>  
> A: The process of science includes taking observation, making hypothesis 
> about observations and then testing the hypothesis. Maharishi was at that the 
> whole time in process from very early on when he left India to go out and 
> teach meditation until his final days. Throughout his long career he would 
> use the large facility of the ™ movement to advance science by this process 
> of from observation making, to hypothesis and testing it. This was large 
> thinking of an inquiring mind.  
> 
> The disgruntled and disaffected may feel and gripe otherwise about him for 
> their own reasons but what he did in persistence at advancing broadly the 
> science on meditation in the last half of the 20th Century and into the 21St 
> Century was monumental in its developmental way.
>  
> Developmental, like with Copernicus observing: Although Copernicus' model 
> changed the layout of the universe, it still had its faults. For one thing, 
> Copernicus held to the classical idea that the planets traveled in perfect 
> circles. It wasn't until the 1600s that Johannes Kepler proposed the orbits 
> were instead ellipses. As such, Copernicus' model featured the same epicycles 
> that marred in Ptolemy's earlier work, although there were fewer. 
> Copernicus' ideas, published only two months before he died, took nearly a 
> hundred years to seriously take hold. When Galileo Galilei claimed in 1632 
> that Earth orbited the sun, building upon the Polish astronomer's work, he 
> found himself under house arrest for committing heresy against the Cathol

Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: In Statistical Truth, The Call to Spiritual Order,Rally Now to Meditation!

2017-07-04 Thread dhamiltony...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]
Angel, Even with your assumption that the science is flawed as biased and no 
good I feel it is swell you meditate and have found a group to meditate with. 
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 Mr. Hamilton, reconciliation is not the proper word. Once rather simple and 
obvious effects are discovered, cataloged, and more or less explained by 
science, the more subtle aspects are often very difficult to sort out. The 
leading edge of any scientific discipline is rife with contradictions and 
ambiguous evidence.

 

 Meditation is a difficult subject because there are some physical effects, 
some psychological ones. And a number of things about meditation are unknown. 
 

 One of the greatest problems is meditation systems have "devotees" which have 
strong emotional ties to their discipline, and strong emotional ties and 
beliefs can override scientific processes because a certain result is desired 
rather than whatever the result happens to turn out to be.
 

 Perhaps the best research would be done by those who do not care about the 
result of the research except that it follows rigorous scientific protocol.
 

 Quite a number of philosophical points in meditation lore are really beyond 
the ken of science as they do not seem to be testable.
 

 Meditation is a key technology in those spiritual circles that deal with the 
concept of enlightenment. The tool is for that, not for health or well being 
even if some of that is a byproduct. The byproducts of meditation are not what 
it is for; what it is for is to make possible the realization that 
consciousness/awareness lies as the ground of experience, and life is just a 
succession of experiences.
 

 As everyone is conscious, that consciousness underlies experience would seem 
to be an obvious fact. It is, but it is too obvious, and the implication of 
that is understanding the nature of consciousness turns out to be a much more 
difficult difficult subject to investigate, for it seemingly has no properties 
that can be seen, felt, or measured directly. It is as if it is not there, even 
though on the basis of our experience we know it must be there.
 

 Spiritual systems tend to elaborate on the nature of consciousness way beyond 
what is justified rationally. 
 

 This is particularly true when spiritual systems institutionalize, and many 
different people with a wide variety of understandings get involved in 
maintaining the system. It is as if weeds grow up in the system and whatever 
truth was there to begin with begins to get obscured by this overgrowth.
 

 This often happens even when the teacher, the central figure is alive. Not all 
teachers are really pure, and that defect sometimes leads to their downfall, or 
eventually to some subtle corruption in the followers, which then leads to the 
downfall of the institution.
 

 My advice is to pursue the main goal, enlightenment, and only give passing 
notice to whatever else seems to be taking up people's attention in the system. 
Enlightenment is simple: you are awareness as is everything else. 
 

 This is little to do with holiness, specialness, grand experiences, or health 
or world peace. You could be at death's door with illness and still know you 
are awareness, or in a foxhole in the middle of a pitched battle, and still 
know you are awareness.
 

