S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 5 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 9 4 3 Michal Kutáš [2] There can be an assumption that they would predict the phenomena they describe with perfect precision if we had absolutely precise data. This is an idealization, because in practice we will never have them. Thus, we will never know whether beyond our errors of measurement phenomena are fully deterministic even if according to our best theory they are. [3] Joe Dispenza describes many such seemingly miraculous cases in his bookYou Are the Placebo (2014). [4] Categorization in the sense of understanding what we perceive seems to be present, but the labeling with inner verbal comment, as also other activities of this “voice in the head”, are absent. [5] Perceptions of our body and of outer environment go on even if we are immersed in the inner verbal behavior; generally, we can be either aware of them or not. They even seem to be, at least for a short period of time, stored in the memory even in the moments we are not aware of them, because we may access them through it in retrospect: after the moment of realization that we had a thought, we may become aware that the present sensory perception was here before, in the time we were not aware of it, and in which we were immersed in the thought we just realized we had. [6] For example, the word “consciousness” seems to carry, at least for many people, some direct knowledge of ourselves, which is activated also in the moment when we use the concept of consciousness by thinking. Since we need not to have the formalization of this concept, it can still contain some experiential content. This may be true for those who were not able to find theoretical explanation of consciousness, because they compared all theoretical constructs of consciousness with direct experiential content of its concept and saw that it was not grasped by that theoretical understanding. In this case there seems to remain an access to what the term means even in the presence of activation of its concept, because this concept itself carries experience of consciousness. For others, words like “I”, “I am”, and others, may still carry experience of what we really are; especially when the experiential content was not replaced by some theoretical construct. In the case of such replacement we no longer activate experience when using concept; we activate the theoretical construct instead. [7] At the time of the event just described, Ramana Maharshi was already dead. This event was an inner act of surrender of Gary Weber, which does not presuppose their actual meeting. References Andrews-Hanna, Jessica R., Jay S. Reidler, Jorge Sepulcre, Renee Poulin, and Randy L. Buckner. 2010. “Functional-Anatomic Fractionation of the Brain’s Default Network.” Neuron 65 (4): 550–562. Brewer, Judson A., Patrick. D. Worhunsky, Jeremy R. Gray, Yi-Yuan Tang, Jochen Weber, and Hedy Kober. 2011. “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Differences in Default Mode Network Activity and Connectivity.” PNAS 108 (50): 20254–20259. Dispenza, Joe. 2014. You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter. London: Hay House. Farb, Norman A. S., Zindel V. Segal, Helen Mayberg, Jim Bean, Deborah McKeon, Zainab Fatima, and Adam K. Anderson. 2007. “Attending to the Present: Mindfulness Meditation Reveals Distinct Neural Modes of Self-Reference.” SCAN2 (4): 313–322. Killingsworth, Matthew A., and Daniel T. Gilbert. 2010. “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.” Science 330 (6006): 932. Lazar, Sara W., Catherine E. Kerr, Rachel H. Wasserman, Jeremy R. Gray, Douglas N. Greve, Michael T. Treadway, Metta McGarveyet al. 2005. “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Increased Cortical Thickness.” Neuroreport 16 (17): 1893–1897. Lutz, Antoine, Lawrence L. Greischar, Nancy B. Rawlings, Matthieu Ricard, and Richard J. Davidson. 2004. “Long-Term Meditators Self-Induce High-Amplitude Gamma Synchrony During Mental Practice.” PNAS 101 (46): 16369–16373. Mason, Malia F., Michael I. Norton, John D. Van Horn, Daniel M. Wegner, Scott T. Grafton, and C. Neil Macrae. 2007. “Wandering Minds: The Default Network and Stimulus-Independent Thought.” Science 315 (5810): 393–395. Rainville, Pierre, Gary H. Duncan, Donald D. Price, Benoit Carrier, and M. Catherine Bushnell. 1997. “Pain Affect Encoded in Human Anterior Cingulate But Not Somatosensory Cortex.” Science 277 (5328): 968-971. Tolle, Eckhart. 2005. A New Earth. New York: Penguin. Tolle, Eckhart. 2003. Stillness Speaks. Vancouver: Namaste Publishing. Tolle, Eckhart. 2004. The Power of Now. Sydney: Hodder Australia. Weber, Gary. 2015. A Leaf Slipped from a Hand: An Awakening into Stillness. Accessed August 20, 2019. www.searchwithin.org. Wright, Robert. 2017. Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. New York: Simon&Schuster.
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