The nature of experience and the mind

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Re: The nature of experience and the mind

Postby Doc Stier on Thu Feb 28, 2013 8:10 am

Kevin_Wallbridge wrote:I would argue that internal is about the mind, and if the way you think is not part of your training you are not doing internals now matter what your style.

I agree. Broadly speaking, the domain of the 'internal arts' is the science of mind.

The personal study, investigative research and practical testing of every aspect of mind function is the specialty of every true internal method. Thus, by definition, the word 'internal' refers to all areas of study which have the potential to improve personal understanding of the mind at every level, whether conscious, subconscious, or unconscious.

Therefore, the study of psychology, parapsycholgy, contemplation, meditation, self-hypnosis, auto-suggestion, subliminal programming, mental visualization, and so forth, are all topics of particular interest, because they can provide practical knowledge of techniques which are directly applicable to mind and intention based martial arts.
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Re: The nature of experience and the mind

Postby shawnsegler on Fri Mar 01, 2013 3:15 pm

Really interesting discussion here:

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Re: The nature of experience and the mind

Postby Bob on Tue Apr 02, 2013 6:15 am

Dangerous territory! Not to side-track but the original link posted by Shawn was removed by the TED Talk Board--below is a repost of the original talk--interesting reaction to this talk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHUaNAxsTg

Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED TALK

revolutionloveevolve

Published on Mar 15, 2013

Re-uploaded as TED have decided to censor Rupert and remove this video from the TEDx youtube channel. Follow this link for TED's statement on the matter and Dr. Sheldrake's response: http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-f...



http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for ... sheldrake/

TED BlogNews TEDx
Open for discussion: Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake from TEDxWhitechapel
Posted by: Tedstaff
March 14, 2013 at 11:59 am EDT More
UPDATE: Please see our new blog post Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake, a fresh take, which replaces the x-ed out text below.

To discuss the talks, view them here:

The debate about Rupert Sheldrake’s talk
The debate about Graham Hancock’s talk

After due diligence, including a survey of published scientific research and recommendations from our Science Board and our community, we have decided that Graham Hancock’s and Rupert Sheldrake’s talks from TEDxWhitechapel should be removed from distribution on the TEDx YouTube channel.

We’re not censoring the talks. Instead we’re placing them here, where they can be framed to highlight both their provocative ideas and the factual problems with their arguments. See both talks after the jump.

All talks on the TEDxTalks channel represent the opinion of the speaker, not of TED or TEDx, but we feel a responsibility not to provide a platform for talks which appear to have crossed the line into pseudoscience.

UPDATE: Please find Rupert Sheldrake’s response below the video window.

According to our science board, Rupert Sheldrake bases his argument on several major factual errors, which undermine the arguments of talk. For example, he suggests that scientists reject the notion that animals have consciousness, despite the fact that it’s generally accepted that animals have some form of consciousness, and there’s much research and literature exploring the idea.

He also argues that scientists have ignored variations in the measurements of natural constants, using as his primary example the dogmatic assumption that a constant must be constant and uses the speed of light as example. But, in truth, there has been a great deal of inquiry into the nature of scientific constants, including published, peer-reviewed research investigating whether certain constants – including the speed of light – might actually vary over time or distance. Scientists are constantly questioning these assumptions. For example, just this year Scientific American published a feature on the state of research into exactly this question. (“Are physical constants really constant?: Do the inner workings of nature change over time?”) Physicist Sean Carroll wrote a careful rebuttal of this point.

In addition, Sheldrake claims to have “evidence” of morphic resonance in crystal formation and rat behavior. The research has never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, despite attempts by other scientists eager to replicate the work.

Response to the TED Scientific Board’s Statement

Rupert Sheldrake
March 18, 2013

I would like to respond to TED’s claims that my TEDx talk “crossed the line into pseudoscience”, contains ”serious factual errors” and makes “many misleading statements.”

