Questions for the scientists in our midst

[Brian]

 

 

My point is that the chemical reactions are the vehicle used by the Absolute as it thinks its way back to the void. It's all one living thing. Someone mentioned religious revelation above. I think spiritual revelation is more accurate. No structure to it - just a result of an experiential set of experiences. If the experiences haven't been experienced, it can't be understood. Those who have experienced understand that these experiences do catapult one into the realm of the unexplainable. Like healings, extrasensory phenomena, things which give us our individual 'proofs' that we are indeed tapped into something unexplainable. Because there is a wall between this and science, those of us who have experienced will always be viewed as the crazy ones. No measurement, no prediction. Just the realm of the weird. The realm is there. Digging in one's heels against the possibility renders the possibility impossible. It is an incredible and unfair Catch-22, if you ask me. We can search for it with all the initials in the world after our names and it will never be found that way.

 

No crossing this bridge with words. Intellect vs. hocus pocus - but not really hocus pocus; really a connection with that which is spoken of in the DDJ, and the center hub of all spiritual thought.

 

But there is no way that those who have seen can help anyone else to see this. This journey is an individual one.

I agree with you 100%. It is my opinion that science attempts to partially explain a tiny fraction of "all that is" for the purpose of being able to do something useful with that gained knowledge. It is not necessary to believe one understands something to be able to make use of it in either a creative way or a utilitarian way. Most inventors/innovators have only the most superficial understanding of "how it really works" and users have even less. In fact, it is generally easier to use something if you DON'T try too hard to figure it out. Riding a bicycle comes to mind...

[Brian]

This is interesting Brian, could you give us a little more on this?

I'd say start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus

 

(Notice the phrase "organisms at the edge of life")

 

And then, as an interesting rabbit-hole, try this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage

 

[Brian]

Coming to life and attacking ? really now. Isnt that a bit umm creative? it compares what living creatures do closely and grossly with that of virions or prions and cell membranes and the like. If one believes in free will of humans they reject that autonomaton view, as I do , if for no other reason than the apparent lack of neccesity for experience in clockwork existance,, and it seems a bummer.

No, I don't think that it is necessarily "creative." The "autonomaton" viewpoint here, as I see it, is that the virus doesn't meet our self-determined criteria for being categorized as "life" and therefore, by definition, it isn't "alive" but that is merely our current definition. Likewise with "awareness" -- we can't really put our finger on it, scientifically, so we establish an anthropocentric definition and then claim anything that doesn't fully satisfy that definition is "not aware."

[Stosh]

No, I don't think that it is necessarily "creative." The "autonomaton" viewpoint here, as I see it, is that the virus doesn't meet our self-determined criteria for being categorized as "life" and therefore, by definition, it isn't "alive" but that is merely our current definition. Likewise with "awareness" -- we can't really put our finger on it, scientifically, so we establish an anthropocentric definition and then claim anything that doesn't fully satisfy that definition is "not aware."

Quite true, and yes a bit unfair on my part ,but its practical for deciding if I have to apologize to my chair , smash a cockroach, or cant eat a cabbage.

Edited November 26, 2013 by Stosh

[Brian]

I hear you!

 

My wife has issues with me rescuing insects from inside the house but roaches ALWAYS die.

[Zhongyongdaoist]

Quite true, and yes a bit unfair on my part ,but its practical for deciding if I have to apologize to my chair , smash a cockroach, or cant eat a cabbage.

 

Apologizing to your chair is probably not necessary and ritual propriety might require an occasional sacrifice to the God of Cockroaches, but eating a cabbage is genuinely problematic. Which is why ritual propriety has always demanded harvest Thanksgiving as an essential part of civilized life.

 

(Please insert smiley emoticon of choice, but the above is only partly tongue in cheek.)

[Stosh]

 

Apologizing to your chair is probably not necessary and ritual propriety might require an occasional sacrifice to the God of Cockroaches, but eating a cabbage is genuinely problematic. Which is why ritual propriety has always demanded harvest Thanksgiving as an essential part of civilized life.

 

(Please insert smiley emoticon of choice, but the above is only partly tongue in cheek.)

