Breadcrumbs · 4 March 2008
I’m not saying anything.
Just dropping breadcrumbs. Which will soon decay but helped feed me because a few years ago I ate them at the right time.
Evolution of consciousness, glibly, could look something like this...
Humans love to go in to altered states of consciousness, but we interpret those experiences in dramatically different ways depending on the lifeworld we inhabit.
The blue meme is the middling stage of personal development in which one interprets an altered state of consciousness (be it waking/gross, dreaming/subtle, sleeping/causal or nondual) as confirming the singularity of her own path.
Most people here would dial in around green or turquoise on the spiral hierarchy, so would tend to reify altered states in ways that aren't so fundamentalist as the blue meme.
From Wilber, Pragmatic History of Consciousness: “[S]omebody at, say, the blue stage of development can have an altered state or peak experience of a subtle state—say… of interior Luminosity—but the person will tend to interpret that experience through the mental apparatus that has actually developed in his or her own case. In this example, the person will interpret the spiritual experience in terms of the blue meme, in which case we would see something like the fundamentalist's 'reborn' experience: this person feels, with utter certainty, that Jesus has come to him personally, and that nobody can be saved unless they accept Christ as their personal savior."
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: evolution
, morality
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that was pretty freaking cool. i thought at one point well of course civil rights and women’s suffrage, and then there were the pictures. i wonder if this is relevant at all: is the highest state of evolved consciousness enlightenment? is there a highest state of physical evolution? if the highest state of evolved consciousness is enlightenment then it would seem like as a people we are closer to that than the highest state of physical evolution. or am i being hopeful?
Posted by: cranky housefrau · Mar 5, 03:47 AM · #
(difficult to restrain suspicion of what looks like a teleological evolution of consciousness; arguably, “physical/physiological” evolution isn’t teleological…blah blah, argument here)
Posted by: patrick · Mar 5, 06:02 AM · #
I’m not saying anything, but I’m dropping a whole slice of bread..Adavaita bread. It’s really high in vitamins and minerals.
“Consider. The world in which you live, who else knows about it? Within the prison of your world appears a man who tells you that the world of painful contradictions, which you have created, is neither continuous nor permanent and is based on a misapprehension.There is no reality in it. It cannot last. He pleads with you to get out of it. You got into it by forgetting what you are, and you will get out of it by knowing yourself as you are. “
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
XO,
Susan
Posted by: Susan · Mar 5, 06:56 AM · #
This looks really good, but I’ll have to watch the whole thing at home. Can’t get caught watching a long youtube!!
I think humanity is definitely evolving. We used to have the Roman forum & now we have scary movies!
That’s just one simplistic example, but whatever.
Posted by: Boodiba · Mar 5, 09:41 AM · #
ooops :)
Posted by: Zee · Mar 5, 09:52 AM · #
Tova, yeah, I love this shit. It’s audacious and yet so obvious. Scary movies, for example. :)
Patrick, that’s it? Hee hee. You’re very generous.
Next post will be a response to you both.
(Hopefully last week’s open panopticon thread won’t get lost before I write something about it… or maybe hopefully it will.)
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 5, 12:01 PM · #
Ok, so still digesting my breakfast toast. Thanks, Susan.
Mmmmm, vitamins and minerals: the painful contradictions (inside/outside, ashtanga/Iyengar, success/failure…) that “nobody else” knows and that cannot last because they are just the stories told by our half-consciousness. What is more nourishing than this? Nothing (in both senses). :)
I dig advaita as a philosophy of mind—like this passage—rather than as a philosophy of existence—like when people take too seriously the idea that everthything “is” only the play of their own consciousness. (Not to be horribly dualistic, but there is me- consciousness and also ego- unbound life- consciousness and it seems like I often tend to see only the first and can mistake it for the second in trying to understand this stuff.) Anyway, for me just a little Sri Maharaj shears off a few false ideas about the world. Right on.
Advaita sometimes troubles me when we’re in the forum of the internet because the combination of this philosophy and this technology encourages us to see others as mere play of our own consciousness to an extreme degree. The insight into the nature of consciousness gets mistaken as carte blanche to treat others as extentions of our own egoes, in classic narcissistic style. Because we are fucked up (not because Advaita is fucked up), it can be a recipe for super-narcissism.
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 5, 12:15 PM · #
(followup, in a fashion) Tom Wolfe (not Thomas, but Tom, you know, acid-test Tom) once wrote, I think in ...Tangerine Flake Baby, that the mind evolves according to technology, and that technology might be how human consciousness “evolves itself”; now, down this road further, we get perhaps David Cronenberg, Jean Baudrillard, Survival Research Laboratories even, Donna Haraway, C-Theory, the Terminator franchise, and so on and so forth. The central problem with a hierarchical or teleological evolution (of anything)is that it posits an end point as more important than present context. For example, what if there’s nuke war and life survives? Evolution will adapt, but it may not adapt on its “same” teleological “trajectory” (if you believe that sort of thing; where the hell, in any case, would such a trajectory be headed? Why don’t we just believe in time travel, if that’s true, and get there the quick way? You know?). Similarly, what has a century of global warming ALREADY done to evolution? How has our “trajectory” (again if you like that idea) ALREADY been inflected in ways manifest perhaps in our bodies/world/physical realm but not, again arguably, in our consciousness/awareness? Sure, we can globalize, we can “think globally” and all the other cute T-shirt slogans, but the scary and compelling thought is not “DOES global thinking indicate an evolution” but instead “HAS the evolutionary process ALREADY been inflected by pollution, by climate change?” Evolution may very well NOT be our friend. That may be true EVEN if it’s teleological.