This discussion is taking place because the militant atheist bloggers Jerry Coyne and P.Z. Myers denounced me, and attacked TED for giving my talk a platform. I was invited to give my talk as part of a TEDx event in Whitechapel, London, called “Challenging Existing Paradigms.” That’s where the problem lies: my talk explicitly challenges the materialist belief system. It summarized some of the main themes of my recent book Science Set Free (in the UK called The Science Delusion). Unfortunately, the TED administrators have publically aligned themselves with the old paradigm of materialism, which has dominated science since the late nineteenth century.

TED say they removed my talk from their website on the advice of their Scientific Board, who also condemned Graham Hancock’s talk. Hancock and I are now facing anonymous accusations made by a body on whose authority TED relies, on whose advice they act, and behind whom they shelter, but whose names they have not revealed.

TED’s anonymous Scientific Board made three specific accusations:

Accusation 1:
“he suggests that scientists reject the notion that animals have consciousness, despite the fact that it’s generally accepted that animals have some form of consciousness, and there’s much research and literature exploring the idea.”

I characterized the materialist dogma as follows: “Matter is unconscious: the whole universe is made up of unconscious matter. There’s no consciousness in stars in galaxies, in planets, in animals, in plants and there ought not to be any in us either, if this theory’s true. So a lot of the philosophy of mind over the last 100 years has been trying to prove that we are not really conscious at all.” Certainly some biologists, including myself, accept that animals are conscious. In August, 2012, a group of scientists came out with an endorsement of animal consciousness in “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness”. As Discovery News reported, “While it might not sound like much for scientists to declare that many nonhuman animals possess conscious states, it’s the open acknowledgement that’s the big news here.” (http://news.discovery.com/human/genetic ... 120824.htm)

But materialist philosophers and scientists are still in the majority, and they argue that consciousness does nothing – it is either an illusion or an ”epiphenomenon” of brain activity. It might as well not exist in animals – or even in humans. That is why in the philosophy of mind, the very existence of consciousness is often called “the hard problem”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_probl ... sciousness

Accusation 2:
“He also argues that scientists have ignored variations in the measurements of natural constants, using as his primary example the dogmatic assumption that a constant must be constant and uses the speed of light as example.… Physicist Sean Carroll wrote a careful rebuttal of this point.”

TED’s Scientific Board refers to a Scientific American article that makes my point very clearly: “Physicists routinely assume that quantities such as the speed of light are constant.”

In my talk I said that the published values of the speed of light dropped by about 20 km/sec between 1928 and 1945. Carroll’s “careful rebuttal” consisted of a table copied from Wikipedia showing the speed of light at different dates, with a gap between 1926 and 1950, omitting the very period I referred to. His other reference (http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/ligh ... light.html) does indeed give two values for the speed of light in this period, in 1928 and 1932-35, and sure enough, they were 20 and 24km/sec lower than the previous value, and 14 and 18 km/sec lower than the value from 1947 onwards.

1926: 299,798
1928: 299,778
1932-5: 299,774
1947: 299,792

In my talk I suggest how a re-examination of existing data could resolve whether large continuing variations in the Universal Gravitational Constant, G, are merely errors, as usually assumed, or whether they show correlations between different labs that might have important scientific implications hitherto ignored. Jerry Coyne and TED’s Scientific Board regard this as an exercise in pseudoscience. I think their attitude reveals a remarkable lack of curiosity.

Accusation 3:
“Sheldrake claims to have “evidence” of morphic resonance in crystal formation and rat behavior. The research has never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, despite attempts by other scientists eager to replicate the work.”

I said, “There is in fact good evidence that new compounds get easier to crystallize all around the world.” For example, turanose, a kind of sugar, was considered to be a liquid for decades, until it first crystallized in the 1920s. Thereafter it formed crystals everyehere. (Woodard and McCrone Journal of Applied Crystallography (1975). 8, 342). The American chemist C. P. Saylor, remarked it was as though “the seeds of crystallization, as dust, were carried upon the winds from end to end of the earth” (quoted by Woodard and McCrone).

