[P2P-F] Fwd: is there no p2p spirituality because there is no spirituality

[Michel Bauwens]

thanks Richard, very 'enlightening' stuff, but this time, I'm just reading
... it's a bit of time question for me now, as I'm preparing a lecture tour
....

If you had time, I'd be interested in some kind of summary of our
discussions, that is readable for outsiders,

just a suggestion,

perhaps one day, when I'm back from my travels, we can have an organized,
publishable, email-based discussion, less tit for tat, more an extented
dialogue,

Michel

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 9:13 PM, Poor Richard <poor_richard at att.net> wrote:

> **
> my comments as usual are interlinear
>
>
> On 9/12/2011 3:56 AM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:01 PM, Poor Richard <poor_richard at att.net>wrote:
>
>>  My comments are interlinear
>>
>> But what makes the term "spirituality" even more problematic than "love"
>> in many contexts is that it is indeed a "hot button" word for many in the
>> atheist/agnostic/skeptic/free-thought/science community.
>>
>
> yes, but that is exactly because they have chosen for an impoverished
> understanding of the world, and thus the world challenges that ...
>
>
> I do not believe such a description fits me nor a substantial portion of
> the communities in question.
>
>
>  for me it's very easy to recognize the people who have either gone
> through this inner transformation, or not,
>
>
> I somewhat agree, but for me it may not be as easy as for you. I am often
> surprised by what extended dialog may unearth.
>
>
>  and the acceptance of the word 'spirituality' seems like a good indicator
> for that.
>
>
> To me the word spirituality, when used in a non-sectarian universalist or
> new-age sort of way, is lately an indicator of a sort of intermediate phase
> of development, although few that I encounter actually seem to pass beyond
> it. That may sound superior or arrogant but I think it best that I don't
> sugar coat it with euphamisms or sneak it in sideways. I base this on my own
> life trajectory as well as my last few years of study and re-analysis of
> myself and those I have known.
>
>
>   You are one of the few exceptions, i.e. having clearly having
> experiences but not using the concept.
>
>
> Yes I will stack up the quantity and intensity of my religious, mystical,
> and shamanistic experiences (with and without psychoactive substances)
> against anybody's. I'm no slouch as an amateur scholar of comparative
> religion and other wisdom traditions, either. I used the concept of
> spirituality most of my life. It has only been in the past decade that I
> have abandoned the concept of supernaturality and only in the past few years
> have I questioned the implicit associations of supernaturality (and other
> connotations I consider doubtful or fallacious) with the word
> "spirituality". It may be telling that I titled my blog post, "Is spiritual
> the new supernatural?," with a question rather than a statement. I am still
> agnostic as to the existence of anything logically and qualitatively
> distinct from everything else in the natural world, i.e. anything
> supernatural or non-natural) but I have completely abandoned the idea in my
> own thought pending some startling future revelation). One might think my
> aforementioned experiences would have provided just that revelation and
> indeed I interpreted them that way once. But gradually over the past couple
> of decades, concurrent with my deepening practice of introspection and my
> further assimilation of neuroscience and other life sciences I have come to
> interpret them in naturalistic ways that are much more satisfying to me than
> my former spiritual  interpretations. My naturalistic interpretations are
> more satisfying because they are more intellectually parsimonious
> (spirituality no longer "adds value" to my interpretations--if it did I
> would retain it); because they expand rather than shrink the horizons of my
> mind; and because they fractally interdigitate with all the rest of my
> knowledge as my previous interpretations never could. The silver lining of
> spending years in extreme depression during which as much as half my time
> was spent in a semi-trance-like, semi-meditative state interspersed with
> long periods of careful and lucid examination of my thoughts, my beliefs,
> and my entire body of knowledge and experience-- was that I was able to
> sort, cross-index, and integrate all that content and process it to an
> extent I think that few people ever experience. This has given me an
> intellectual rebirth. I would say that my new brain is about two years old.
>
>
>  But from the above, your choice seems politically and socially motivated
> by the acceptance of that said community.
>
>
> Not at all. I neither accept nor am I accepted by those communities (I
> mentioned several) to any extent that would influence me. My brief
> interaction with people in the local atheist community in N. Alabama was
> quite contentious. My acceptance of science is not of the community but of
> the methods, philosophies (with exceptions), and discoveries of science. I
> merely mentioned the various communities in question because they are
