Hi Joe, I'm going to walk into another unwanted epithet as 'prophet' because I don't want your "asking over and over again" to go unanswered. I haven't caught up with the rest of the thread, and maybe others have given different answers. I just gave a long answer and IE7 crashed AGAIN! So excuse the brevity.
I sympathise with you there.
The checks and balances of science, which attempt to minimise the problem of subjective experience being susceptible to error has a downside. If errors are noticed by the scientific community getting together and comparing notes on their repeated experiments, all well and good, but errors that are not noticed become consolidated into the authodox view.
It's all well and good to say this, but if you want to assert that it is relevant, you have to show that this really happens.
The first thing that you would be afraid of, therefore, is not relying on others to pick up your errors in thinking or tell you what the established facts are.
Okay, that's just silly. While science is an effort involving a huge number of people all cross-checking each other's work, every experiment and observation is a reference to
reality. The cross-checking is to make sure that we did the referencing part - the observation or experiment - right. And you can do that yourself, as long as you are scrupulously honest.
Then, there are various fears that come if and when you learn to open your mind and quiet your mind in the contemplative practices.
Eh? Why should this be at all frightening? After all, we know what the mind is. Meditation is no more frightening than sleep.
For reasons that are still not clear to me, my first experience of pure awareness was the most frightening thing I ever encountered.
Why?
When I was in my teens I thought that my consciousness was the same thing as my thoughts/feelings/etc. - all the contents of consciousness. I thought that the yoga books I was reading must be wrong to talk about "pure awareness", until I bothered to learn to meditate and practised enought to verify it. It was/is a state of mind in which there are no contents of consciousness, but consciousness (or awareness, awakeness, a witness, a subject) remains, a strange, silent, empty place where I have an overwhelming sense of not being fooled by illusion (although I don't rule it out, of course), of not thinking or feeling or visualising or hearing anything, and a solid, undeniable sense of simply Being.
There, see, you can describe it using language. Doesn't mean a whole lot, but you did describe it.
Now, the real question: What does this "pure awareness"
do?
Later, I began to verify more of the statements of the 'perennial philosophy' or spiritual teachings of Buddhism, etc. Not only that, I began to understand truths that are intimated in the words of all the great prophets and spiritual teachers in different religions, and to make sense of them in my own experience, still suspending both belief and disbelief for any others that I didn't know myself. I began to realise that, as postmodernists have pointed out, the problem with much of this kind of understanding comes down to simple problems of language.
Whatever. What does all this
do?
As I and others have acknowledged, verifying this subjective realm, whether it is unreal imagination or has anything real to tell us, is a personal decision, a personal practice, and it is hard, often extremely boring, requires an unusual amount of discipline, which is why it is called discipleship, and all the while one is tortured by the fear that it might be all the things you lot keep saying it is (prejudicially, having not tested it): self-hypnosis, self-deluding, a retreat from reality, comfortable but wrong...... and all the while there is little or nothing against which to measure it, other than the thousands of years of (often contradictory) literature of what others have made of their subjective experience.
Yes, yes. And what does it do?
How can it not be frightening, Joe, to be told, and to know, that it could be utterly delusional to investigate subjective experience?
Um, what? Why should that be frightening at all? It's a statement.
Tigers are frightening, if they are about to jump on you and eat you. Cancer is frightening. Being dangled by one leg from the observation level of the Empire State Building is frightening.
Ideas are just ideas.
Practical effects of my woo being true?
Okay! Now we get to the good stuff!
Well, assuming it were true, you would have to overhaul just about everything you think you know (believe, as I keep saying) about reality.
Such as?
Space and time, or spacetime, would mean something quite different.
Why? How? What would be different? What behaviour of space or time or the matter and energy that exists within them would change?
Your view of yourself would be quite different, even if as a materialist you had already come to the conclusion that you don't exist in any permanent form (if we take Buddhism as comparison, because that comes to the same conclusion).
Why? Nothing in the world changes. All our observations remain exactly as they were. Mind is still brain function. Brains are still squishy biochemical computers. People are still people.
However, where the materialist's mind is seen as the processing of a machine, the individual's mind in Buddhism is seen as a kind of self-limiting infolding of the All, the Cosmic Consciousness, a "filter" as Nick put it, which creates the local impression of a separate self. I have to say that I have not verified these more advanced stages of the subjective investigation, and am not either a prophet or an Enlghtened Being.
That's fine. Now, what does this actually change?
Becoming selfless, though, if that were really possible, instead of a pretense of mechanistic worldviews that alters your ego not one jot, you would become extremely - er - selfless, and be able to bring the expansive identity to human affairs that people like Mahatma Gandhi brought, for instance, having no qualms about starving oneself to death in order to force the British Raj to recognise its insidious enslavement of India.
That is ridiculous.
Mahatma Gandhi was an interesting character, yes, but very far from selfless. Take a look at his actual history. He's another Mother Theresa.
As for starving yourself to death - people do that, you know. Doesn't require any special insight; all it requires is not eating.
If X is true then Y is true? I hope the above is one example of that.
Nope.
The effect of the evolution of consciousness is a movement from identifying with the small ego to larger and larger entities.
Yes, yes. And if I stick you with a needle, who feels the pain. Oh, look, it's still you.
So what actually changes?
The selflessness of the materialist explanation, that I am just the local fizzing of some synapses, does not cause this expansion of identity
Why do you say this? This "expansion" has, so far as you have told us (apart from some nonsense about spacetime) no actual material effect whatsoever. So it is perfectly compatible with materialism.
and thus the socio-political implications of the two views are extremely different.
So what? Really, so what? People fight over ideas all the time. Read
Gulliver's Travels.
Consciousness evolution of individual human beings, indeed, has often been posited as the only route to sustainable civilisation, since it acts to cause each to include all others in their love and care, their identity, their Self - and indeed all the environment, too.
What you are saying, is that this is
an idea. Well, so it is. So it is. It's not one that has any basis in reality, but many ideas are that way.
This is another thing to fear, the extreme communism of Christ
Huh?
which it is easy for those prior to such an intuition to imagine must mean becoming like ants in a colony, or being forced into a fundamental religious authodoxy.
I've completely lost you. Sorry.
Ironically, science seems to develop just such a powerful authodoxy, prejudging all other philosophies as false
Nope. (By the way, it's "orthodoxy".)
or demanding evidence be provided for them
Nope.
even when they have not been tested in the way the test must be carried out, and the proponents have explained again and again why it is difficult - impossible - to bring anything that would satisfy the scientist as evidence.
John, science studies the behaviour of the real world. If you are making a claim that doesn't relate to the real world, that is fine. It's not subject to scientific examination. It's imaginary.
But the moment you claim that it changes the nature of the world - and you do claim that - then it becomes subject to science, and to the rules of science, and you have to provide a coherent statement of what these changes are and objectively verifiable evidence to support this.