The research on rat behavior I referred to was carried out at Harvard and the Universities of Melbourne and Edinburgh and was published in peer-reviewed journals, including the British Journal of Psychology and the Journal of Experimental Biology. For a fuller account and detailed references see Chapter 11 of my book Morphic Resonance (in the US) / A New Science of Life (in the UK). The relevant passage is online here: http://sciencesetfree.tumblr.com/

The TED Scientific Board refers to ”attempts by other scientists eager to replicate the work” on morphic resonance. I would be happy to work with these eager scientists if the Scientific Board can reveal who they are.

This is a good opportunity to correct an oversimplification in my talk. In relation to the dogma that mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works, I said, “that’s why governments only fund mechanistic medicine and ignore complementary and alternative therapies.” This is true of most governments, but the US is a notable exception. The US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine receives about $130 million a year, about 0.4% of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) total annual budget of $31 billion.

Obviously I could not spell out all the details of my arguments in an 18-minute talk, but TED’s claims that it contains “serious factual errors,” “many misleading statements” and that it crosses the line into “pseudoscience” are defamatory and false.
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Re: The nature of experience and the mind

Postby RobP2 on Wed Apr 03, 2013 2:41 am

"If your life seems dull and boring - it is" - Derek & Clive
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Re: The nature of experience and the mind

Postby Bob on Thu Apr 04, 2013 2:22 pm

http://www.skeptiko.com/

207. Rupert Sheldrake Censored by TED Conference’s Anonymous Scientific Board
April 2nd, 2013 Alex Tsakiris

Interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake about censorship of his Science Set Free lecture.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake author of, Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery.

During the interview Sheldrake talks about the controversy:

Alex Tsakiris: The irony of this is, if not hilarious, certainly inescapable. A reputable Cambridge biologist publishes a book claiming science is dogmatic. He’s then censored by an anonymous scientific board. You can’t script that any better. What does this say about how science can be dogmatic without even realizing it’s dogmatic?

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: I think this whole controversy and the people who have weighed-in in favor of TED’s actions do indeed confirm what I’m saying. These dogmas are ones that most people within science don’t actually realize are dogmas. They just think they’re the truth. The point about really dogmatic people is that they don’t know that they have dogmas. Dogmas are beliefs and people who have really strong beliefs think of their beliefs as truths. They don’t actually see them as beliefs. So I think this whole controversy has actually highlighted exactly that.

The other thing that is highlighted is that there are a lot of people, far more than I imagined actually, who are not taken in by these dogmas, who do want to think about them critically. One of the remarkable things about these discussions is lots of people are really up for the discussion of these dogmas. They really want it to happen, far more than I’d imagined, actually. I’m impressed by that and I think this TED debate has actually helped show that the paradigm is shifting. There’s no longer a kind of automatic agreement by the great majority of people to dogmatic assertions by scientific materialists.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s Website
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Re: The nature of experience and the mind

Postby D_Glenn on Sat May 18, 2013 1:58 pm

TrainingDummy wrote:
Kevin_Wallbridge wrote:TrainingDummy, its the exact opposite. The Hun aligns the Shen. The Hun is the truth of who you are. The Shen is the Looney Toons character that you make up for yourself as you struggle with existence. Every psycho-emotional scar that we carry is what takes us out of alignment. Being the most Yang it is the Shen that is the most able to change, but those changes call us to address issues of our own identity. That's what the alchemy is, bringing it all into the same speed and direction. Fixing the Jing is relatively simple, its just training the basics; its powerful because you are maximizing your physical potential (Po), but at a certain level its still just mechanics.

Aligning the Hun and Shen is often an uncomfortable process. Its not enough to get a grip on your temper and be calmer than before you were training, or that sort of thing. Its getting at the deeper experiences that you to build your buttons in the first place. In Chinese medicine there are no positive or negative emotions (fright and oppression 惊忧 are kind of special cases), the issue is one of intensity and duration. When you experience and emotion that has too much intensity or goes on for too long a duration, what lies below that in who you think you are?
.

