351–360 of 396 posts
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Jhanas are achieved a particular way and should be readily accessible once your concentration is strong enough (yours likely is). You may have not experienced them if you haven't accidentally pulled the right levers, so to speak. There are a few guides online of what to do, I suspect you'd succeed quickly
Links?
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> You have to do your own research. Generally a bad idea. Usually leads to quackery, pseudoscience beliefs etc. Individuals are much worse than institutions on matters of research.
Maybe if you have a dozen peers around to compare notes. But the subject is esoteric. Peers are in short supply.
Yes, which is why individuals cannot do research alone. We need a well organized effort with proper subject recruitment so that there is a sufficient pool to investigate and all the research precautions are taken.
Modern research does not just happen casually and individually. It is a sophisticated activity with a lot of planning and organization.
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> It's quite simply an Abrahamic religion based around following the teachings of Jesus Christ. First off, that's not true. Second, your argument is tautological: Daoism is a path based around following the tenets of the Dao; Confucianism is a path based around following the teachings of Confucius; Buddhism is a path based around following the teachings of Buddha. Even if it were true, it wouldn't mean anything. > Th…
> > There are plenty of different doctrines and interpretations but you can tell what is and isn't a Christian church. > Are Mormons Christian? Lots of Christians don't think so. > Are Catholics Christian? Lots of Christians don't think so (despite the Roman > Catholic Church being the largest Christian church). > You're assuming agreement that does not exist. These are all Christian denominations [0], i.e. distinct…
Mind that I don't think Jesus talking to Native Americans, hying to Kolob, and sacral underwear are any more farfetched than anything in the King James, but I wouldn't call it the same thing except in the very loosest sense.
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I know virtually nothing about Daoism, but I know a lot about Christian theology and there is not agreement on what Christian belief _is_. It gets even funnier when we compare Christian theology and its interpretations of the Old Testament to Jewish theology and its interpretations of the Hebrew Bible (which Christians made their Old Testament). So, who decides what Daoist belief _is_? And isn't?
>there is not agreement on what Christian belief _is_ this isn't true at all. It's quite simply an Abrahamic religion based around following the teachings of Jesus Christ. There are plenty of different doctrines and interpretations but you can tell what is and isn't a Christian church. Same thing with Daoism. Daoism is both a religion and a philosophy with very specific teachings and traditions. You can argue about h…
> this isn't true at all.
Yes, it is.
> It's quite simply an Abrahamic religion based around following the teachings of Jesus Christ.
That's not even the most common of the competing ideas, in part because it is useless because it just pushes the lack of consensus out one level because there is no consensus on what, if anything, are “the teachings of Jesus Christ”.
There is a broad consensus among the theologians of communities making up the vast majority of self-described Christians on what thr boundaries of Christianity are, but it excludes a fair number of other self-descibed Christians, and even common members of those communities often have narrower definitions.
> but you can tell what is and isn't a Christian church.
Lots of people “can tell”, but they won’t agree. Where its important to a discussion, people who are careful will define the term as it applies to the specific discussion. There is no one true right answer separate from specific context of usage. (This is true of language generally, but its especially true of trying to do binary in/out boundaries of communities or other spaces with near-continuous variation.)
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Ah, you are referring to the SRI experiments, though I'm not sure who "they" are. You should, however, be aware that the Proceedings of the IEEE (Volume: 64, Issue: 10, October 1976) contain a paper presenting the results of a remote-viewing experiment with n=36 and p=0.0000006 [1]. Many people who purport to "love science" set aside how much of one's understanding of the universe is axiomatic. Now, I've never direct…
> As a small example, neither one of us could make a stealth bomber capable of dropping nuclear ordinance anywhere in the world nor perform the required R&D to properly design one. I never said they weren't good at tech and engineering. Anyway, the army and CIA make none of those. They just contract it out to Northrop or such, no? I haven't accused defense contractors of paranormal pseudoscience.
As of 2017, the military actively conducted research in the domain of Anomalous Mental Cognition [1]. The modern terminology is different and more technical, but the goal remains the same: to identify and understand precognitive and extrasensory abilities.
Also, SRI International was a defense contractor, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. A defense contractor may well be charged by the military to make a device for Anomalous Mental Cognition.
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> > There are plenty of different doctrines and interpretations but you can tell what is and isn't a Christian church. > Are Mormons Christian? Lots of Christians don't think so. > Are Catholics Christian? Lots of Christians don't think so (despite the Roman > Catholic Church being the largest Christian church). > You're assuming agreement that does not exist. These are all Christian denominations [0], i.e. distinct…
It seems weird to call Mormonism a Christian denomination because of the whole extra book where Jesus visits North America. That's a massive deviation. It's the same as saying Catholicism or Rastafarianism are denominations of Judaism. You're leaving out a lot! Mind that I don't think Jesus talking to Native Americans, hying to Kolob, and sacral underwear are any more farfetched than anything in the King James, but I…
If a group self-identifies as Christian, they're probably Christian. At the very least, they're much more Christian than all the people that don't identify as Christian.
If a religious group is based on following the teachings of Jesus Christ, and claims to be Christian, I don't see how you could ever claim they're not without going full No-True-Scottsman.
