Tag: consciousness

New Age, histomat, meditation, evolution and consciousness

Google blurb on new age beliefs:

What are New Age beliefs?
Image result for new age movement
But many Christians also hold what are sometimes characterized as “New Age” beliefs – including belief in reincarnation, astrology, psychics and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects like mountains or trees. Many Americans who are religiously unaffiliated also have these beliefs.Oct 1, 2018

A deeper movement lies behind the nonsense level of the so-called New Age movement; World history shows clearly a recurring trend to ‘foment’ meditation in global cultures after being in prime focus in the Indic tradition, echoed in sufistic, and in mostly distorted for in the Christian stream. Astrology for example is entirely extraneous yet a persistent entanglement for the deeper current subject to trivialization. Hatha Yoga has been especially popular but some how divorced from the key legacy tradition of viz. Raja Yoga, an ancient practice already in classical time. Behind the curious hype (often used to dismiss all ‘new age’ configurations) lies an immense cultural shift in an important descant on globalization. Human consciousness is an incomplete formation and the evolutionary injection of mediation into human evolution (in the wake of the mysterious amplification of ‘consciousness’ in first homo sapiens) requires nurture and recovery from the constant distraction away from focal consciousness…

The Marxist left with historical materialism miscalculated all such factors and creates a strong crypto-Stalinist prejudice against all such frameworks, a tragic confusion that left Bolshevism a cultural cripple.

Does the eonic effect show consciousness in historical evolution? (what does the sentence mean?)

The issues of consciousness are complex and confusing, next to panpsychism which is a question mark.
But the data of the eonic effect is provocative on both points. The text of Decoding World History (and WHEE…) is extremely cautious and doesn’t jump to any conclusion, in the attempt to simply present the data of world history which is almost intractable due to the amount data required and books to read. But the data provokes a kind of crisis of understanding, and the search for the right categories of analysis. The pattern of transitions shows that nature directs the evolution of civilizations, the term ‘nature’ itself being a problem. Or so we cautiously conclude. The point here is that if new innovations in world history are non-random, what is ‘causing’ them, the term ’cause’ itself being a problem. The implication is, or seems to be, that something must at a higher level than its own inductions. But we can’t be sure. This essay (ultimately via the Discovery Institute?) is treading of dangerous ground: the issue of the Old Testament and its history being the most confusing of all: but the data shows it to be part of the eonic effect/sequence and not a case of ‘god’ in history. That idea dies hard, and if you study the eonic effect you can see how mysterious the whole question is, but that ‘god’ is clearly not the answer, as the ancient Israelites thought. But look at the ‘Axial Age’ data (in our model the period from 900 BCE to 600 BCE, in Greece/Rome, Israel/Persia, India, China, and you confront the action of something at the level of a planet able to act globally in a kind of multitasking effect. We have no concepts to deal with what we discover here. The ID group falls into trap here: we see design in history, but the data exposes the Old Testament mythology, a hard outcome for religious ID thinking.
I will stop and simply point to Decoding World History as an attempt to describe the nature of the evidence of world history, its directionality and long term action. Scientists and historians are not likely to even look at the data shown, which is unfortunate, but what to do? The academic and scientific community is confused on the issue of Darwinists, the situation is close to hopeless, for the time being….

The differences between panpsychism and naturalism are subtle but critical. As panpsychism’s popularity grows, insight will be better than rage and ridicule.

Source: A Darwinian Biologist Resists Learning To Live With Panpsychism | Mind Matters

marxmail@groups.io | the ‘science’of meditation

Source: marxmail@groups.io | the ‘science’of meditation

Meditation/Mindfulness is a can of worms IF you go chasing the science. ‘Tis very hard to tie down in way of effects as ‘feelings’ aren’t statistics.