Id choose

[manitou]

Please, nobody even comment on this post. It will be a ridiculous post. I saw a virus segment on the Science channel once where the virus was 'walking' toward the nucleus of a cell with the intent of permeating the wall of the nucleus. (This was quite a while back so I don't remember the details much - and the Wikipedia page was a little complicated for my PTSD memory banks). If I recall, was the virus 'walking' on rods of protein or some such thing, advancing toward the nucleus to insert something into the permeable 'windows' of the nucleus to infect the cell. At the time, somebody I knew had a terrible cold. I used this same visualization in a healing ceremony where I requested the viruses to all switch direction and head away from the nucleuses.

 

As it turned out, the person did get better very quickly. Probably would have happened anyway - but the visualization was a good one and it made a whole lot of sense to me at the time. Although I acknowledge that this doesn't begin to address the reason the body is manifesting the common cold in the first place, which is the level I try to work at. I've subsequently developed my own theory about a reason for cold manifestation.

[Marblehead]

The manifestation of our visualizations are more frequent than most people would believe to be true.

[Stosh]

Can you explain that? giimmea a fer instance or something.

[Marblehead]

Can you explain that? giimmea a fer instance or something.

Who you talking to?

[Stosh]

Who you talking to?

Must be myself since I cant draw any distinctions.

[Marblehead]

Okay. An example of manifestation of a visualization (ears and mind).

 

Put on a song from your favorite female singer. Make sure you close your eyes before the song starts. Listen to the song, listen to the background music. Place attention on the singer. Listen carefully to her words. Feel the words she is singing. What do you feel? Visualize that she is singing directly to you. Where are your feelings going? This is the manifestation of visualization.

[Stosh]

^{Ok , where are you going with that Mh ? You know as well as I that the mental doesnt directly translate to the physical, eg.}

^{Id need to sing the song to pass it along later, Im not sure Id call it manifestation till it gets out of the realm of mental, but yes it has a reality of its own type manifested in there.}

[Zhongyongdaoist]

Sorry, ZYD - just can't do the homework. . . . When great masters tell us to Know Thyself, it's because when one knows themselves, they know others as well.

 

just can't do the homework: You are not the person who needs to do it.

 

When great masters tell us to Know Thyself, it's because when one knows themselves, they know others as well:

 

Mencius said, `All the ten thousand things are there in me. There is no greater joy for me than to find, on self-examination, that I am true to myself. Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence.' (D. C. Lau, Mencius, Penguin Books, 1970, p. 192)

 

That about covers it.

 

"in San Diego, Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UCSD, offers, "We used to say, metaphorically, that 'I can feel another's pain.' But now we know that my mirror neurons can literally feel your pain." "Mirror neurons dissolve the barrier between you and someone else," says Ramachandran. He calls them "Gandhi neurons.""

 

Ummm, I think not. I can express signals which you respond to, but if I dont convey it , you wont have sympathy, and even if you have empathy, it just aint the same as breaking your own arm in intensity or duration or duress.

Also since 1, Its no surprise to me that people have neurons are in their brain, and 2, its no surprise either, that rowdy fans are caught up in a voyouristic experience involving the neurons in their brain, his claims are way overstated to the extent of implying that which is technically unfactual or really amount to bombast.

Its like saying I have neurons in my brain to play tennis.

I dont think so!

(Emphasis mine, ZYD)

 

I read books myself and then when I need to, I go and find something on the internet for the people who don't. I'm sorry that you didn't find this site edifying. About a year ago I read Marco Iacobini's Mirroring People (Farrar. Straiss and Giroux, 2008). On p. 116 he starts a section called 'Empathic Mirrors' and on p. 121 a section called 'I feel your pain', in which he describes the neurological mechanisms for these ideas. Granted the book is a popularization, over simplified and lacking in the types of charts and graphs that some more technical types, myself included, might have wished to see, overall he makes a good case. Someone concerned about his credentials and the technical aspects of his research can check him out here:

 

Iacobini Old Site

 

Iacobini New Site

 

Iacobini Publications

 

it just aint the same as breaking your own arm in intensity or duration or duress: Iacobini says that the body responds to the sight of injuries by a sympathetic response in the same area of the viewers body. A response involving a complete re-experience of the injury would not be useful and one could argue that evolution provides for empathy, but is aimed at motivating action. Feeling the pain to excess would hinder that action.

 

Generally speaking I could care less about brain research, but I have been reading up on it in the past few years. The techniques used and the results obtained are still at a primitive level and I only mention them because they have to do with recent research in a changing field. Yesterday's neurology just doesn't make it anymore.