Posted by: patrick · Mar 5, 01:31 PM · #
I really dig Wilber’s way of fitting disparate bits into a single, coherent structure. Even though he’s obviously off-track at times his inclusiveness opens up some new ways of dealing with problems. Were he more reader-friendly, I’d have read more of his stuff already. I’ll check into this title when I get a chance.
Regarding the advaita, I agree that it seems to be a handy cop-out for some people. But fantasy-minded people will dismiss realities no matter what their chosen texts tell them they should do. It’s a problem that comes from the individual view of the person — that people are ‘complete units’ unto themselves. Any time the universal view peeks through into our little minds — that we’re each little bits a bigger, more whole organism — our real non-dualism becomes more clear.
Posted by: Carl · Mar 5, 02:34 PM · #
I don’t believe Adavaita is so much more a cop out than any other philosophy or religion that people take too literally or expound upon without a sense of the truth. No different. I’ve been hit over the head by Buddhists, Christians, and Yogis alike….
Posted by: Susan · Mar 6, 07:19 AM · #
I agree with you.
I see truth and even a mystical core in all these traditions… and also a very handy literalist interpretation (as well as fodder for fantasy, as Carl mentioned). Some people are going to be at the, ahem, stage of literalism and dogmatism in any tradition. (Ashtanga is full of fundamentalists, features some pluaralists, and isn’t without a few integralists.) and Even those of us who are not fundamentalists contain the shadows of literalism/ fundamentalism inside us, somewhere.
The guy who made this video just emailed me. Turns out it is the same NYC reader who sent the Krishnamurthi quotation recently… I had no idea whose work I was pulling off youtube Tuesday night and it turned out to be that of someone whose path I’d just crossed in a different way. Cheers, JJ.
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 6, 12:57 PM · #
“Advaita” is particularly dangerous for those individuals that look for ways of dismissing inconvenient or disagreeable realities. Religious extremism allows people to close off this way but they have to first entertain some kind of structure. “Advaitism” allows them to avoid absolutely anything and everything they don’t care to deal with and permits them to do so without adopting conservational frames of reference.
Anyone that takes advaitist thinking principally from text misses the point ENTIRELY. It must come from experience or it’s just self-indulgence. The only way to experience it is by embracing every aspect of one’s own being, including the physical. It’s foolishness to disregard one’s body.
There’s so much physical fun anyway! Why miss out on any of it?
Posted by: Carl · Mar 6, 01:33 PM · #
But sometimes reading Nisargadatta actually engages every aspect of my being, Carl. It’s not necessarily a flight from reality so much as a moving, reality-shifting embrace of nonduality. This is mere fantasy, simply because part of the experience is words on a page? Engaging with beautiful texts can be an embodied experience (dirty fiction books…?), and can be a transporting one as well (Shakespeare still undoes me). Why cordon off reading or hearing words—if fully engaged in them—as less real than other experience?
I agree that Advaita “metaphysics” facilitates psychopathic flights of fancy. But ever know a psychopathic Christian “metaphysician” though (the people who say the world is just a shadow of the angel-demon warfare raging on the plane of Spirit)? Lots of avoidance in that cosmology too.
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 6, 03:13 PM · #
“Back away from that Adavaita, it’s dangerous in the wrong hands!” she shouted hands raised in fists above her head. “Put it down! Put it away it’s only for those who truly understand!”
“Does he have a license for that ma’am?” asked the police officer.
“Oh, no he doesn’t! I’ve been trying to get him to understand but it just isn’t working!”
“It’ll be OK, we’ll get him down to the station and give him a nice comfortable cell all by himself and we can sort this all out.”
Posted by: Susan · Mar 6, 05:14 PM · #
I can see I won’t convert Susan. I didn’t say anybody should be barred from pursuing the advaita vedanta or any other realm of thought. It’s just that for some minds it’s a black hole and premature oblivion awaits them there.
Now you’re going to say something like: “Well, yes, that’s what we want: oblivion. No more Self, yada, yada, yada.” Fine. Whatever.
Owl, if you relate to what Nisargadatta says then that’s perfect. You absorb the ideas, assemble them together with what you already have seen or figured out and any voids and rough patches that you have, you fill with tentative fillers. It’s all a wholesome, continuous process of putting things into perspective. I like reading the Ashtavakra Gita (totally non-dualist propaganda) because I can really relate to some passages.
There are others that use advaita-brand “non-dualism” as a wholesale dismissal mechanism and it only serves to reinforce their neuroses. The idea that everything is an illusion is misinterpreted by these folks. They think it means they should tell the whole world to fuck off, that they should live in very small boxes, divorced as fully as possible from whatever they find to be disagreeable. These people embrace a few of the notions of advaita vedanta simply because it allows them to quit caring about stuff.
Posted by: Carl · Mar 8, 03:28 PM · #
Pretty much I just tripped out when I saw Sri Aurobindo. Did the Editor not get a giggle out of that?
Posted by: yancy · Mar 15, 08:07 PM · #
Yes! My thought when I post this was exactly this: “Oh god if M sees this she will never believe me.”
The Editor won’t even consent to watch this dreck. He deems everything not published by an academic press to be “self-help literature” and swears it off completely.
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 16, 05:32 PM · #