A brief thread where I try to say something brief about why I think meditation is relevant to current disputes in the philosophical literature on consciousness. Lots more to think about here, but I think it summarizes my views—which will certainly change and develop over time...https://twitter.com/NeuroYogacara/status/1223939602974638080 …
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara
I’m glad you added the rider at the end, given the claim in the thread that one can’t be sure what one mental state is in.
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Replying to @danielwaweru
As long as we are languaging and conceptualizing, all we can ever do is approximate and abstractly characterize. And which approximation and abstract characterization feels right will always be a contextual matter
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @danielwaweru
1` I've mentioned elsewhere "I" have experienced the jhāna sequence unfolding (vividly) during dreamless sleep—"I" in quotes because the waking processes of languaging & conceptualizing were not present. Loosely: the "body" knew how to do that sequence of meditative absorptions.
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2` So, among other things, that rather starkly highlights the point of a verbal characterization of such experience being a contextual matter: The entire context-apparatus of a waking cognitive/language process has to boot up and be "entered" in order to speak of it...
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3` ...and, needless to say, that waking system wasn't there during the experience itself. To borrow from the deconstructionists, such linguistic characterization then is going to be "always already too late." Or, to borrow lyrically from the Christian contemplative theologian...
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4` "the mighty David became intoxicated & went out of himself: he saw while in ecstasy, that divine beauty which no mortal can behold, & cried out in those famous words: 'Every man is a liar' [Ps.116:11], thus giving us some hint of that ineffable treasure."
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Replying to @bodhidave3 @danielwaweru
I have never had such experiences. So I have to trust people who report them, and keep searching for them myself. But I am pretty confident that such experiences reveal important aspects of awareness, which I have only dimly glimpsed!
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @danielwaweru
1~ You likely know, the jhāna absorptions are at an end position, so to speak, of Old School Buddhist calming & concentration techniques, and considered restorative & not immediately leading to release (they're still generated states). But to me they very much provoke insight...
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2/2~ ... in highlighting how *every* phenomenal experience is a generated, constructed state. Everything, in that sense, is a "nimitta," a "sign." Plus, they're just humbling, in showing in a rather dramatic way what the mind is capable of.
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"[W]ith the abandoning of pleasure and pain…a bhikkhu enters upon and abides in the fourth jhāna…He considers this and understands it thus: 'This fourth jhāna is conditioned and volitionally produced. But whatever is conditioned and volitionally produced is impermanent…'"
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