Showing posts with label Quantum Self. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quantum Self. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Human consciousness is much more than mere brain activity

How does the animated meat inside our heads produce the rich life of the mind? Why is it that when we reflect or meditate we have all manner of sensations and thoughts but never feel neurons firing? It's called the "hard problem", and it's a problem the physician, philosopher and author Raymond Tallis believes we have lost sight of – with potentially disastrous results. In his new book, Aping Mankind – about which he was talking this week at the British Academy – he describes the cultural disease that afflicts us when we assume that we are nothing but a bunch of neurons. Neuromania arises from the doctrine that consciousness is the same as brain activity or, to be slightly more sophisticated, that consciousness is just the way that we experience brain activity.
If you think the brain is a machine then you are committed to saying that composing a sublime poem is as involuntary an activity as having an epileptic fit. You will issue press releases announcing "the discovery of love" or "the seat of creativity", stapled to images of the brain with blobs helpfully highlighted in red or blue, that journalists reproduce like medieval acolytes parroting the missives of popes. You will start to assume that the humanities are really branches of biology in an immature form.  link

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Meditation changes temperatures: Mind controls body in extreme experiments

In a monastery in northern India, thinly clad Tibetan monks sat quietly in a room where the temperature was a chilly 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Using a yoga technique known as g Tum-mo, they entered a state of deep meditation. Other monks soaked 3-by-6-foot sheets in cold water (49 degrees) and placed them over the meditators' shoulders. For untrained people, such frigid wrappings would produce uncontrolled shivering. If body temperatures continue to drop under these conditions, death can result. But it was not long before steam began rising from the sheets. As a result of body heat produced by the monks during meditation, the sheets dried in about an hour. Attendants removed the sheets, then covered the meditators with a second chilled, wet wrapping. Each monk was required to dry three sheets over a period of several hours. Why would anyone do this? Herbert Benson, who has been studying g Tum-mo for 20 years, answers that "Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There's another reality we can tap into that's unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world. Buddhists believe this state of mind can be achieved by doing good for others and by meditation. The heat they generate during the process is just a by-product of g Tum-mo meditation."  link  

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Kymatica (2009)


"Sometimes the best way to effect change you wish to see in the world is to change the way you see the world."

"Kymatica will open your eyes to why your every day thoughts and actions directly correspond to what's going to happen if we don't change them." talismanicidols.org

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Terence McKenna's Final Earthbound Interview


In this last video interview before his untimely death, Terence McKenna describes Novelty Theory to director John Hazard with an elaboration of its core principles involving hyper-complexification and the compression of Time. He holds forth on the correspondences between the structure of the DNA molecule and the Chinese I-Ching, then shows how his notion of an Archaic Revival leads from the theories of mind and the art movements of the early 20th century to the Shaman as the quintessential figure of the 21st century, with psychedelic substances being the bridge between these worldviews.  link

Friday, April 29, 2011

Brains of Buddhist monks scanned in meditation study

In a laboratory tucked away off a noisy New York City street, a soft-spoken neuroscientist has been placing Tibetan Buddhist monks into a car-sized brain scanner to better understand the ancient practice of meditation.  But could this unusual research not only unravel the secrets of leading a harmonious life but also shed light on some of the world's more mysterious diseases? Zoran Josipovic, a research scientist and adjunct professor at New York University, says he has been peering into the brains of monks while they meditate in an attempt to understand how their brains reorganise themselves during the exercise.
Since 2008, the researcher has been placing the minds and bodies of prominent Buddhist figures into a five-tonne (5,000kg) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.
The scanner tracks blood flow within the monks' heads as they meditate inside its clunky walls, which echoes a musical rhythm when the machine is operating. Dr Josipovic, who also moonlights as a Buddhist monk, says he is hoping to find how some meditators achieve a state of "nonduality" or "oneness" with the world, a unifying consciousness between a person and their environment.  link

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Across the Threshold

...Forty years later, that world is falling apart at an accelerating rate. The stories that undergird our civilization are crumbling. Two are primary: the story of the self, and the story of the people. The first is the discrete, separate self, a Cartesian mote of consciousness looking out onto an objective universe of soulless masses and impersonal, deterministic forces. In biology, the separate self manifests as the paradigm of the selfish gene seeking to maximize its reproductive self-interest; in economics, it is homo economicus, who seeks to maximize rational self-interest as measured by money. In psychology, it is the skin-encapsulated ego; in religion, the soul encased in flesh but separate from it.  Such a self is naturally in opposition to all other beings, whose interests are indifferent to or at odds with its own. Spiritual teachings based on this story of self, then, tell us we must try very hard to rise above nature, to conquer our biological and economic drive to maximize self-interest at the expense of other beings.  link

Nonduality, Neuroscience, and Postmodernism: The Dream of the Self

The conventional nondual inquiry begins with asking "Who am I?"
So, who are you?  If you ask most people what makes them who they are, chances are you'll get an answer that has to do with the self, the personality -- perhaps even the "soul," something distinctively individual, psychological or spiritual. As all of us mature, we come to know ourselves, and form personal, professional, familial, and other identities. And those identities are usually disembodied (we usually say we have bodies, rather thanthat we are bodies), and connected with thoughts, habits, preferences, and feelings.  Yet if you look closely at the personality (or mind, or heart, or soul), you discover that it isn't there -- at least, not in the way you thought.  link

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Demystifying meditation -- brain imaging illustrates how meditation reduces pain

"We found a big effect – about a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness. Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25 percent."
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The scans taken after meditation training showed that every participant's pain ratings were reduced, with decreases ranging from 11 to 93 percent, Zeidan said.  link