This is so difficult to explain, as our language just is to limited to really convey these "dimensions". Language is linear, but experience is multidimensional. I guess it is for a reason that there is this Chinese saying: "One picture is worth more than a thousand words." Just try do describe and explain a picture - you will never really be able to convey the same impression that the picture does. Now take inner states, can be distress - have you ever had the situation were you tried to console someone in despair, who was crying and you asked: "What is the matter". Usually word-wise this person will not be able to talk coherently, maybe even talk "gibberish", and still you get the idea of what is going on in this person, despite the words not making any sense. There is definitely something beyond the level of intellect that can be communicated, maybe through music and art. There are also other states of knowing - however, again in non-verbal form, as they can be experienced in meditation - but as soon as you try to reduce the experience to words, it is loosing its essence, it often doesn't make sense when put in to words. One reason maybe, because we never created words that can carry that kind of information.
P.S. Jyana Yoga is the Yoga of inquiry - asking question to find enlightenment. However, the Jyana Yogi does not use the internet to find the answer; the Jyana Yogi meditates on the questions and looks for the answers "inside".
Thus, everything that you do not experience through your senses is spirit - feelings, emotions, thinking, visualizing, etc.
But this is simply wrong-headed. It presumes, for one thing, that those things are something distinct from physical and chemical interactions in the brain. There is no justification for such an assumption.
Language is linear, but experience is multidimensional.
This sentence is a prime example of why this discussion is so difficult. Linear and multidimensional are words that have meanings. And you're not using them in a way that makes any sense given their ordinary meanings.
While you are, of course, free to employ your own semantics, in which you imbue words with meanings that they do not usually have, it would help the reader to more easily grasp your point if you would please point out which definitions you change and how you change them.
Further, it does not help matters that it is almost invariably highly technical terms like dimensionality or linear that are mangled in this fashion. Taking the above example, you employ the term 'linear' as a contrast to the term 'multi-dimensional' - but the two are not mutually exclusive. The Schrödinger equation is very much a linear equation and it is very much also a multi-dimensional equation (OK, you can construct a one-dimensional version, but that has strictly limited utility). Further, neither of these terms has any natural connection to any description of language with which I am familiar.
I guess it is for a reason that there is this Chinese saying: "One picture is worth more than a thousand words."
... but 999 of them may be lies.
Snark aside, a word can also be worth a thousand pictures. I cannot, for example describe the full meaning that the viewer derives from a picture of an Iraqi child who's been hit by a phosphor grenade. There are simply too many side bands and connotations. However, it is equally true that no amount of pictures can describe the word 'imaginary' - again, there are connotations and impressions that are not easily translatable. And that is true for any migration from one media platform to another. An SMS can't say the same that an e-mail can, which in turn can't say the same thing a radio broadcast can, which in turn can't say the same things a TV broadcast can.
None of this is particularly new or deep insight, however, so I am not entirely sure where you are going with this. Certainly, the loss of information during translation from one medium to another is not to be taken as evidence of 'spiritual higher planes of existence?'
- Jake Ceterum censeo Chicago esse delendam
I guess I will take a break from ET too, these discussions are just no fun anymore.
That's a shame. Just when we've got them on the run.... ;-)
Jake is a Defender of the Faith, just the same as any other. Except his Faith is in "Science" and the "scientific method".
He is a priest in what Pirsig called the "Church of Reason".
I've taken breaks too, and they are good for peace of mind. But I always return because I have such good friends here to share with. You can't be me, I'm taken
Not so very long ago, people remarked on this blog that philosophical disagreements would be used (and have been used) to drive in wedges between natural allies. It would be a sad irony if we were to drive in such wedges ourselves.
In other words, please consider this an apology for any insinuations of 'quackery' or somesuch in your practice.
And I do admit I am currently extra touchy - unfortunately I have been confronted over the last weeks, lets say with the shadow side of conventional medicine, and have been able to see some of the good stuff from the woo woo side. :-)
This disingenious, intellectual dishonesty/_ and exceptionalism are the ET equivalent of the eco-no-mist. Self-locked into quadrant 17, level B, having an ´on-my-terms-only´, puerile tantrum and refusing to come out. Newborn ´scientists´, as dangerous, authoritarian and myopic as newborn christians. Yet, you meet them and they are pretty full people! It´s an amazingly woowoo paradox, to use their terminology.
I will try to read below this and control myself, but if the ignorant and HURTFUL contempt continues, I´ll figure something else out.
Hope you give yourself credit and a good treat, then, come back soon. Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. --Charu Saxena.
I'm not entirely sure what has provoked it, or how much of it is a defensiveness-projection thing, but if we had a smug-o-meter handy right now, the needle would be off the charts. At this point I've become too annoyed with everyone to care what their original stance was. See, now I am being smug... This diary is a smug-magnet. I suggest everyone slowly back away from it. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
metavision:
a higher-level gnome
I do have quite a bit of weaknesses and shadows. And the other FP's are great people, and I really appreciate being in the same team with them. (okay, they might have some weaknesses too! At least I hope so.)
I would appreciate if we all could just take a deep breath, exhale and take a step back and start all over with each other. Let's stop this he did, she did - lets let it be.