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The world isn't so bad. You might just need a perspective shift. A huge number of regular human activities and interactions don't generate profit, and yet aren't considered worthless. Go play an intramural sport, or take a walk with a friend, or read a book to a niece or nephew, or spark up a chat at a coffee shop, or hell, comment on Hacker News. The vast number of capitalist activities and goings on aren't so bad e…
To elaborate further my comment also stems from articles referring to things like this being a $50 billion dollar industry. A lot of services or goods are described as such like we are all just dollar signs. I also play airsoft, walk twice a week with a friend and spend time with my children. Those are all great things and I like your optimism... However I disagree that our capitalist society is a good thing, the ric…
If we're focus our perspectives on the gap between rich and poor, there's reason to be upset. But why should that gap matter for any of us in our own personal lives? Jeff Bezos owning a yacht and a mansion doesn't make me any less happy about my car and my apartment.
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The human brain is far less rational than we tend to believe. Recent research indicates that we hallucinate our world: we guess what we are likely to see, based on prior experience. If wrong, our brain adjusts and reevaluates the sensory data. In some cases, we even ignore unusual experiences that do not fit into our internal model. Senior meditators spend vast amounts of time examining their personal reality, and le…
> The human brain is far less rational than we tend to believe. Recent research indicates that we hallucinate our world All the more reason, to not take reason for granted. > Senior meditators spend vast amounts of time examining their personal reality They do, and my concern is they contribute no new insights, especially given the vast investments of time. > Out of body experiences can be had by any person who spend…
Do you dream at night? That is a hallucination. People can learn to be aware during dream states, this is called lucid dreaming. There is nothing delusional or dangerous about that, although the experience can be terrifying for people unfamiliar with the experience.
Out of body experiences are simply a special form of lucid dream, in which your imaginal / energy body seems to be located away from your physical body. There can be a sense of the imaginary body moving. This is just dreaming involving the proprioception sense.
The term "energy" can spook skeptics like yourself. The best explanations I have read is that it is just a mentally constructed sense of the body. Your brain right now has constructed an imaginary model of your body; this can also happen in dream states.
Your body is real, your mental map of the body is not. It is yet another form of hallucination which we all experience on a daily basis. Meditators will experience various forms of "energy" as their practice deepens, and this is also totally normal and not usually harmful.
Many of the explanations and mystical claims about energy and out of body experiences are questionable of course.
The mind is way more freaky and amazing than you realize, and labeling unusual states of consciousness as "delusional" is very limiting. It's your life...
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According to Google Scholar, the paper has been cited 19 times [1], which isn't groundbreaking but is an order of magnitude larger. Also, I imagine the fringe nature of scientific research into remote viewing keeps researcher numbers and therefore citation counts low. Perhaps a better paper is "The Persistent Phenomena of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective" by Robert G. Jahn, who, at the time of publicatio…
>Yes, brains are RF transceivers. This is why transcranial magnetic stimulation is effective. First, TMS operates at frequencies of 1-10 Hz, so that's well below RF. Second, an RF transceiver is a device capable of sending and receiving a signal over RF, not just anything that emits RF or that is physically affected by RF. Otherwise a glass of water is an RF receiver, because when I put it in the microwave it heats u…
So? ELF communication systems have operated in that frequency range for decades [1]. Also, by "RF", I'm not referring specifically to ITU radio bands. I'm saying that the brain in general responds to radio waves in general, which is inclusive of the whole portion of the electromagnetic spectrum below 300 GHz. Perhaps a better characterization of the brain is "electromagnetic radiation (EMR) transceiver."
> Second, an RF transceiver is a device capable of sending and receiving a signal over RF, not just anything that emits RF or that is physically affected by RF. Otherwise a glass of water is an RF receiver, because when I put it in the microwave it heats up.
The very fact that functional brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been created demonstrates the brain is indeed a transceiver. According to a DARPA news release concerning a BCI: "By enabling two-way communication between brain and machine—outgoing signals for movement and inbound signals for sensation—the technology could ultimately support new ways for people to engage with each other and with the world" [2]. These signals are electromagnetic in nature. Given that non-invasive TMS EMR is received by the brain in specific and targeted ways [4], and given that non-invasive skull caps receive electromagnetic transmissions from the brain (though I recognize you may object to such a characterization) [3], brains are certainly able to receive and send "radio waves."
A glass of water by itself is obviously not an RF receiver.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency
[2] https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-10-13
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He practiced Advaita vedanta. When exploring the non-duality of self vs world, there are fundamentally 2 approaches. Advaita Vedanta denies the existence of the world, only the (true) self is real. Buddhism denies the existence of the self.
I thought Advaita denies only the duality between the soul and the world soul, while denial of the world is more of solipcism. Buddhism can deny self, but Buddha can also say, his self alone exists. In any case, these are just beliefs. We know the world exists and there are no souls around. So much for "enlightenment".
Enlightenment is profound, and unrelated to belief, or non-belief about the existence of the world. Mainstream Buddhism does not deny the existence of the world or individual persons, it states that our conception of the "self" is a mental construct.
From a subjective perspective, everything we experience is mind-constructed, and in that context, there is no difference between self and world; everything we experience is mind. This is the essence of buddhist non-duality.
I would further add that we do not know anything about the existence of the world, only that we perceive the world indirectly based on sensory input, and most of us conclude that the world actually exists. There is a movement in science that calls this fundamental belief into question, you can checkout writings and interviews with Donald Hoffman.