 

overstated to the extent of implying that which is technically unfactual or really amount to bombast

 

If you have 'factuals' to counter these 'unfactuals' that actually are critical of the research rather then an expression of your own or someone else's incredulity, that might be interesting, but it is exactly this type of discussion that I characterized as:

 

. . . an intellectual 'Tar-Baby' of sorts and I don't want to get stuck in them.

 

A point admirably illustrated by the past history of this thread. I simply don't have the time to get into extended discussions of any of this, but do wish to point out relevant ideas and resources.

[manitou]

(Reply to Stosh and Marbles)

 

I would argue that the mental causes the physical, as in physical malady. So would Mary Baker Eddy or Science of Mind. I've actually had results with this.

 

I went to a birthday dinner the other night. The man sitting next to me had had cysts on his kidneys for a long time, a chronic problem. He is now going to an oncologist for this problem, one area of concern has developed at the bottom of one of his kidneys.

 

What do the kidneys symbolize, looking at it as the microcosm to the macrocosm? (And not using the qi concept of TCM, but something a little different) It symbolizes elimination. I asked him if there were something in his life that needed to be eliminated, something that had been stressing him over a long period of time. Yes, there was. He and his wife are highly agitated that they have been taking care of their grandkids over a long period of time, but have never known how to tell their son (who is in his late thirties at this time!) that they don't want to take care of these kids any longer - they want to travel the world, they have the money to do so.

 

The man asked me to go into this further. I told him that he had two choices - to either confront the situation with their son and let the son figure all this out for himself; or they need to find a way to continue doing this caretaking lovingly, without resentment. Obviously, the first would be the easier of the two.

 

If I were to work with this healing situation, I would bring it all into the physical by doing a ceremony; having them (or specifically, he - although it might be more potent if they were both involved) do something symbolically to show that the are washing their hands of this whole thing with the kids. It's effective to have someone bury a picture of the persons involved (in this case, the kids and their son) along with a picture of whatever religious figure they relate to (if at all) - or even just a feather or something in nature - to signify that they are turning over this problem to 'the universe' and knowing that it will be handled just the way it's supposed to be. That they're not obligated to run interference on their son, to carry his karma - and in fact by doing so they are prohibiting his inner growth, they are enabling him to stay irresponsible (which apparently he is, according to the father). The practitioner must do the best they can to convey this 'truth' to the person being healed.

 

This is deep healing from a deep dynamic. It must be done by the practitioner without any regard for results, without ego involved in the ceremony at all. If anyone is interested further in this type of inner healing, there is a thread where it is described in real time as it was occurring, more or less. Traveler and I were having a dialog on the Hua Hu Ching, chapter 12, and after post #11 I got off into this actual situation with a young man with quadriplegia. The healing occurred during the course of this thread, and the ceremony is described in detail. There were positive results.

 

Christian Science or Science of Mind is healing from the Inside to the Outside, addressing the cause rather than the effect. Christian Science does use Jesus as a proxy, although I think that either Mary Baker Eddy hadn't completed her evolution at the time she wrote Science and Healing, or if she had, she assumed that her readers may not have been as highly evolved as she; therefore, she does use Jesus as the proxy through which practitioners must go. Science of Mind does not use Jesus as a proxy as a matter of course, nor do I. But it's all in the mind of the beholder. If the sick person believe that only Jesus or another icon can be the healer, then by all means bring the sick one's beliefs into the ceremony. I use a shamanic setting because it separates one piece of ground from another, one point in time from another, one mood from another. It rearranges the assemblage point, as don Juan Mateus would say (Castaneda's Nagual) and leaves the energy field shook up enough to be pliable and accepting to suggestion.

Edited November 27, 2013 by manitou

[Stosh]

I would argue that the mental causes the physical, as in physical malady.

Ok yeah ,I can agree that sometimes, phantom limbs, stress headaches, and yes sometimes even inexplicable conditions as well can be addressed from that angle ,, but in saying that , I still hold that if I were to get in a car accident , I could really get injured ,even if I wasnt mentally prepared ( since I was texting at the time).

If the Shaman methodology brings relief from what defies normal medical care thats just fine too, so long as someone doesnt seriously endanger the welfare of dependents because they want to be defiant about western medicine.