 Unity means there is no other. That means you do not have a relationship in 
unity, because there is only one thing, and you are it. Note this does not mean 
"the person" is in unity. The person is an aspect of unity, it is the unity 
that knows what the unity is. Your person is an object in the field of 
awareness, and the mind and intellect in the person has to come to terms with 
this.
 

 Enlightenment is not about your personal life. The ego, while still existing, 
has to be perceived as not real, that you, the person, are not the center of 
attention, rather the whole is the center of attention, and your person hood is 
just like a chair, or a dog, or a TV-set in the field of awareness.
 

 If this is not what you thought enlightenment would be, perhaps a body could 
get a job pushing burgers over the counter at McDonald's. 
 

 But even there, there is the counter, a customer, your hands pushing the 
burgers and fries on the tray to the customer, all in the field of awareness, 
life just like for everyone else, but just that lack of knowledge that this is 
all what you in the largest sense are, means the activity seems to lack 
something and is unfulfilling, whereas just that knowledge, if you had it, 
would mean the same activity is just the unity maintaining its balance as 
wholeness.
 

 It is all very simple, unspectacular. You gain nothing, but what you lose is 
significant. You lose the ability to fantasize that there are options to 
reality. The problem is people think there is an option or options other than 
what is happening now. That there is something better. It is when this fantasy 
goes away, that self realizati

Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: In Statistical Truth, The Call to Spiritual Order,Rally Now to Meditation!

2017-07-03 Thread Archer Angel archonan...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]
Mr. Hamilton, reconciliation is not the proper word. Once rather simple and 
obvious effects are discovered, cataloged, and more or less explained by 
science, the more subtle aspects are often very difficult to sort out. The 
leading edge of any scientific discipline is rife with contradictions and 
ambiguous evidence.
Meditation is a difficult subject because there are some physical effects, some 
psychological ones. And a number of things about meditation are unknown. 
One of the greatest problems is meditation systems have "devotees" which have 
strong emotional ties to their discipline, and strong emotional ties and 
beliefs can override scientific processes because a certain result is desired 
rather than whatever the result happens to turn out to be.
Perhaps the best research would be done by those who do not care about the 
result of the research except that it follows rigorous scientific protocol.
Quite a number of philosophical points in meditation lore are really beyond the 
ken of science as they do not seem to be testable.
Meditation is a key technology in those spiritual circles that deal with the 
concept of enlightenment. The tool is for that, not for health or well being 
even if some of that is a byproduct. The byproducts of meditation are not what 
it is for; what it is for is to make possible the realization that 
consciousness/awareness lies as the ground of experience, and life is just a 
succession of experiences.
As everyone is conscious, that consciousness underlies experience would seem to 
be an obvious fact. It is, but it is too obvious, and the implication of that 
is understanding the nature of consciousness turns out to be a much more 
difficult difficult subject to investigate, for it seemingly has no properties 
that can be seen, felt, or measured directly. It is as if it is not there, even 
though on the basis of our experience we know it must be there.
Spiritual systems tend to elaborate on the nature of consciousness way beyond 
what is justified rationally. 
This is particularly true when spiritual systems institutionalize, and many 
different people with a wide variety of understandings get involved in 
maintaining the system. It is as if weeds grow up in the system and whatever 
truth was there to begin with begins to get obscured by this overgrowth.
This often happens even when the teacher, the central figure is alive. Not all 
teachers are really pure, and that defect sometimes leads to their downfall, or 
eventually to some subtle corruption in the followers, which then leads to the 
downfall of the institution.
My advice is to pursue the main goal, enlightenment, and only give passing 
notice to whatever else seems to be taking up people's attention in the system. 
Enlightenment is simple: you are awareness as is everything else. 
This is little to do with holiness, specialness, grand experiences, or health 
or world peace. You could be at death's door with illness and still know you 
are awareness, or in a foxhole in the middle of a pitched battle, and still 
know you are awareness.
Unity means there is no other. That means you do not have a relationship in 
unity, because there is only one thing, and you are it. Note this does not mean 
"the person" is in unity. The person is an aspect of unity, it is the unity 
that knows what the unity is. Your person is an object in the field of 
awareness, and the mind and intellect in the person has to come to terms with 
this.
Enlightenment is not about your personal life. The ego, while still existing, 
has to be perceived as not real, that you, the person, are not the center of 
attention, rather the whole is the center of attention, and your person hood is 
just like a chair, or a dog, or a TV-set in the field of awareness.
If this is not what you thought enlightenment would be, perhaps a body could 
get a job pushing burgers over the counter at McDonald's. 
But even there, there is the counter, a customer, your hands pushing the 
burgers and fries on the tray to the customer, all in the field of awareness, 
life just like for everyone else, but just that lack of knowledge that this is 
all what you in the largest sense are, means the activity seems to lack 
something and is unfulfilling, whereas just that knowledge, if you had it, 
would mean the same activity is just the unity maintaining its balance as 
wholeness.
It is all very simple, unspectacular. You gain nothing, but what you lose is 
significant. You lose the ability to fantasize that there are options to 
reality. The problem is people think there is an option or options other than 
what is happening now. That there is something better. It is when this fantasy 
goes away, that self realization has a chance to click over. 
The purpose of meditation is really to exorcize the unreal options the mind 
entertains about the experiences it has. They bubble up as thoughts, 
spontaneously, without our trying. Those thoughts tangle us up in unreality. 
Eventually the m

Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: In Statistical Truth, The Call to Spiritual Order,Rally Now to Meditation!

2017-07-02 Thread dhamiltony...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]
Good to see that in the end you have reconciled all this skepticism of the 
published science of meditation in meditation. 
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 
 Comments below in text.


 From: "dhamiltony...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]" 
 To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com 
 Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2017 4:39 PM
 Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: In Statistical Truth, The Call to Spiritual 
Order,Rally Now to Meditation!

 
   

 People ‘claim’ things like:
  
 One: “..the movement's confirmation-bias tainted research”.
  
 Confirmation-bias may be a fault of some of the earlier research but evidently 
not of the replicating studies done in more recent times. That there might have 
been some confirmation bias in some of the research does not invalidate all the 
science published on meditating. There is a lot of discussion and rebuttal 
about this for open minds to consider at TruthaboutTM.org
 

 TruthaboutTM.org is a die hard TM site by David Orme-Johnson. It is not in any 
way scientifically neutral. Anyone who strongly believes that what Maharishi 
says is true will have a hard time constructing research that is neutral.
 

 If you take the position that everything Maharishi said is false, that too 
would likely create a situation that would taint research, although if you 
really try to prove some hypothesis false and it survives all those tests, the 
hypothesis will be in a much better position to be accepted.
 

 Social research with large groups is notoriously hard to control properly.
  
 Two: “..Maharishi did not even really know if this coherence effect would 
really work, as it seemed to be based on a rather loose association of a 
statement by Patanjali with a coherence effect in physics.”
  
The process of science includes taking observation, making hypothesis about 
observations and then testing the hypothesis. Maharishi was at that the whole 
time in process from very early on when he left India to go out and teach 
meditation until his final days. Throughout his long career he would use the 
large facility of the ™ movement to advance science by this process of from 
observation making, to hypothesis and testing it. This was large thinking of an 
inquiring mind.  
 The disgruntled and disaffected may feel and gripe otherwise about him for 
their own reasons but what he did in persistence at advancing broadly the 
science on meditation in the last half of the 20th Century and into the 21St 
Century was monumental in its developmental way.
 

 But how you test the hypothesis is the key. That is the brain buster. You not 
only have to test ways that might show it is right, but also test in ways that 
would show it is wrong. 
 

 The ME effect has not been tested this way. 
 

 One of the problems is non-movement scientists are not horribly interested in 
this research, as they would likely be more likely to attack both the 
philosophical explanation and discover experimental flaws in the experimental 
design.
 

 David Orme-Johnson has resisted all attempts by other scientists to get access 
his raw data for the ME. He is retired now, so of course, not actively pursuing 
any of this with new research.
 

 One thing that would need to be explained is why MUM seems to be doing so 
poorly while being the center of the alleged positive effects in question. As a 
university it is a decaying shell of its glory days.
 

 Hypothetically the movement explains the Maharishi Effect as a unified field 
effect, yet there is no accepted unified field theory in science yet.
 

 There are many candidates, but none have any experimental evidence to confirm 
or deny them except those theories that predict the decay of the proton. 
 

 Experiments have shown no proton decay, which makes Hagelin's flipped SU5 
theory unlikely to be true as it predicts proton decay. 
 