Thanks Kevin, I'll reframe my question.

Experientially then, how does one discern from the Hun (my personal Truth) to the Shen (the truth as I'd like it to be)?



In the 文始真經 'Wen Shi Zhen Jing' aka the "關尹子" "Guan Yin Zi"*, written in nine chapters: first, there are The 'Four Symbols' (四符) -

The Shen is fire. Jing is water. Without Jing we die [of old age, burning out, and disease]. Suddenly or abruptly, when we're without Shen, we will also die [accidental death or killed].

The Shen is the head, the Jing is the tail. We need both our head and tail to live.

Jing is water and using water we clear away the dirt and sand to find gold. Gold is the 'Po'.

Shen is fire, the 'Hun' is wood, and by burning the wood we produce the 'Hun'.

The '4 Symbols': 水为精为天,火为神为地,木为魂为人,金为魄为物。

{Water is 精 Jing (Essence) and 天 Tian (Sky); Fire is 神 Shen (Spirit) and the 地 Di (Ground); Wood is 魂 Hun (Ethereal Soul) and the 人 Ren (Person); Gold is 魄 Po (Corporeal Soul) and the 物 Wu (Creature).}

All living creatures have the '4 symbols'. The 'Po' is the primal, instinctual thing that drives the mind during the day, the 'Hun' dreams at night, learns from what happened the previous day so that the next day the 'Po' can be adapted and have learned from experiences. Animals live their whole lives under control of their Hun and Po.

The human 'Po', because Gold is found in the Ground (地 Di) that from our 神 Shen (Spirit) comes our 意 'Yi'. From the 'Yi' we get our emotions (our Shen is now Xin-Shen (emotional spirit) and our 意 'Yi' also imparts our 'awareness of self', the higher consciousness, and we are able to make careful, meticulous plans and calculations and contemplate the workings of the universe.

The 'Yi' is related to the Earth and we have the 'Five Elements' (Wu Xing) and it's Cycles: [1- Intent (意 'Yi') / Earth (土 Tǔ)] leads to --> [2-Physical/ Corporeal (魄 Po) / Gold (金 jīn)] --> [3- Essence (精 Jing) / Water (水 shuǐ)] --> [4- Ethereal 魂 Hun / Wood (木 Mù)] --> [5- Desires (心神 Xin-Shen) / Fire (火 Huǒ)] and back to #1.

#1 - The Earth/ 'Yi', can contain or conceal gold, it's where fire is started or it can be thrown over a fire and snuff it out, it can be used to dam up water or divert water to flow in the direction you want, but the Earth is always growing plants and trees (Wood), as all the creatures of the world need to sleep, but the quality and growth of the Wood is determined by the amount of Water it gets (Jing - our Intrinsic Health). So our 意 'Yi' is the most important part as it's our control over every other factor.

The 意 'Yi' is our ability to control what and when we eat. If the food is good then it increases our physical constitution (魄 Po), the 'Po', like all creatures is all the things they need to do in the day to survive. The 'Yi' controls the 'Po' by determining what we do in the day. If we constantly overexert ourselves or succumb to addictive substances and behaviors then our constitution/ 'Po' is weakened which begins to deplete our 精 'Jing'.

If your 'Jing' is healthy, then you have a strong will (志 'Zhi' - Water Element); and a strong water element will affect the 魂 'Hun' (wood) which will allow your dreams/ personal truth to be wholly obtainable and the things you learned during the day will be set in your mind/ truly learned and closer to something that can be habit/ or done with little to no thought.

Healthy dreams (healthy 魂 'Hun'), allow one to awaken calm, without depression and ready to tackle the day, and the 心神 'Xin-Shen' (Emotional Spirit/ Wants and Desires) can be fulfilled and, in turn, your ability to focus your 意 'Yi' is then stronger, and the cycle is repeated.


