Thanks for the explanation, Jake, but I find the links unconvincing because they are based on a rigid view of science-nothing-but and keep bouncing back to a shared, personal dislike as support for their argument.

It does not seem far-fetched at all for a ´full human being´... to be more than the sum of its studied parts.  A lot of people snicker at terminology, like New Age, and are not willing to consider a farther development of consciousness that is experienced and not researched yet.  

A lot of knee-jerk reactions come from the connotations of words also and/or the hidden agendas of personal gain, but I cannot discard the ´woo´ just yet.

 

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.

JakeS:

He has some straaange ideas about a universal consciousness-field

I would say this is not so much Chopra as Rupert Sheldrake:

Morphic field - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Morphic field is a term introduced by British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, the major proponent of this concept, through his Hypothesis of Formative Causation in the early 1980's. It is described as consisting of patterns that govern the development of forms, structures and arrangements. As a new theory challenging established concepts, Sheldrake's theories have received criticism by some members of the scientific establishment, have been ignored by others and have been taken as a possible new line of research by borderline researchers.

I do not like Chopra very much, he is not an original thinker - he is taking his ideas from different sources, what he sales has been thought by others before him, however, he is good at marketing.

I really don´t see any competition or dare here.  I´ll take that as a skeptic way of saying you want to learn more?  (;

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.

It would make the scientists happy.  (;  He uses it in medical science at least, but is that the only, overruling method?

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.

Unfortunately I can't see your point of view, because it seems to be too poorly formed to be rigorously evaluated. From what little I have been able to parse from you and your references, it looks like a lot of confused magical thinking written in an extremely non-standard version of English. This assessment may be unkind, of course, and I'm prepared to be proven wrong. But I don't think I will be.

Furthermore, I take severe exception to the insinuation that I have dismissed and ridiculed your ideas based solely on my own ill-founded prejudice. This new-age bunkum has had more than a fair hearing here, and (as usual, I might note) its apologists have presented nothing new whatsoever. Lots of martyr complex, lots of hazy allusions to magical spirits, lots of putting words in people's mouths, but zero substance.

I ask for an explanation of what Chopra says that makes sense, and I get a laundry list of crankery and quackery. I ask for a falsifiable hypothesis and a means to test it experimentally, and I'm told to go pray and report back to my local priest. I ask for an explanation what some new-age advocates that you linked to approvingly are saying - because they don't seem to be using the same version of English that I am, and the request is ignored.

I then conclude - after giving what you have to say a treatment that is entirely too unprejudiced and open-minded considering the number and severity of crank-indicators in the opening posts in this conversation - that you have nothing to say that I've not heard from every other freaking crank I've ever met on the 'net (and several I've met in real life). From young-earth creationists through 9/11 troofers to postmodernists.

You then have the gall to tell me that I am employing 'pre-emptive ridicule' and being unscientific. I like to think that I have a thickish skin, but unfounded, juvenile accusations against my intellectual honesty are not on the list of abuses that I am prepared to let pass without comment!

Having noted this for the record, we can now return to our regularly scheduled friendly-if-somewhat-snarky progressive blogging.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

We can meditate all we want but it won't lead to progress on the "quantum theory of consciousness" or suchlike.

We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo

Meditation is fine and well, and if you claim that it calms your mind, or gives you more energy or contributes to your wellbeing then this is entirely believable. It does not have to be falsifiable and all that jazz, since it is a statement of the subjective effect of mind exercises on yourself. It's like I say: "this thing makes me happy", no one will ask me to prove it!

But the sort of mystisism that this seems to be about involves a strange leap of faith:
JakeS:

1994: Awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for his experimental conclusion from a rigorous scientific study, published in the peer review journal "Social Indicators Reserarch", that found that 4,000 practicitioners of the TM-Sidhi program who gathered in Washington, D.C. for the Summer, caused a 23.3 percent decrease in crime in that city during an 8 week period.

Okay, how does that work? What is the method of action where by this gathering of people caused a drop of crime in the area in which the collected? Because if none can be proposed one would be inclined to think it was coincidental. But what is really not convincing is a bunch of drivel about energy fields or cognitive synergy or whatever. Really, one has to do more than mimicry of the language of science to be scientific.