As a lifestyle I tend to be a tad hostile to because of the oft association with ethereal metaphysics.Gautama Buddha — I’m looking at you, kid.
But I’ve always appreciated the Zen-ness of conscious movement.
Static or sedentary meditation is so unlike me and my fidgets.
Since I do come from an age when Biofeedback was the fashionable rage — at least in my ‘hood — I defer to the physiology of conscious slowness, breath and heart rate.
While working in mental health, I’m no stranger to relaxation therapies, which are essentially guided meditations.
But over time I became interested in drone sounds and especially Sufi rhythms — plying at me from Bandung to Timbuktu. This drew me to an interest in frame drums — especially the Daf.
I love the Daf because it is not essentially religious despite its pitter-pattering.
Then I moved onto soundscapes. And that, my friends, was a revelation which is now an addiction. Anything with water — rain, stream or sea — turns me ‘off’ in the nicest way. ‘Tis a great way to dose off…accompanied by meteorology or aquatics.
Read more….>

The question of meditation makes a surprising appearance at Marxmail. The hostility of the (Marxist) left to such subjects is both classic and yet a liability. The moment of Marx was to make a strong move toward secular humanism, science, atheism, with the result that a kind of scientism appeared in the vacuum created by the absence of religion. That stance was sensible in context but has made historical materialism the vaunted replacement for religion, a stance that can only backfire.

Let us note that the ‘secular’ is far broader than that and if one looks at the modern transition one sees a far vaster field of innovations. The era of Marx cannot be reduced to the limited canon of historical materialism.

We might comment further on this but since I was unsubbed from marxmail (or at least unable to post under moderation) the list hardly deserves any contribution from me.
But I might comment further here in a series of posts. The issue of meditation points to the fact that Marxism is culturally impoverished and can’t deal with the global sphere of culture. The cannon can’t even handle the question of consciousness let alone meditation. We have tried in the Last Revolution to place the eonic model in place as a way to a more inclusive global history of all categories…

But the wariness of Marx is not so far off if much of the so-called New Age movement is entangled in reactionary thinking. The key here is to see that such traditions are far older than the rehash of their current adherents and that a real left can invoke their sources, no doubt very ancient, in the Neolithic.

What’s the Origin of Consciousness? Global Effort Puts Two Top Theories to the Test

Despite the great interest of this initiative, it is also useful to offer skepticism about this project. Consciousness is not a hard science problem. It stands beyond the kind of problem that is explored in physics to biochemistry. Is it really objectively analyzable?
We cannot know the extent of consciousness. Consider the eonic effect: is evolutionary transformation connected with consciousness? These research projects are controlled by the larger propaganda system of Darwinism, no? Can anyone in these teams dissent from Darwin?  If the flaws of Darwinism are not clear or open to discussion how on earth could anyone expect to resolve the issue of consciousness. The evolution of consciousness has almost no data. How could evolution as such produce consciousness?
Consciousness has been more successfully explored via meditation. The schematic of four brands: sleep, consciousness, self-consciousness, and state 4 (enlightenment) can’t be studied from the state of consciousness, yet perhaps from a higher state of consciousness. State 4 is said to be connected with the overall life domain, the exit from space-time existence, liberation.
Scientific control of consciousness would probably backfire and produced malevolent technologies???
The issue may be insoluble for minds in low-level consciousness.
….

Six different teams from across the globe are uniting in a challenge to test our fundamental theories of consciousness.

Source: What’s the Origin of Consciousness? Global Effort Puts Two Top Theories to the Test