> well-represented in internet fora. I run across them all the time, but
> usually in open discussions of activism, politics, economics, ethics,
> conservation, general philosophy, and life sciences. I get the impression
> they are well-represented in the ranks of public intellectuals, internet
> geeks, and social activists. Very few of them seem to specialize in hyping
> their atheism, skepticism, etc. to the exclusion of the general spectrum of
> issues and ideas, any more than most gender-atypical or neuro-atypical
> people or handi-capable people are obsessed with talking just about their
> special community ad nauseum.
>
>
>  I understand that position perfectly, for the same reason I do not use
> the loaded s- and c-words .. but rather p2p to start a fresh investigation
> of emancipatory possibilities
>
>
> If I slant my language for any audience (which is seldom), it is usually
> the "mainstream" audience. But if I were in your position I would probably
> avoid loaded words, too. From that frame of reference I might be fairly
> neutral on spirituality, since it is so popular, but I think I would avoid
> constructing many articles (with occasional exceptions, of course) that
> didn't allow some room or comfort level for bright, non-spiritual and
> anti-spiritual people to feel safe about participating.
>
>    We can say that "all is part of life", but again, isn't there a sea of
>> difference between understanding this mentally, i.e. still separately as a
>> watching and conversing mind, and/or to experience this directly, as a
>> shaman might.
>>
>>
>>  I behold a sunset. I am moved esthetically and emotionally, and perhaps
>> in other ways for which "naturalistic spirituality" might serve as a place
>> holder for other words we don't have for responses of our organism that are
>> still insufficiently examined. I'm not even saying that we can't value the
>> sunset without examining our experience at all. But if someone tells me the
>> sunset moves them spiritually, I probably know less than if they say it
>> moves them esthetically or emotionally. Most people would just accept the
>> spiritual explanation as if that meant the same thing to everyone. If you
>> said you love the sunset, depending on the context I might say "yeah, me
>> too" or I might ask "why?", or "what do you love about it?," or "what do you
>> mean?, or "why don't you marry it?"
>>
>
> The sunset is not a good example, as anyone can 'easily' experience that,
> but what about shamanistic, mystical, gnostic and other experiences, that
> are not reducable to an external input from nature, but are rather inner
> events, from problematic origins (your 3 mind theory) . THere is more to
> life than nature 'mysticism' ..
>
>
> I want to say a bit about eroticism and then I'll discuss shamanism. A lot
> of artful lovers (I include myself of earlier years) have had so-called
> spiritual erotic experiences--merging with the cosmos kind of stuff. The
> thing is, all kinds of hormones get flowing in the nervous system that are
> capable of producing hallucinations and there is ample evidence of the
> interaction of bio-elctromagnetic fields that probably affect the
> proprioceptive nervous system in exotic ways. I myself became fairly adept
> at the latter, and for years I considered various spiritual interpretations.
> Gradually I worked out naturalistic hypotheses that were more plausible to
> me. This does not exhaust the possibilities for evoking spiritual-like
> erotic experiences but I think it probably characterizes the whole spectrum
> of the phenomena.
>
> I'm not sure how you might distinguish mystical and gnostic, but one of the
> few experiences I have no good naturalistic hypothesis for is my occasional
> ability to correctly visualize the interior construction of a machine I have
> never worked with before. One example is the case of a WWII vintage Willys
> Jeep that wouldn't start in the middle of the wilderness. Although I was not
> likely to have ever seen a schematic of a Willys starter, much less ever
> disassembled one, I had a vision of the construction of the starter which
> actually included the problem. I disassembled the starter and found the
> problem exactly as I had seen it. Its possible that I had disassembled maybe
> one other starter, possibly that of a 1949 Jaguar, before. So go figure.
> I've had similar experiences with other machines. Leaky mind?
>
> What shall I say about shamanism without fearing for my life? Here again I
> think the proprioceptive nervous system and the bio-electromagnetic fields
> of living organisms are recruited in exotic ways, often with the aid of
> psychoactive substances, music, chants, rhythmic movements, sleep
> deprivation, and many other devices that alter or reconfigure the neural
> networks and the electrochemical state of the brain and the entire nervous
> system of the practitioner and sometimes other participants. Even though a
> lot of real stuff, including very exotic biophysical and biochemical stuff,
> is actually going on, the other dimension of it is that memory contents (not
> just the conscious memory but the eidetic lifetime memory of every sense
> perception you ever had and every Hieronymus Bosch<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Hieronymus_Bosch>-esque