So the only thing we really have control over is our own 意 'Yi' and in order to improve and ultimately control the other 4 aspects is first done through making good decisions about what we eat and drink, which supports the health of the spleen and ultimately all the organs of the body.

Then determining what we physically and mentally do, the actions we undertake in a day can also be under our control, or of our own volition, rather than being driven solely by our instincts. But to be truly beneficial it needs to be done through our 意 'Yi' intent, with focus, intentional.

Any type of work or labor, under a boss or under duress of time or making money, whether it's physical labor or mental work while sitting at a desk, is not really beneficial as it's working under time constraints and the need to get the job finished, so it ends up being either too physically or too mentally demanding and can deplete the Jing and Shen. You will still dream about what you do during the day no matter but compounding the issue is if you don't enjoy your work then your dreams will be bad and you wake up a little worse off each day.

Just up and quitting one's job is probably not an option either, so, if the intake of good food and water is already being covered, then we need to work at playing (玩 wán) while exercising. An exercise where you're physically moving, while using 意 'Yi' (intent), but it's something you enjoy, it's fun, it's not too physically demanding, nor too complex which would make it too mentally demanding.

It needs to be just the right amount of physical exertion ( breathing is associated with the 'Po' ) combined with just enough self-discovery and use of imagination so that it both stimulates the 'Po' and the 'Hun'. (If your 'XinShen'/ Emotional Spirit/Mind is out of whack it can overact on your 意 'Yi' and tell you "If just a little bit of play is good, then a lot of play should be really good!" and in turn increases the heart rate, compounding the bad state of the 'Xin-Shen').

So pacing one's own self is priority #1, not only by being guided by your breathing and heart rate but also other changes like if you're adapting to the practice by getting stronger or making adaptations in accordance to the seasons, weather, and temperature and how much or how little you sweat, is there increased blood flow getting to the extremities, etc., if the intensity of the practice is not stimulating enough then increments need to happen at a quicker pace. To lax in one's practice is no better than lying on a couch.

If you only practice/play every other day or 3rd day or once a week then you may tend to become anxious in anticipation and will likely overdo it every time you practice. You need to make it a habit, like the necessity to eat and drink can become something people enjoy, so by doing it everyday of every week it becomes not only something your body needs but you feel better after doing it and it allows you to see how your body can adapt to the cycles of nature and seasonal changes. Nature keeps changing everyday and you miss out on it if you're only practicing every other day and miss even more if you practice even less than that.

Over time, you will gradually increase the quality and increment the levels of the physical exercise and the amount of mental 'intent' (意 'Yi') you put into it.

After some time, this manner of practice and playfulness can also be put into the things you need to do everyday, like cooking food, making tea, etc. but not rigid or confined as it needs to be constantly changing so that you're learning and challenging yourself.

Martial Arts and in particular the Chinese Internal Martial Arts are designed to fit into this way of practicing and in turn help to increase not only one's martial skills but also the physical, mental, and emotional health of the practitioner.


* ~ The "文始真經 Wenshi zhenjing" -- http://ctext.org/wenshi-zhenjing aka the "關尹子" "Guan Yin Zi", written in nine chapters -- http://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E9%97%9C ... 9%E5%AD%90

The Wenshi zhenjing does not appear until the Yuan dynasty, when it is mentioned in Chen Zhensun's Zhizhai shuluyjieti , dated to 1240. It was probably compiled by the Quanzhen patriarch Yin Zhiping (1169-1251), an alleged descendant of Guan Yin. Before that time, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, remnants of an older text are mentioned in various Song bibliographies, but they have not survived.



.
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Re: The nature of experience and the mind

Postby Mr_Wood on Fri May 24, 2013 6:09 pm

The Sheldrake theories are indeed very interesting and thought provoking. Think I will read his book. Always nice to read the views of those people who can think outside of the box.
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