Very different levels. Do you play with your mind by using all available stimuli or do you submit to the injection of beliefs without possibility of evidential support?
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The teaching of practices is of course a very different thing than the teaching of ontological, moral or ethical precepts.
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My claim is that there are practices that can give you access to observations that cannot be accessed by looking through a scanning electron microscope, carrying out a statistical analysis, or deriving a conclusion from a set of axioms.
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Absolutely, and each observation has to be explained. The frame of the explanation itself cannot be generated by divine revelation.
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Explanations are constrained by language. Some things can't be understood no matter how well it's explained (e.g. what a headache feels like). The issue with mystics is they try to explain gnostic knowledge in the same terms physicists explain electrons. This causes confusion.
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Ex: Claims made in Vipassana are inherently experiential. Thus they can only be understood by experience. Nothing divine about it. In vipassana, you learn the nature of experience. In science, you learn how physical systems behave/function. They are completely separate projects.
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I tend to disagree. Science is simply the systematic, criticizable pursuit of knowledge. The nature of experience is a kind of knowledge, and separation is not the right way. Vipassana may have a scientific and a practical and a cultural aspect.
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That's actually a fair point, and I happen to think that vipassana is a scientific practice, insofar as what you're doing is testing empirical hypotheses about the nature of mind. The methods of experimental methodology are just different from those of "Western" science.
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Yes, and I don’t think there is Western and Eastern science, only bad and good science. The deference to authority (scholasticism) is usually a sign of bad science, as are emphasis on consensus and preservation of tradition.
End of conversation
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