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I attended a zoom talk the other day featuring Shinzen Young. He has been involved with several studies, including at Yale, investigating meditation with neuroscience. This is particularly exciting because Shinzen understands the enlightenment process and all the stages and believes science and technology can be used to assist the process. In the talk, he was mentioning possible “boosters” to meditation, such as yoga. He actually mentioned microdosing psychedelics to boost meditation but didn’t go into detail. Could it be possible that the present science based on the materialistic paradigm could be adequate to come up with a reliable method for attaining enlightenment? https://www.shinzen.org/

This is why I don’t take anything serious that is popular in this shallow, money-driven culture. Peterson reflects back the prejudices of his followers thus making them feel validated. He is not an author who breaks new ground in understanding.

I believe this is a result of social media. The main stream media no longer controls the source of news, and hence the source of reality making. Anyone now can create news and put it on YouTube, adding to the noise and confusion. Worse yet, there are tons of scam artists and psychopaths who are more than willing to take advantage of the new technology. Also, the main stream media itself is corrupted by money and power and is no longer accurate. I still remember the live speech broadcast with Colin Powell explaining in front of the UN with charts and photographs the “evidence” showing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. How is this any different than the allegations of election fraud propagated without evidence?

I had a facilitator tell me that occasionally he gets a person who will have no reaction (that’s zero) to ayahuasca even after being given 3 or 4 cups. He stops after that. If you view aya as just a “drug”, it is hard to explain that. It is a medicine, a plant teacher, a spirit.

I have been told by a shaman that the plant medicines give you exactly what you need and what you deserve. It’s not a drug like aspirin where an effect happens automatically independent of your intentions. That is part of what the strict diet is about. To learn to sacrifice and make yourself worthy. This doesn’t make sense if you are in the “drug” paradigm.

Follow your intuition and not your mind. For me, it is Mexico.

I recommend reading Shinzen Young’s recent book to get a valuable insight into this subject. Shinzen’s life goal is to integrate meditation with Western science. He makes a distinction between “objective science” and “subjective science”, and he sees the Buddha as a subjective scientist. Shinzen also believes in the possibility of using technology as part of a scientific method for achieving enlightenment. https://www.amazon.com/Science-Enlightenment-How-Meditation-Works-ebook/dp/B01KUGQYJO/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=shinzen+young&qid=1605638117&sr=8-1

I was told by my shaman, that the real work begins after the ceremony ends. The ayahuasca is still working for 2 to 3 months after the ceremony. It opens up your emotions. During your journey, you may have been downloaded information that serves as your homework, i.e. things you need to do or changes that you need to make. Try to look for this and integrate the experience into your life.

He repeats the same familiar uninformed opinions, confuses psychedelics with alcohol (intoxication), creates straw man arguments, and seems totally ignorant of the scientific evidence that psychedelics are safe, non addicting, and have therapeutic uses. I don’t see any enlightened opinion here, but nice turban. Terence Mckenna is so much more informative and insightful in his talks and comes from a place of deep knowledge of the subject he talks about.

The problem is that we don’t have 100 years to develop because the orange stage is unsustainable, and the increase of power through technology is exponential, so spiritual progress also has to be exponential. The next Trump in the future may be a fly.

I agree with that. Finding the real deal anywhere is like looking for a needle in a haystack. It is too easy to mimic the words and behavior. But any true path has to lead to love. Where does the love come in - Shinzen Young.

The Dalai Lama frequently talks about love and compassion. “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” “Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” --- Dalai Lama True love is born from understanding. -- Buddha

I am not going to criticize them on who they vote for. That is their business. I just don’t think that they are enlightened teachers or even close. Finding the real deal is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

The state of the unconscious mind can determine one’s ability to meditate. Consider Bill who had an ideal childhood with understanding parents and little trauma. John had a traumatic childhood. Bill can meditate, but John can’t focus because his mind is permanently distracted. In the East, they address this issue with the concept of “karma”. So, the Buddha could attain enlightenment because he worked on himself through countless lifetimes, and thus his mind was ready for the final push. If you are a bad mediator, you have to work on your karma. Now, if John does intense psychotherapy to resolve his issues and now can meditate, does that invalidate his meditation? I think the answer here is clearly not. Now if John resolves his issues with psychedelic assisted therapy, does that invalidate his mediation? Why would it? This seems more likely an attitude generated by an orange culture where you construct the myth of the “individual” and pretend you do everything yourself and take pride in your illusory effort. It can help to shift out of this culture. Because if you are a fish swimming in muddy water, some of the mud sticks to you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghBxjliqIPY

Also keep in mind that most Americans have been propagandized by the corrupt "War on Drugs". That combined with the American myth of the “individual”. In Mexico, there is an acceptance of these medicines, knowledgeable practitioners connected with the indigenous culture, and a respect for alternate methods of healing. That’s why I only work with psychedelics in Mexico.