From above:
emilmoller:

The way this thread develops to me is an important pointer as to why our world community is in the lamentable state it is in.

Jake cs uses the proper tools for the material and intellectual domain. For the spiritual domain other tools are required. When tools for domains are confused, threads like this and other non life serving phenomena appear.

'models' are tools from the intellectual domain. These can be used to give hints of results of investigations in the spiritual domain, but no more

'spiritual' = the domain where all esoteric traditions refer to as being the common ground for all and everything

Wait! I think this thread is great! From the side of JakeS it has little to do with the lamentable state of the world. In fact, I would say, if our world followed the rigor with which Jake seems to operate, it would not have such a state. To take an example: it is pretty clear from a scientific standpoint that CO2 is a big problem. Has been for quite some time, actually. Took long to catch on popularily, but this is hardly due to thinking only in the material/intellectual domain and not the spiritual! All the scientific evidence points one way, we have the technological ability to do something about it. And we have a bunch of people who think it would be too expensive, or that they can more easily profit from not doing anything, etc, etc, etc. A bunch of greedy, shortsighted bastards. A bunch of greedy, shortsighted, gullible bastards that don't believe in physical, material limits to a finite world, among other things. With proper material scientific foundations we avoid stupid things like that. The problem is too little, not too much science.

I don't understand how we need the spiritual to solve the problems of the world. Unless:
BruceMcF:

Yes, technology, so while engineering is a ...  part of it, its only a part. Much of the trickiest aspects of technological change will be in the social arrangements that are complements of the engineering.

Yes, we need social change. And if the claim is that if people meditated more and drove less, the world would be better off. Yes, indeed, I believe it. However, if there is bizarre stuff in there about how the 'energy' fields of these meditators will cause quantum-string vibrations and excitations in a molecular magnitronic potential... Well, it's impossible to take that bit seriously. If you want to be spiritual, be spiritual. But, please, keep off the language of physics. Really. You might confuse someone to think that the two are actually related. Or you should make clear that you are speaking metaphorically. Except, aren't metaphors most effective when people know what they refere to? If you wish to construct a useful metaphor for people to explain something spiritual, shouldn't you use a field in which they have some experience, rather than drawing together a bunch of impressive sounding vocabulary from physics?

And we do have to defend science from the kind of intrusions that uses the language of science and claim to be scientific, and are anything but. Or someone will convince us that all we need to do is meditate for an hour a day, and the collected energy-consiousness field will make everything great. No need for actual action in the world, no need for actual reduction in driving. Just meditating will suck the carbon right out of the air!

So, to sum up: meditation as mental training: just fine, no problem. The link Fran provides, its about measurable changes in the brain due to meditation. Seems scientific and believable. (I haven't looked in detail)

Meditation as some kind of mystical link to spiritual whatever... Either this is religious, has no bearing on material reality and I don't care, or else you have a lot of work to do to show a link to the real world. And, no, "try it and have faith" doesn't cut it. Now we are back to religious nonsense again, no different from all the other lies being peddled by other faits!

I think Jake has been asking for convincing, scientific discussion of certain claims all along.

When I read Emil say this:

the rest of the world suffers from the consequences of one's inability to see a larger picture. That is: a picture from the next domain [the domains are nested: material is transcended & included in the intellectual and the intellectual is t&i in the spiritual]

I am eager to see his scientific backing for it. Because I do not accept transcendentalist esoterica, I am causing suffering to all that lives? I look forward to Emil's justification for that.

Compared to that, the usefulness or not of meditation is really a bit of a sideshow, imho.

but I do agree with metavision that you do not appear to be open to new or different things.

Appearances can be deceiving. It is precisely because I am open to new and different ideas that I have to do some kind of sorting of people's suggestions. If you want me to take something seriously, you have to give me reason to believe that it isn't nonsense. Else, I could spend the rest of my life studying one strange notion after another without ever having the foggiest idea what good it's going to do for me or anyone else.

I don't think you are seriously suggesting that I ought to be 'open to the idea' that the moon landing was a hoax. I don't think you are seriously suggesting that I should be 'open to the idea' that Earth was created in six days six thousand years ago. I don't think you seriously suggest that I should be 'open to the idea' that homeopathic 'remedies' (i.e. vigorously shaken bottles of pure water) confer any real medical benefit.