 The movement science overlooks other possible explanations that are not 
unified field based, such as a magnetic effect, an electromagnetic effect, a 
chemical effect, social-behavioral effects, and even, there is no effect. 
 

 Scientific explanations do not start with explanations based on what we have 
not yet figured out or discovered to be likely true, but on explanations that 
are currently accepted and then the discoveries grow out from that.
 

 Saying the Maharishi effect is unified field based means scientists have 
nothing to test so it provides no theoretical way to understand the theory.
 

 My own experience is there is something going on in those groups, but it could 
well be the explanation is not what we are being told. 
 

 It could even be just credulity or gullibility, but this could not be the 
entire explanation as there are group effects in any group. It is just figuring 
out what they are.
 

 There are many kinds of social phenomena where groups with a common belief get 
together and act more or less like an organic whole, not all positive. Riots 
for example. How does this behavior spread so quickly? One could 

Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: In Statistical Truth, The Call to Spiritual Order,Rally Now to Meditation!

2017-06-22 Thread 'My Enlightenment Delusion' myenlightenmentdelus...@gmail.com [FairfieldLife]
Here’s what I wrote about radiance:
TMers emanate a type of radiance during group meditations. Maharishi and the TM 
movement have had several publicity campaigns extolling possible benefits to 
society from radiance.

There are many instances besides meditation when a kind of energy is 
transferred from person to person. For example, the electricity-like atmosphere 
at concerts, plays, and sporting events is an amazing, worthwhile life 
experience. 

Another possibility of energy transference might occur when seeing someone else 
yawn, or when riding in a car with someone who takes a nap. 

In 1973, I first noticed that meditations seemed deeper when meditating with 
others on my Science of Creative Intelligence course. There is a radiance 
effect coming off a meditator that does affect other meditators in the 
vicinity. I noticed a radiance effect also when learning the TM-Sidhi on 
levitation in that I was more likely to hop when someone close to me was also 
hopping.

During the years that I was ungrounded, I seemed to sense a deeper quality of 
silence when entering the city of Fairfield, Iowa. Although the placebo effect 
could be at play, I think that an ungrounded person is more likely to sense the 
deeper silence in Fairfield than someone who is grounded.

The TM organization came up with what seems to be fanciful mathematics to 
predict the radiance effect of the TM-Sidhis program. They stated that when the 
square root of 1% of a population practices the TM-Sidhis program as a group, 
there will be an immediate reduction of hostility and violence in the 
population. These kinds of unbelievable claims eventually made it easy for me 
to walk away from the TM movement.

I do think there is a super-radiance effect from large groups practicing the TM 
and TM-Sidhi program, but I suspect it has a mixture of healthy and unhealthy 
effects. The unhealthy effect of TM super-radiance is probably greater on 
people who are ungrounded. I suspect that the effect on the population as a 
whole would be negligible, but there might be a means of small benefit through 
hormesis.

More on my musings at https://myenlightenmentdelusion.wordpress.com 



From: Archer Angel archonan...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife] 
Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2017 2:59 PM
To: Archer Angel archonan...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife] 
Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: In Statistical Truth, The Call to Spiritual 
Order,Rally Now to Meditation!

  

I was wondering just what kind of research might show up under "group effects 
of meditation."


group effects of meditation - Google Scholar


 group effects of meditation - Google Scholar
 
   
 



This search on Google does not search for only results from TM.








Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: In Statistical Truth, The Call to Spiritual Order,Rally Now to Meditation!

2017-06-22 Thread Archer Angel archonan...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]
I was wondering just what kind of research might show up under "group effects 
of meditation."
group effects of meditation - Google Scholar


| 
| 
|  | 
group effects of meditation - Google Scholar


 |

 |

 |



This search on Google does not search for only results from TM.


On Thursday, June 22, 2017, 12:22:42 PM PDT, Archer Angel archonan...@yahoo.com 
[FairfieldLife]  wrote:


   
 
 
 


Comments below in text.

 
 
 
  

From: "dhamiltony...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]" 
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2017 4:39 PM
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: In Statistical Truth, The Call to Spiritual 
Order,Rally Now to Meditation!



   
 
 
 


People ‘claim’ things like: 
 
_,_._,___