  The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do 

The issue of artificial intelligence is confusing, with a lot of hype and this book exposes much of the confusion.
The issue of ‘consciousness’ is totally misunderstood and the Turing test is mostly a joke. I (almost) made a mistake in Decoding World history of allowing AI thinking to influence my interpretation the eonic effect. The ideas of AI are of great interest and I indulged in a speculation that ‘evolution’ might hide some processes of the AI type, e.g. is evolution mechanical yet able to mimic intelligence or learning as it goes along.
That thinking never really enters the account, but I don’t think they explain anything at this point. Still,the recent explosion of AI deserves to be considered in relation to evolution. The time is perhaps not yet ripe.
The eonic effect is hard to observe, you must read a lot of books in multiple areas ancient to modern. Then you have to try and consider how to visualize processes operating over thousands of year. In fact you can’t visualize that except in part, from reading those books.
So the question of evolution is almost beyond our intelligence at this point. But we can ‘see’ evolution more or less as mental datasets whose action is reasonably clear. You can read ten books on Archaic Greece (recommended) and assess that intelligibly. That period is crucial in the eonic model and there is a huge amount of material there.
The key issue in evolution of the kind we explore is that of consciousness. Is nature in any sense conscious? The answer is framed by a quote from Bennett that ‘consciousness’ like electromagnetism probably has many forms that at first don’t seem related. You get it wrong either way here. Nature has to be conscious, no, nature as ‘conscious’ is mystical pseudo-science.
The answer is there is a disguise we can’t yet understand.
Darwinists want to claim random natural selection can create the whole of life, a species of stupidity inflicted on the entire secular public in the name of enforcing atheism and debunking the design argument. Scientists have let the religious right confuse them: the evidence for design has nothing to do with ‘god’ or theology. It is a natural process still beyond the powers of science. Everything was like that once, before being understood. The religious obsession of Dawkins et al is a distraction. We must find a higher level of science than what we have. The only controversy is that this ‘science’ will be far beyond causal physics.

The eonic effect is about civilizations but can most probably give us a hint about early evolution by showing the scale of species emergence, its complexity and its path via a set of transitions in a discrete/continuous sequences.

So what is evolution? The eonic effect suggests a shaping process of form factors that apply an abstraction to a species field (macro aspect) which then realizes that potential as a particular body form. There is no way around the necessity that ‘evolution’ be a creative force in nature…

Look at the way, visible now as history, that a series of transitions shape historical directionality by an infusion of creative innovations.
To get from to visualizing a species evolving over millions of years is data set so colossal, so humoungously colossal that to speak of a theory of evolution at this point is stuck at the level of thumbsucking, generally frowned on for those over fiver years old.
Edition 1 of Decoding is going to have to be rewritten, edition 2.

Bennett on evolution /2010/02/08/bennett-on-evolution/ – The Gurdjieff Con

Bennett was a modernist/liberal, I suspect, unlike the milieu in which he appeared. He was, along with Ouspensky, a draftee into the Ouspensky (Gurdjieff) circle and produced his remarkable The Dramatic Universe.
That milieu was not modernist/liberal but did project a form of materialism as a challenge to scientism, using the materialism of ancient Samkhya, remarkably modernized by Bennett.
The interest here is the way he considers three related domains: the hyponomic, autonomic, and hypernomic realms. This division is highly useful because it points to a universal materialism on three levels, that of physics, chemistry, etc, that of life, and a hypernomic ‘spiritual’ realm, which isn’t spiritual but the higher materialism of a domain that man can barely detect. That’s the point, along the lines of ancient materialist Samkhya: the spiritual realms is really a highly material or at least ‘natural’ realm. Evolution then becomes the ‘reconciling’ or third factor in a dialectic of hypo and hypernomic realms. a magnificent, if speculative, resolution of the hopeless confusions of evolutionary theories. We can’t reduce evolution to the hyponomic realm. And the extension is not a creationist/religious alternative. The hypernomic is almost invisible to man who flounders hopelessly in ‘spiritual’ confusions. But man does connect with the hypernomic, a la Bennett, in the factor of consciousness (which really means the ‘self-consciousness’ in some kind of meditative sense). That’s a bold consideration: man is just at the boundary of the hypernomic, and his mechanical consciousness or animal sensitivity, can jump to a higher form, as he interacts with the hypernomic.
This kind of thinking needs more work, but as an intelligible ‘science fiction’ is at least not as crackpot as Darwinian fundamentalist scientism.

I thought I would put up some more material on Bennett’s (outlandish) perspective on evolution and history. (The material on the eonic effect is much better) I am not a proponent of these views, bu…

Source: Bennett on evolution /2010/02/08/bennett-on-evolution/ – The Gurdjieff Con