Edited November 27, 2013 by Stosh

[Stosh]

overstated to the extent of implying that which is technically unfactual or really amount to bombast

If you have 'factuals' to counter these 'unfactuals' that actually are critical of the research rather then an expression of your own or someone else's incredulity, that might be interesting, but it is exactly this type of discussion that I characterized as:

I dont see why you should hold me to a higher factual standard than the other side in order to disprove it to you.

I consider it one of those 'wild goose chases' to have you assign me unfair tasks which you will dismiss anyway.

[Marblehead]

^{Ok , where are you going with that Mh ? You know as well as I that the mental doesnt directly translate to the physical, eg.}

^{Id need to sing the song to pass it along later, Im not sure Id call it manifestation till it gets out of the realm of mental, but yes it has a reality of its own type manifested in there.}

Didn't really want to go anywhere with it. Just a thought (that manifested).

[Stosh]

Didn't really want to go anywhere with it. Just a thought (that manifested).

Ok ,now we need someone to say something controversial so we can all hammer it from different directions.

[Marblehead]

Ok ,now we need someone to say something controversial so we can all hammer it from different directions.

If we wait long enough Manitou will be back. Hehehe.

 

I forget what the question was in the opening post but it realted to how science views the world or something like that.

 

Science can't prove Chi but it is something I strongly believe in.

 

Science can't prove Dark Energy or Dark Matter but they insist that it must exist.

 

Science has its limitations. Some things just can't be proven right now and some will never be able to be proven.

 

But regardless of what science says they have proof for we will continue to believe whatever it is we believe in. It gives us security. Fro example, life after death. What a wonderful idea, especially for those who are having less than an ideal life in their opinion. Something better to look forward to.

[Stosh]

If we wait long enough Manitou will be back. Hehehe.

 

I forget what the question was in the opening post but it realted to how science views the world or something like that.

 

Science can't prove Chi but it is something I strongly believe in.

 

Science can't prove Dark Energy or Dark Matter but they insist that it must exist.

 

Science has its limitations. Some things just can't be proven right now and some will never be able to be proven.

 

But regardless of what science says they have proof for we will continue to believe whatever it is we believe in. It gives us security. Fro example, life after death. What a wonderful idea, especially for those who are having less than an ideal life in their opinion. Something better to look forward to.

I guess its something to look forward to , but I dont cotton to the idea that one should make things bad now so as to have things be good then, but if the idea is just gravy then, so be it.

I dont know what Chi is supposed to be , I might agree with some things , just I'd use english ,, have you got a description other than breath? and why ,of all things that science has yet to explain ,are you willing to embrace the idea of Chi?

[Marblehead]

I dont know what Chi is supposed to be , I might agree with some things , just I'd use english ,, have you got a description other than breath? and why ,of all things that science has yet to explain ,are you willing to embrace the idea of Chi?

Chi is energy. That's all it is. Our living body and brain (Hehehe. The brain is part of the body.) generates energy. This is a provable fact. Many predators seek out pray by this means, especially aquatic animals.

 

Energy from the sun is constantly mermiating our body with its energy. We even sometimes get energy from other parts of the universe. (Most of this is not good for us though.)

 

Our brain uses more energy than any other part of our body. It also generates more energy. If we can channel (I don't usually use that word, it is for other people.) our energy we can do things that we can otherwise not do. How to channel this energy is what alchemy is all about.

 

I believe in Black Holes, Dark Matter and Dark Energy. None of these can be seen. But the logic of it allows me to accept the concepts. We don't have to prove everything as long as there is logic in it. Later on if the logic proves faulty we can discard that concept.

[Stosh]

Wow I never took you to be alchemist. Are we agreeing that the electrical emmissions of brain and muscle are the energies you are referring to and the source of it is chemically mediated by way of metabolism? Or are you in disagreement with the thermodynamic laws here.

[Stosh]

The dark matter thing I'm not convinced on yet because the only support for it I have read is the inexplicable mass imbalance of a theoretically expanding universe. I neither know what significant implications it would have nor do I have much faith that there cannot be unknown factors other than it to explain the disparity. My jury is still sequestered on that idea. That being said I see no reason to invoke dark stuff as a significant explanation for anything yet....but sure it could be significant somehow someday.

The practical matters of every day life have enough explainable unpredictability that I can wait till there is a more thorough framework before trying to employ knowlege we collectively don't have yet.