Meditation is difficult and not everyone can do it. In the East, only monks tend to meditate, and everyone else just does merit, in the hopes of becoming a monk in the next life. Also, before they would even be allowed to meditate they would need to practice morality for several years to calm the mind. It was westerners who believed and insisted they can instantly meditate. Osho noticed westerners had a hard time relaxing the mind due to growing up in a Christian culture, so he developed dynamic meditation. If your mind keeps spinning you can’t get anywhere. I have been meditating for over 20 years, but I never experienced the state of Samadhi I had with 5-meo-DMT. The voice had totally stopped and there was complete silence. One reason to take psychedelics is for purification – to go into the shadow world and purge trauma from the body. It’s the trauma that keeps the mind spinning. Ayahausca is useful for purging.

One thing that bothers me about Sadhguru is that he seems to be positioning himself as the “Answer Man”. He is willing to come up with an answer to virtually anything no matter how mundane or distant from his real expertise. When I took the Inner Engineering Course, you were given a certain number of tokens to look at his videos giving various answers, and if you ran out, you would have to pay for more answers. I thought a guru was someone who guides you towards liberation. Answers are just brain food that makes the mind more confused. In Zen, they give you a koan to trip up the answer seeking mind. Maybe he is appealing to the millions of lost people living in the rootless and soulless West desperately seeking answers. Has anyone in his organization obtained liberation?

The hard sciences have intentionally chosen their reality tunnel in order to avoid wasting time on false and unfruitful paths. Science is a group project that includes the judgments of wise men spanning generations. For example, over the course of centuries, scientists decided that teleology was not a valid scientific explanation. So you couldn’t explain a natural process as having goals. You had to use efficient causality. Another example, is with the advent of thermodynamics, perpetual motion machines were not considered valid explanations. The methodology was not only productive, but they succeeded in blowing up their own tunnel with quantum mechanics, making a new paradigm possible.

If FDR couldn’t pull it off during a depression, how is Joe going to do it? Term limits would be more doable and easier to justify. March 9, 1937: Fireside Chat 9: On "Court-Packing" https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-9-1937-fireside-chat-9-court-packing

For my undergraduate degree, I got a double major in Math and Physics. In hindsight, for the humanity requirements, I would study history, Latin, and Greek. The classical works written in Latin and Greek provide a solid background for living life. When it was still free, I took several dozen courses from Cousera. They were excellent and taught by leaders in their fields. The subject matter was presented clearly and easy to follow. Taking a course from a bad professor who can’t explain the subject matter is a total waste of time if you get lost. On the Internet, you can learn from the best instructors. I think college by Internet is the future

Science is like spiral dynamics, in that you have to go through the stages and you can’t skip a stage. Relativity theory couldn’t have been developed without Newton’s Laws. Each stage builds on top of the previous stage. Physics has reached the limit of the materialistic and reductionistic paradigm with quantum mechanics, wave/particle duality, non locality, and the uncertainty principle. Furthermore, particle physics keeps on generating new particles and they are reaching the limit of the size of particle accelerator that can be feasibly built. There appears to be no underlying theory to explain all the particles. These are the conditions for a new paradigm to emerge that takes into account the observer and interconnectedness of the universe.

A sick video of a fundamentalist devil violating innocence in order to spread the virus.

Hawkings is expressing the limitations of mathematics as a tool of physics. When he says it sprang from “nothing”, then the question becomes “What is nothing?”. The Buddhists see “emptiness” as the door to liberation. So nothing is beyond the mind and verbal description. But it is real. The menu is not the meal.

Another distinction that can be made is between objective science and subjective science. The West developed objective science by directing its attention to an outside world. The East developed a subjective science by directing its attention to the interior world. The Buddha was a subjective scientist. The Buddha was as precise as any objective scientist. Meditation can be seen as subjective science. I got this distinction from a Shinzen Dharma talk I attended many years ago. https://www.liamchai.com/soe/

One way to look at it is in terms of information. A map (i.e., model) is an abstraction. An abstraction intentionally leaves things out in order to highlight patterns. Thus, the territory would be 100% information and the model would be less than 100 %. Consider, for example a picture divided into pixels with 10 grey scales and a finite number of colors. The total picture would have a finite number of bits. A program detecting all the edges in the picture would be an abstraction and a model with less information than the territory. However, the raw picture itself does not have any edges. It is just a matrix of pixels with different levels of grey and color. (Keep in mind that you see edges only because your brain has a module that abstracts the edges from the territory). Edges only exist in the model. So the model is, in some sense, a different reality in itself (a territory) not contained in the original.