Is it wrong to be self-centered?

truth
Ican, very appropriate and subtle observations. TRYING to meditate (to observe "without thinking") is always, I believe, counter-productive. You can only sit and watch the process you've just described. With time it will all "soften down" and you will "give up" trying and just observe. With practice it will come about by itself. YOU, the ego, cannot do it. This is what makes meditation (except for the mechanical methods of following the breath, counting the breath, concentrating on a koan, etc.)--the simple act of watching one's experience without comment, without getting in the way, so difficult. The reality is that it is ultimately very easy, once one stops trying. But that comes only with great persistence and patience.

ican, Ridley's GOD is certainly not intelligent, nor automatic in any deterministic sense. It is just a whimsical acronym for the various processes that affect the arrangement of letters in DNA.

JLN, in your opinion, do people who meditate become less self-centered (in relation to the rest of humanity), or do they tend to withdraw from the world and concentrate on their own personal experience of the unity?

How long (on average) does it take to achieve the non-dualistic state? In what way is this perception of reality any less illusionary than the ordinary way in which we perceive it?

truth
Relative, good questions. In MY opinion people who meditate long enough and successfully develop a greater capacity for empathy for others. They continue with their personalities (although some people insist on major personality changes), even their vanities and aesthetic and social values. Nevertheless, they also seem to be freer to see the world and their own inner lives as profoundly relativistic and processual. Things no longer seem so absolutely "real" and fixed in nature. Their minds become, in a sense, softer regarding the categories they make about experience and far less attached to their desires. They just have them and let them go. They feel freer to be whatever they are at each moment. Most important, perhaps, is that they no longer feel "surrounded" by a universe that is fundamentally separate from them; they ARE their experiences and not some sensitive nerve center to which experience happens. They feel (or realize that they are) one with all things. Ego in this sense is no longer real, only a sensation or orientation that assists them in orienting themselves to the world. It has utility but no actuality.
I think that SOME become more isolated and others remain or become more sociable. It's probably just a continuation of their personalities. I don't know, since I havn't done or read a survey.
I can't say that the so-called enlightened or liberated frame of mind is or isn't more or less illusory than that of the normal dualistic orientation. No one I know in this category thinks that their monistic or non-dualistic orientation is no better than their prior dualistic one. You will just have to meditate and then judge for yourself.
I do not think of myself as "enlightened." I have gained nothing from more than 3 decades of meditation. But I have lost some things which I realize now were burdens to my life. But it's hard to know if these "gains" are a function of meditation or just living a long time with physical health, happy marriages, a great job, financial security, and a growing appreciationfor the aesthetic and epicurean life.

Are you saying that it is impossible to know anything by categorizing it? I would think that that is the only way we CAN know anything.

truth
That's not at all what I said. Reconsider your interpretation.

That was in response to

"Ican, regarding the first question, check out the Reality thread. Regading the last two questions: No. By pre-cognitive I was not including a "turning away" from a thought. That is a kind of cognitive act. One can think and one can not think. They are both forms of cognition. In meditative practices one does not try not to think, because that is no different from thinking. Instead one develops a frame of mind wherein one observes "without" thinking. It would be very difficult to explain the difference between the pre-reflective "without thinking" and the reflective "not thinking." So if you do not "get it" intuitively, I'm sorry."

But you were ignoring it then.

truth
I guess I was coming to the conclusion that one has to be dualistic to live this life with others, but to ALSO have the non-dualistic perception of one's life is to be so much better off. One has to categorize one's experential content if one is to make analytical generalizations about classes of things, events and qualities. Abstract thinking is about classes, not concrete unique things, events and qualities, of course. But our lives consist of concrete moment by moment experiences. The pre-reflective or "without thinking" frame of mind is profoundly immediate and concrete, seeing things as they are in their continuous process of coming into existence and disappearing (or changing) almost immediately and constantly. Like music, it is about flow and change, only describable in terms of verbs. Analytical thinking (knowledge) is about abstract categories/classes of things, describable mainly in terms of nouns and adjectives. Thinking is ABOUT life, experience is OF life.

I see what you're saying, but the pre-reflective state that you're talking about isn't entirely objective either, no moreso than the one in which you think about things and categorize them. It just goes back to the earliest conception you had of meanings and categorization and reflects on that. But the memory is so old that it's almost instinctive. So if you got bit by a dog when you were a kid, you'll always associate dogs with fear or pain or whatever in the pre-reflective state because of that - you won't just, as you say, passivly experience dogs as part of a continuum. It's not possible for human beings to perceive things at all without categorizing them - even when you're just born and don't have any categories yet, the first thing you do is attempt to construct them - and you never stop trying to do that. You can break free of certain methods of categorization - for instance, when you say a word over and over again until it becomes a meaningless set of sounds - but inevitably you recategorize reality along different lines - for instenace, you group those meaningless sounds into labial, alveolar, velar, etc. That's just how people are. Ungrouping and regrouping everything every once in a while is how we expand our horizons and gradually get a better picture of your indivisable continuum of reality.

I thought that was the case. Nonetheless, I couldn't resist having some fun with the idea in the context of dualism versus non-dualism.

Genome Organizing Device = GOD

Here I go again!

How about, Auto-Piloted Genome Organizing Device Evolution = APEGOD:?:

Of course, such a dualistic device evolution needs a modicum of intelligent initialization with occasional enroute adjustment (e.g., chest thumping) in order to get somewhere in a timely manner before its "fuel" is exhausted.

rufio,

One concept some have of reality is that reality is not separate from consciousness. Rather reality is consciousness itself; it is a universal consciousness of which what we individually perceive to be our individual consciousness, is actually nothing more or less than universal consciousness from which we cannot succeed in separating our individual selves. Consequently, we delude ourselves when we perceive the existence of any other reality or other separateness from that of universal consciousness. These folks claim it is all there was, is, and ever will be.

