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Pastimes : Human Brain, The -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (783)	8/25/2015 10:07:56 PM
From: koan	1 Recommendation Recommended By Road Walker Respond to of 935

How have you been? I took some time off for self reflection. It was a good decision. In the past year I discovered Robert Ornstein who wrote: "The Evolution of Consciousness". It is a must read for everyone interested in the brain, because he explains how we do not have one mind, but hundreds of minds and we move between them. And how we are thinking with the brain of an animal long since extinct. And while it worked great with chaging lions, not so much with nuclear proliferation :). Ornstein teaches at Stanford, UC Medical and is president of the institute for knowledge. He is also a world authority on left brain / right brain and explains very well how we all live in a virtual reality. I think it is good to know one lives in a virtual reality. Our knowledge of such ,is really the thing that separates us from the rest of the animal world; not tools as they used to think.

To: Road Walker who wrote (783)

9/28/2015 1:43:20 PM

From: koan

1 Recommendation

Recommended By
Road Walker

Respond to of 935

Good old Ornstein, he always takes me to a new place I can believe in. You will like this roadwalker.

Remember this guy has spent 50 years as a research psychologist and teaches at Stanford and UC medical school. He is the real deal.

Ornstein: "According to esoteric tradition, the organ of perception, which can be

(tutored in the same fashion as is language) is what we term intuition.

Although the phrase is often maligned, conventionally used to indicate random guesswork or mysterious combination of elements, it should be properly understood as "knowledge without recourse to inference".

The diverse and seemingly unconnected practices of religious and esoteric conditions centered around the cultivation of what we might call nonlinear immediate understanding, and complement to the inferential, meditated, ordered sequence of rational thought. The metaphor of site is often employed, it is like explaining to a blind man what color is like."

koan: So here is what he is saying, I think. Some knowledge cannot be understood, nor explained through language. Existentialism and ZEN would be two of these, IMO. That is why the Zen masters never try to explain it, but rather help the student to see it for themselves. Intuit it.

I never understood it like that before. I always referred to it as seeing it "in my minds eye". But I can see he is correct. I had been out of school years before I "saw existentialism in my minds eye". It just popped up one day and then later Zen.

I was seeing the "whole elephant" not just a trunk or a leg. It is sort of like critical mass. Through study, it just popped up one day. Einstein sort of implied that is how he "saw" relativity. One day he just saw it.

So in the east they actually teach this, but in the west we do not even recognize it as a real thing, but rather as a pseudo science..

Three books:

The Evolution of Consciousness - the biological evolution of the mind and structure - ie. we have many minds

The MInd field - eastern thinking and other intellectual perspectives

Multimind - virtual reality

To: Road Walker who wrote (783)

10/3/2015 8:36:13 PM

From: koan

1 Recommendation

Recommended By
Road Walker

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 935

koan: For 50 years, I have complained that our society has been completely geared toward left brain capabilities. All the test requirements, from IQ to SAT's, to language and math requirements for university entrance, and on and on, pretty much discounted the right brain intelligence. All my life, I have watched smart people with great right brains, but average left brains, feel they weren't smart, to be blunt, as all of the left brain tests kept showing them as failures.

But nothing could be further from the truth, because while the left brain is involved in sequential logic, the right brain is involved in the simultaneous juxtapositioning of things, intuition, a holistic interpretation of reality if you will. An example might be the ability to walk into somebody's house look around and notice whether they were liberal or conservative.

Ornstein:
we now possess both a new understanding of ancient systems of knowledge and technical basis for the analysis of the human brain. It is now the time to undo the cultural bias against intuition as a mode of knowledge, against, the right hemisphere.

Our culture and education often produce people hemianopic to reality, and it is time to return toward wholeness, not merely through a faddish concentration on individual process of the esoteric tradition, but through an attention to goals.

It is important to note, in the context of the traditional esoteric psychologies, that the recent discovery of a right hemisphere activation in intuitive cognition does not reduce the mental aspects of esoteric knowledge to right brain functioning. It does allow a person who might be interested in a more complete consciousness to decide merely that he or she understands it is an activity for the right hemisphere. The comparison again is with learning language: one might realize that language depends predominantly upon the left hemisphere, but this useful realization does not constitute learning language. One must still study grammar, spelling, writing, etc.

The studies of the role of the right hemisphere and cognition do, however, provide a secure physiological basis for areas of thought often devalued in contemporary Western society. When different remedies for the same illness, which are employed in numerous and isolated societies, are found to have a common physiological basis, we can understand the unity within the apparent diversity. We can then choose the method of preparation best suited to our needs. We do not now understand esoteric tradition enough to judge the efficacy of certain processes, but we're beginning to understand the common mode of esoteric activity, especially the diverse methods and techniques used to train intuition.