Lucid Dreaming and Children Living in the Now

Lucid Dreaming

   

Living in the "Now" and Children

     


[edit!!] I'm not sure why my post turned into boxes and deleted all the words... I'll re-write it this evening...

grrrrr

I had a blog all typed out... and then I went to submit it and it didn't go through.. and it didn't save either!
So this one will be short because I don't feel like typing it all over again.
Basically I just talked about how I find it interesting that people's minds can be programed to experience a "mystical experience" or some sort of lucid sleep.
I also talked about the "God Machine" mentioned in the reading. Here's a video that I found that sort of explains what happens >
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YPOTaUyvA0

Acatalepsia and Ataraxia

Acatalepsia and Ataraxia

Pyrrho

(thoughts from Chapter 6: The Sheep Who Became A Goat, Rational Mysticism)

This chapter uses "randomness" as a proof. It also uses other proofs, just as unprovable as "randomness" but I'll just concentrate on "randomness". It is good to be skeptical, but that skepticism must be applied to all things, and not only to one in favor of another. One must also be skeptical of science.

After all, as I have mentioned before, pi is an abomination of the mind that does not exist. But there are many more things in science that do not exist. In fact, the entire science of geometry does not exist. We have found that there are no such things in nature as a line or a plane. Everything is fractal, and therefore neither a line nor a plane -- but something inbetween. Without lines and planes there are no geometric shapes, only fractal shapes. No Geometry . . . how random is that!?

Don't believe me, read for yourself: Fractal Dimension

Enough of that. Let's talk about randomness.

"When one is dealt a bridge hand of thirteen cards, the probability of being dealt that particular hand is less than one in 600 billion. Still, it would be absurd for someone to be dealt a hand, examine it carefully, calculate that the probability of getting it is less than one in 600 billion, and then conclude that he must not have been dealt that very hand because it is so very improbable." -- John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences

Or, as I say:

"1% is 100% when it happens."

Randomness. What is it? Is it compartmentable? Can it be segregated? Is it distinct, one random bit from another random bit? How infinitesimal is randomness? How huge is randomness? How ordinary is randomness? How extra-ordinary is randomness? Is there no connection anywhere, at any level, between one random bit and another random bit? Is every new second of time a bit of randomness never before seen in exactly that manifestation? How does one calculate randomness? If a thing has a 50% chance of happening -- how is that calculated? Forget coins, what about real life?

A baseball batter with a career of 20 years comes to the plate. Over those 20 years he has gotten a hit 30% of the time (he has a career batting average of .300). Does he have a 30% chance to get a hit? Does he have a 50% chance to get a hit? Does he have some other chance to get a hit? Or is it random -- without any reference at all to anything that has come before or will come after? No connections? None? A totally random chance to get a hit every at bat? Even the tiniest, teeniest bit of a connection utterly dissipates randomness.

Any player of baseball will tell you that each at bat in the player's career is connected in the mind of the batter to the moment at hand, and has an influence over the outcome of the present moment. Further still, each and every previous moment of the pitcher's career is connected in the pitcher's mind to the present moment. And the runner at first base, as well as the first baseman and all the fielders, and the umpires, and the coaches, and the trainers and general managers . . . and on and on. There is a complex web of intricate and ethereal connections that is so interwoven the pattern is hard to see -- and we call that randomness. The present moment is not, nor is it ever, distinct and wholly separate from every other moment. There is no such thing as a random moment, nor is there anything that exists that is random.

Go ahead, name me a random creature. A creature that exists randomly, a creature without any predecessors. Too difficult? OK, how about a random word. Tell me a random word, any word, a word not connected to any other words through thought or utterance or ink, a word that is a thought in and of itself and has random definitions each time it randomly appears in random conversations with random people on a random world in a random universe.

Randominity demands randomness at every level or it is not random. Can there be such a thing as a random anything? Or is randomness just another pipe dream like circles, triangles and squares?

Absurd? Yes. OK, how about flipping a coin? Can a coin flip be random? Or is it influenced by the muscles of the hand that flips it and the molecules of air that surround it? Make a machine to flip the coin, and the machine will wear out a little with every flip thus creating a building influence from the first flip to the last flip -- none being random.

Computers? Random number generating programs? Don't wear out, simply electrons . . . Funny thing, that. Computers cannot generate random numbers. There is always a pattern. A repeatable pattern. Programs that generate random numbers all fudge it, trying for enough of a complicated pattern that it appears random -- but it never is. Computers, those things that think in either-or, on or off, zero or one . . . those things that are utterly without deception, they say randomness is simply impossible.

If a moment cannot be random, what then can we say about randomness? How can randomness exist when there is no environment for it to survive within?

I found the skepticism of this chapter misplaced, vindictive, childish, and not at all random. Skeptics assert nothing, announcing only opinion. The protagonists in this chapter are not skeptics, they are zealots of cause.