So why should trancendental meditation get a free pass?

How do you want to understand meditation if you are not willing to learn the basic tools.

I'm not unwilling to learn the basic tools, as long as the expected outcome stands in some reasonable proportion to the time commitment. I am, however, unwilling to accept at face value the often outrageous and frequently worse claims of miraculous magical power that are attributed to meditation. As I said above, I do not hand out 'get out of critical scrutiny free' cards for weird philosophies just because their adherents are sincere.

If you want to convince me that meditation is a good way to spend my time, then convince me on the merits. Don't try to recruit me into a cult and especially don't try to sell me snake oil. Chopra fails on both scores, as does his local apologists.

Over the years I have learned that there is more than science.

A fairly trivial observation. I don't know why people seem to keep thinking that I disagree with it.

(But if I had to guess, I'd say that it's because they don't understand or accept that I won't go along with their rhetorical two-step and accept that 'more than science' equates to their favoured kind of hand-waving magic.)

To me science descibes what can be perceived and measured consciously at this point in time. So many things were in the realm of magic, until someone came along and has been able to either measure it or make it visible. Then they became scientifically acceptable. However, these things excisted before they were proven scientifically.

I don't know where you're going with this, because that seems to be my point you're making? Science works. If you think you have an interesting effect, submit it for scientific scrutiny. Most of the time, it'll turn out that what you thought you were seeing was in fact confirmation bias, selection bias, placebo effect, wishful thinking or sensory illusions. That's the breaks of the game. But if the effect is genuine, we'll find it. Eventually.

Here a link to some SCIENTIFIC research on meditation. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/101/46/16369 :-)

Typing in all caps went out of style with FORTRAN :-P

That being said, that paper isn't terribly revolutionary [1]. From what I can read from the abstract, it says that meditation is coincident with enhanced levels of certain neurological processes associated with the ability to concentrate, which is entirely plausible and not exactly unexpected. If you wanted to convince me that meditation is a good idea, then this is the kind of thing you need to put forward [2].

That is, however, very much beside the point, since the discussion so far has been about whether or not we should accept the whole mythological baggage that some feel should go along with meditation. Meditation was presented as a 'tool' with which to 'explore the spirit realm' - and it was that notion which I rejected for lack of plausible mechanism and being untestable, not meditation en bloc.

- Jake

[1] Contrary to popular imagination, few - if any - papers are truly earth-shattering, but that's a different story.

[2] That being said, further studies are required to determine whether meditation is superior as a concentration-enhancer to - say - solving mathematical problems.

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

I suppose this is your central claim. Is that right?
emilmoller:

Up to the time some % of people (here are some interesting issues) reach a higher level of awareness, efforts to reach significant/sufficient developments re sustainability are futile.

This is so, given the chaotic structure (or lack of structure) of our world society. The intellect + current structural/institutional arrangements are unable to properly use the technologies that can set us free.

Reading newspapers, blogs like this one and an occasional structure-exploring book suffices to illustrate this.

Can you point to a community or communities (preferably contemporary but, if you must, also historical) with a relatively high fraction of people at a higher level of awareness?

What is a higher level of awareness? Awareness of what? How do I know a person with a higher level of awareness when I see them?

We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo

We are not overruling anything. Science is open to novelty - is all the time.

But until you can apply the scientific method to your claims (which I'm still not sure I have seen, beyond "we don't knoweverything", which nobody contests), these will remain in the realm of belief rather than in that of empirical fact.

That may be enough for you, and that's fine. But don't claim it's a fact when you refuse to follow the steps that can convince others that it is so. Or it's just proselytism.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

I don't care what stories you want to tell to explain things you don't understand - it's roughly the same thing I think a lot of scientists (see cosmology) do when they're afraid or embarrassed to say "I don't know" - but don't expect other people to believe in them or value them above other stories.

The point here, I think, is that while meditation (for instance) is a valuable piece of technology, the fact that we don't really understand how it works doesn't mean that a pile of woo-woo pieced together from bits of QM, ancient texts and whatever else you're having explains anything at all.

And if I have and still think that the common ground of esoteric traditions is abstract religion?