Isn't Christmas supposed to be the time of love and forgiveness. Let's practice that! :-D
the pseudo-science hammers
gnome gang
disingenious, intellectual dishonesty/_ and exceptionalism
Newborn ´scientists´, as dangerous, authoritarian and myopic as newborn christians
I'm just sorry you've been wasting so much time reading us. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
This is an overly simplistic reductionist view of what was being said, it's like a paint-by numbers version of the mona lisa. Everything has to fit together as a subsetof my own model of how the world works. The fact that someone has a different language to describe experience is seen as irrelevent or wrong headead.
None of this is particularly new or deep insight, however, so I am not entirely sure where you are going with this.
If it isn't particularly a new or deep insight, why are you having trouble working out where they are going with this, surely it should be obvious? Life should consist in at least fifty percent pure waste of time, and the rest doing what you please.
The problem is not that someone else is using a different language. The problem is that they are using the same language, but clearly not the same semantics. When a laundry list of perfectly biological functions is offered up as evidence of spirituality, I get sceptical. But I will admit - and apologise for the fact - that my language was intemperate.
If it isn't particularly a new or deep insight, why are you having trouble working out where they are going with this, surely it should be obvious?
No, it is not obvious, because it looks like these very much ordinary and commonly accepted facts are being used to argue in favour of a conclusion that does not seem to me to follow from those facts.
Fran, with 'linear', you surely meant is that speech has a one-dimensional progression, with words (and voices within words) following upon each other. Now the difficulty is less that what words are to describe is multi-dimensional, given that single words can describe three-dimensional objects ("duck") or even four-dimensional ones ("history"), but that what is to be described may branch out and loop back, have a million nodes, and you have to string it all up on a single thread. (While what you really meant goes beyond that I presume: the problem of describing things and words with no good handy words for it.)
Now while I have to disagree with JakeS on 'linear' ('linear' is not just a mathematical term, it also has a general meaning of 'line-like', and used so in many fields; say just the other day I mentioned Linear Pottery Culture) there is the thing that we see a lot of technical terms used loosely, improperly, or senselessly. In this instance, I deduced what you (Fran) meant from the context and my prior awareness of this problem with language, and not from the words you used.
However, when reading someone trying to describe a concept new to me, what's more trying to introduce a new philosophy of everything, such loose use of technical terminology is an insurmountable obstacle. (And an annoyance.) The text will not make sense. Or, one will get the impression of shifting images, and from that of the incoherent thinking of the author. Or, one will guess that the author himself doesn't understand at least he technical terms he uses, or worse, not even what he means to say.
'Dimension', 'energy' and 'linear' are among the most misused terms. So we with a technical education have our triggers, to explain JakeS's reaction. *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
Since all people are more-than just an education and free to use language, there should be no limit to what terms anyone here can use. After all, rotten oil companies and the msm misappropriate the terms every minute of our lives and ´everyone´ here understands what they mean.
P.S. to DoDo: It feels bad that the gnomes on the previous thread did not extend the courtesy of reading or trying to understand a new poster, but Jake S. was goaded on and now it´s being helped out, after insulting Fran and posting a far-from-genuine apology. Not fair, not honorable. Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. --Charu Saxena.
This would be an interesting subject for discussion, but not in your current emotional state as expressed by your several recent comments in this thread. Like poemless, I kindly ask you to stand back a bit, like many others managed earlier today. *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
Let me explore this further.
I chose the core of a neutron star as comparison. This is something I can't see, hear, taste or smell. I can't even see it with instrumental aid (e.g. photograph it with a telescope), being hidden by a visible surface. What I can do is use physics theories on what I can observe (e.g. view formulas in books, and computer printouts on observations of radiation from the covering surface and gravity), and make a picture in my mind.
Now my real point is not that this is a visualisation (which you mention as part of the 'soul'), but that what I do with the neutron star's core I also do with at least other people's feelings, emotions, thinking, visualizing. So, are at least other people's 'souls' strange the same way a neutron star's core is, or is there more to it?
(I could go on asking whether the individual makes the same to her own feelings/thoughts/etc. as she does to the neutron star's core, and answer for myself that yes and that that has much to do with what we call consciousness, but this goes too far for what we are discussing at the moment.)
A bit of a sidetrack: what you say about reduction to words, here for subjective experience, might be true the other way: there is a lot more to things people are used to talk about fluently.
The best example is Stalin's statistics ("One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic"): it is easier to syphatize with one anecdotal story than contemplate dry numbers, yet behind those dry numbers express the truth of a million such personal stories. But the same goes for other 'dry' stuff -- compare the explosion of colors and forms on a photograph of Jupiter by a space probe with the white speck of light everyone saw until 400 years ago, and then contemplate what multitude of Truth might be there in a piece of Reality it is simply physically impossible to ever sense with human senses (even if we'd travel there), like the core of a neutron star.
"One picture is worth more than a thousand words."
This is entirely a sidetrack, but worth to pursue. I think sometimes the opposite is true. Some words are used to describe concepts built on hundreds of preceding concepts which have no good visual representation, at least no good visual representations that are meaningful without at least a hundred of those preceding concepts. Say, the spin of atomic nuclei. Or 'neoliberalism'. Or 'karma'!
Pictures are also so meaningful because our brains are built (evolved) to heavily process visual sensory information (e.g., recognise lots of patterns in it). For, say, a dog, one smell might be worth a thousand barks and yells and a million pictures. *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
