Meditation and Mind Science

Oh bummer. I wrote a whole long reply and then the forum ate it.

So to start again, more briefly:

1) Sorry, Jake & Chris - the geekery goes way over my head. I know nothing of quantum physics. I could go read up on it I suppose.

2) Clearly there is time in the sense that I have a 3pm conference call and tomorrow is November 21, but I have had experiences of time being simply... not. Like there is not time, never was, never will be. The concept is just inapplicable. How do those two types of experience interrelate? Maybe they don't. Or maybe Quantum Physics offers the genius answer I should take a look at. Off to read wikipedia.

So I guess what I was getting at is does this experience of timelessness relate in any way to our understanding of time in the mundane sense, in science, etc. or is it just another one of those weird meditation things.

@Jake - rereading your geekery above it hints at interesting things to my less-tired-than-last-night brain. Thanks for that.

"There are physicists who would tell you that time simply does not exist, that every tiny moment is its own universe. There are more physicists who will tell you that time and space are woven together and cannot be considered separately. All of that jives with certain realizations we've probably all had, due to out practices." ~Chris

This reminds me of something that Ian and I talked about over lunch not long ago. In the case of the two points of view above (i.e. time does not exist, time and space are interwoven), among others, it's interesting to note that most human beings (all of us, at one time or another) have a tendency to assume that only one view is absolutely correct. "You say this, and she says that, but which view is really real?"

Some will insist that how things work at the smallest, most fundamental level will be the true answer. Others will assert that the biggest, most all encompassing, Universal explanation is the truth. And there are seemingly countless points of view that lay at various levels of organization all the up, and all the way down. Each level seems to function in its own way - systems interacting with systems.

This lead both of us (if I can speak for Ian) to recognize that when it comes to determining the truth about reality in some objective way, it depends on how you look at it. In other words, what appears to be true will change based on one's frame of reference. The ability to take different frames of reference is experiential evidence for the lack of any fundamental reference point. And therefore, yet another finger pointing to the moon that is emptiness (not as a thing, but as a characteristic).

The same can be said about awakening. Ian brought up the "crystal of awakening" (Jack Kornfield's term), which implies multiple facets that are available depending on different factors. Emptiness is demonstrated by participation in the process.

Good one, Jackson.

I'm pretty sure the morning "thought spin" (which in me used to be a pretty consistent onset of anxious panic and bad temper which settled down after about 20-30 minutes of stomping around and fretting) is due to the natural surge of adrenaline that is associated with the body waking up in the morning.

For a couple of years now, I've been interested in the physiology of sleep. I'm not much of a scientist, but I have noticed that part of waking up [for me] is a flush of heat. A darned good thing, since the room I sleep in is rather cold. It's a distinct thing, like a heater kicking on-- so its being propelled by an adrenaline rush makes perfect sense. It probably kicks you out of sleep-paralysis, too.

The other thing I've noticed as part of the waking process is the sort of semi-formed dream fragments that are really annoying-- about attempting to do something, usually trivial, over and over again. It's a kind of mental equivalent of the body climbing out of sleep, a re-orientation to daytime life. This seems to have taken the place of more conscious thinking about what I have to deal with in the coming day, what's left over from the preceding day.

More and more the Dzogchen directive about being unconcerned with the 'contents' of mind makes perfect sense. We usually think that our bodies are led by mind; but one of those figure-ground reversals that interest me so much is that one could equally say that mind is reflective of body.

I've been doing lucid dreaming training for a few weeks now, since taking a workshop, and one of the things I've noticed is that in certain phases of half-sleep there is a drift of dream-stream which is not really any different from the image-streaming that happens during trance visions, and not really so different from the random thought-stream that can occur during waking state sometimes. (The thought-stream in this case being a bit distinct from deliberate thinking (as in "what do I need to get at the grocery store"), but more like the kind of random memories, impressions, etc that can drift by at any time, or what we might call daydreams.)

At times when I am dreaming while aware/awake/conscious - particular while waking up in the early morning or when dozing intermittently on a train, there seems to be a rather random generation of imagery - not even images of anything in particular, but just globs of color shifting around, and it seems this is mixing with a layer of thoughts (often data-processing from recent experience) and the two interact to create stories and images of stuff (people, places, etc.).

This be no scientific analysis, but some ideas I've had based on my own experiences.

Re: mind-body oneness -- as Eugene Gendlin says in Focusing: "The body is the unconscious." You correct the modality of the mind by correcting the modality of the body. And here, mind obviously includes the unconscious. If it didn't, you might be able to maintain Descartes' thesis of mind-body separation. But this isn't reality. To me the unconscious is the driver, the ocean, and the conscious mind, the little dinghy flitting about. At least this is such in people who adopt the everyday standpoint based in ego-consciousness. These people are thrown about by their emotions, likes and dislikes. They are inhibited by unconscious shadow elements. Those who have achieved conscious-unconscious integration, they have become the ocean as well as the dinghy. And even though the dinghy is still floating--it hasn't been subsumed by the ocean--it is in a state of immeasurable calm. This is because any tension between the conscious-unconscious--as the unconscious struggles to be heard--is normalized. The water is stilled.

Haha, wow I sound preachy.