People who share this idea see it as a way to help see our relationships with each other to actually be intrinsically cooperative rather than competitive.

For me, cooperation without competition, or competition without cooperation is unachievable. One or the other of those dualities appears unescapable to me. Rather than struggle trying to escape one or the other we would be a lot better off if we sought to practice more honorable ways to cooperate and compete, or compete and cooperate. They are not mutually exclusive. Rather one without the other leads to the chaos of random motion or mutual extermination.

truth
Some interesting points, Rufio, but let me point out that I did not intend for you to interpret the "pre-reflective state" as "objective". It is, as an experience, subjective (but subjectivity is an objective fact in nature). You say that it is not possible for people to perceive things without categorizing them. That is what people do almost all of the time. After a split second of pre-reflective experience we instantly INTERPRET it in terms of cultural predispositions. No doubt. But it IS possible to not do so beyond that split second of initial perception, especially in the meditative state. AND it is very possible to "transcend" one's normal tendency to categorize by watching (as a pre-reflective event) the categorization process as it occurs. One can even feel the intracranial physical sensations of thinking thoughts and applying cateogies. It is not easy; it take considerable practice. But it IS done by some.

I meant objective as opposed to cultural in that sentence, not objective as opposed to subjective. Sorry if it was a little unclear. As far as transcending categorization, I don't believe that any non-cultural information, that is, information perceived directly by the senses that goes uninterpreted, can make it to our brains - I'm sure it may have been experienced by someone somewhere, but once they recognize the experience for what it was, it becomes named and therefore categorized, as well as whatever made up the experience. In theory, it would seem like it might be possible, but in practice I don't believe it is.

Ican - there are plenty of people on here like that. They are positively aggravating.

truth
Rufio, I know what you mean when you say that something uncategorized cannot make it to one's brain (I think you mean consciousness). I agree that nothing can be cognitively meaningful without undergoing cultural interpretation, and that, as such, it may not even be noticed. But if you watch your experience closely, openly and carefully, you may realize that even after you've interpreted something, your meaningful experience retains a dimension of purely sensual qualities. It's like hearing music. You may realize the music's abstract theoretical properties (e.g., acoustical, harmonic, rythmic, and thematic) while AT THE SAME sensing qualities that are extra-cognitive. I refer to the purely concrete sensual qualities of the musical experience. The same holds for all experience, meaningful or not. If we were--to be really hypothetical--to go to a far-off galaxy where everything is extremely unfamiliar, the exotica there might strike us as powerfully and aesthetically present without being meaningful in the sense of fitting into any ready made cultural categories. Have you ever had that experience of looking at completely non-representational abstract painting (before you invent some meaningful interpretation of its forms)? This might strike the bell I'm trying to sound.

Well, obviously, our perception of color and shape isn't affected by cultural interpretation... that's not really a feeling though.

Re: truth


You asked this of rufio, but I'd like to offer my answer too.

I would like to reword the question.

Have I ever perceived a pattern out of that which I at first perceived only chaos. Yes:

-rug patterns becoming a population of people
-abstract paintings becoming a conglomeration of toys of my own invention
-clouds becoming a conglomeration of faces of my own invention
-stars becoming a conglomeration of constellations of my own invention

The period between first reception of the original image and first reception of the pattern of my own invention always was and is to the best of my recollection a thoughtful, albeit playful, process to see what I could invent out of chaos. Invariably my mind's eye was attempting to perceive familiar patterns within unfamiliar patterns. Thinking about that process now, I come to the conclusion that the whole thing was an entertaining experience in dualism: between the duality of chaos and order.

truth
Ican, very nice. Yes, it seems that in addition to calling our species Homo Habilis (because we make and use tools), we are also meaning makers. We seem to have an innate drive to create or ascribe meaning to that which has no inherent meaning (remember the existentialists' existence precedes essence) We do so with reference to our group's cultural inventory of meanings. Meaning is both a way of making sense (i.e., making familiar that which is threateningly unfamiliar) for ourselves psychologically and for constructing meanings to share, sociologically, with others (with whom we must share a life of meanings in order to facilitate survival-promoting cooperation). Note that when our meanings are excessively ideosyncratic we are often locked up as insane, as individuals who do not share reality with others and who cannot, therefore, cooperate with them.
What I have been trying to express to Rufio is that the pre-reflective experience of life, in its immediacy and concreteness, must not be lost through the process of meaning creation. That "raw" (as opposed to culturally "cooked") experience is the ground of our being. It is non-dualistic and constitutes our most primitive nature. When I smell the wet grass in the dewy morning; it is more fundamental to my life experience than are my IDEAS about the nature of grass, olfactory lobes, and the neurological process of smell.

But patterns made from chaos are culturally defined.... are you saying that the smell of wet grass is the "cooked" part, or the "raw" part? I am confused.

truth
The raw.

Re: truth


RAW & COOKED

Seems like another dualism to me.

Ok, you have led me to a new theory, at least new to me (perhaps this too is more order out of chaos).

Theory: Every dualism consists of exactly two non-dualisms.

Correlary: Non-dualisms exist only within dualisms.

Oh, Oh! Exist & Non-exist!

Conundrum: Can either existence or non-existence exist or non-exist without the other?