Viruses are a pain

In The Meme Machine, she called religions "memeplexes", intellectual viruses that have survived not because they are true but because they excel at replication and infection. To put it another way, religions are just extremely successful chain letters.

I love this statement. Religion as a virus I think is a perfect analogy. Religion has its ups and downs, I being an agnostic tend to see the down sides to most religions. I could always find faults in religions theories and teachings, I usually got scolded for pointing them out too (hence why I'm an agnostic, I can't find a religion that I can agree with enough to live by). So I personally have taken a little bit of every religion that I have come across and sort of made my own belief system. For some people this isn't an option. Religion has been so ingrained in their minds that it is impossible for them to see outside or the bigger picture. A virus affects people on different levels, affects them more than others. So does Religion. Some people are blinded by religion but if it makes them happy then let me be blind. Natural selection will take over eventually and kick our asses, its been long over-do. Religion does have its up, just like a virus. Once you have gotten rid of a specific virus, you build up an immunity to some parts and don't have much trouble from it again. You become stronger because of it, Religion is the same in some aspects. It can blind some people but it can also make them stronger in the right doses.

SheepGoat

To start, I enjoyed the first sentence of "The Sheep Who Became A Goat". It was a fun way to begin a chapter.
In relation to what Blackmore and the author discussed on page 111, in my Intro to Challenge Course class there are roughly 14 students. Out of the 14 of us I share the same month and day birth date with two others. Not that I'm saying that's more than coincidence, but it beats the norm. Maybe I'm a sheep.

What drew my attention and pulled a reaction out of me was the talk of "no self" on page 114. Am I to understand that when the author writes: "This view echoes the suggestion of some cognitive scientists that there is no unified self at the core of each individual;...he's saying that no self means no soul? On second thought I'm beginning to understand that the idea of no self is much larger than I've been imagining. According to this concept there is not only no body and mind but also no soul...nothing at all but everything combined. This is confusing and leaves me with questions like "Then where do concepts like "the soul" and "morality" go to?"

Then farther down the page Blackmore theorizes that life is just a bunch of ideas and beliefs passed from people to people. Clearly ideas and beliefs are what life seems to revolve around for the most part, but even if you strip all cognitive abilities away from humans you still find instincts..no?

About being mindful in the moment, is there a difference from being mindful and obeying impulses? When Blackmore says that she yelled at her kids because they yelled at her all I can imagine is a lack of inhibition and a completely natural reaction to one's environment. Does that make sense? If this obeying of impulses is "true and right" then murdering a neighbor would be completely "justifiable" wouldn't it? (To be completely extreme.) Blackmore walks down that path as well on page 119 when she says that rather than becoming selfish she is more at peace and feeling selfless through the "no self" teaching. "On the surface, she said, this doctrine might seem to be 'a recipe for immorality and disaster,' but the outcome is just the opposite. When you stop living for your self, 'guilt, shame, embarrassment, self-doubt, and fear of failure fade away' and you become, contrary to expectation, a better neighbor.'" But what if-in accepting that you are not unique because you do not exist-you then in turn decided to embrace the illusion full force and completely oppositely chose to live entirely for the illusion of reality that is you? Why not?
I need to think about this a little more, but it doesn't sit right with me. Maybe I'm a goat.

Also, if you read the little asterisk section at the bottom of page 115 you may have noticed that the Dali Lama didn't give the man a very helpful answer (in my eyes) to his question. I get the feeling that people tend to take whatever comes out of the Dali Lama's mouth to be wonderful because he's "enlightened", when really it seems like bull to me. If by being enlightened the D.L. knows that there is and isn't an afterlife at the same time then he could have just said that. Maybe it's just annoying to me. Maybe I'm a Sheepgoat.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Since I was ill, I didn't receive this reading, so it took me a little while to get my hands on it. As I read it, though, my head kept getting filled with songs that related somehow to the reading. (I.E. Pocahontas: "We are all connected to each other in a circle, in a hoop that never ends.")

The song that stuck with me throughout the whole reading, though, was Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, a folk song written by Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson.



The song is a cycle that starts with flowers and ends with flowers. The flowers are picked by young girls. The young girls marry young men. The young men turn into soldiers. The soldiers go to graveyards, and the graveyards turn into flowers once again. It's a circle that seems to have no birth or death because everything else is formed from what already existed. It really reminded me of the reading.

Also, a few things that stuck out to me:

1) You are a continuation of yourself even if you aren't the same person you were yesterday.

2) Time is what changes things, and you can see the changes even before time changes them. Everything is there just waiting for their time.

3) You are what you are looking for.

I like the symbolism

What struck me most about this reading was the clear and helpfull symbolism used. I thought that the ideas of the match and the quater were usefull to my understanding of the reading. I saw a relationship between the match and the Zen circle becasue the match has the ptoential for fire and that fire can comsume the whole match. I not sure if I am streching it here but that is what I came to mind as I read. Also the quarter idea seemed alot to me like a ying yang, the two sides oppposing each other but both essential for the quarter to be a quarter.