> image you ever imagined or dreamed in your life) are recruited to wrap the
> real physiological phenomena in a "virtual reality", or a sort of channeled
> hallucination that relates in a meaningful way to the shamanistic activity
> being conducted. The deal is that stuff happens that seems like magic, but
> is actually very natural despite its being truly unusual, mind-boggling, and
> poorly understood by science. That is not to say that all practices
> considered as shamanism, such as so-called psychic surgery, are legitimate.
> But there truly is real shamanic "magic", healing, and communication with
> nature in the manner I characterized above. I am fairly convinced I have
> communicated with plants and animals shamanistically, but a large part of
> what I thought I experienced was probably amplified and elaborated by my
> brain. Lets say one percent of the communication was real and 99% was
> brain-generated virtual reality (to be very conservative).
>
>
>
>>  But, this is crucial, just as we cannot reduce the 'meaning' of
>> skakespeare by the physical qualities of the ink on paper,
>>
>>
>>  This is a bad example for your position. Meaning is only a relevant word
>> in the context of a conscious entity. The ink on paper only has meaning when
>> it is given such by the reader. We have learned a great deal about how all
>> that works, and have no good reason to think that any of the stuff we don't
>> know about it yet is not just as naturalistic as what we already know. When
>> it comes right down to it, there is no good, logical, persuasive way to
>> assert that anything unknown or mysterious is unnatural, because of the very
>> lack of explanatory evidence that makes it a mystery. I have been
>> experiencing and witnessing real mysterious phenomena for decades and have
>> not seen, heard, nor read any convincing evidence that anything that exists
>> or anything that is real is unnatural. Thus one of my objections to the very
>> prevalent "supernatural" or dualistic connotation of the word spiritual.
>>
>
> ok again, there is no need to accept the supernatural at all; but here is a
> crucual difference, you seem to argue that one day, we'll know enough of the
> brain to explain the inner experiences of shakespeare lovers and tibetan
> monks, and that is the reductionism I object two. These are entirely
> different planes or aspects. No matter how much we know about how the brain
> works, that does not say anything about the hermeneutic aspects of
> Shakespeare. For that you would need psychological and social sciences but
> even more: intersubjective dialogue, irreducible to any 'science'.
>
>>  Not yet. That will require full visibility into all levels of brain
>> function and a way to "play back" these recorded correlates into another
>> brain to verify that the experience induced by the recording is as complete
>> as the original. I predict that some day it will be demonstrated so. I'd
>> guess that to occur around 2040. I hope I'll live to experience
>> high-fidelity brain recordings.
>>
>
> again, for me that has no bearing on understanding the phenomena in
> question, physical correlates are just physical correlates, they do not
> exhaust the issue at all
>
>
> How can you say that does not exhaust the issue if you record the
> correlates and play them back in an actual brain to reproduce the original
> experience? I put that in specifically because it would confirm that the
> correlates + brain were in fact sufficient to reproduce the full subjective
> experience. You can say that's impossible and will never happen, fair
> enough, but if it did happen why wouldn't it exhaust the issue?
>
> Besides, there is all the evidence from brain damage, stimulation, etc.
> that the brain creates the subjective experience because when you damage or
> stimulate it you alter or extinguish a specific category of subjective
> experience or cognition.
>
> I consider this just as well-settled as an election where 40% of the votes
> are in and every single one of them is for the same candidate. In other
> words, I don't believe in miracles even though there is still a small
> possibility they could happen. If and when one happens I'll reappraise the
> situation. This is not so much reductionism as a tendency to conserve ones
> resources by concentrating on the most probable pay dirt.
>
> We are all reductionists. That is built in to the nature of our brains and
> it offers certain economies and efficiencies. That is why we have to be so
> vigilant for habitual cognitive biases and why all our beliefs, even about
> our own first-person experiences, have to be provisional and have to be
> regularly examined, tested, and revised. The issue is whether one's
> reductionism is reasonable in a given context. For example, if you are even
> remotely fundamentalist about anything, including science, that is excessive
> reductionism. Many religious people have some of the most reductionist views
> of reality of all. I would say that one's world view must be at least 50%
> based on the best available science or it is a reductionist world-view. By
> that standard probably 90% of the human species has a pathologically
> reductionist world-view. Most of the remaining 10% would be some
> approximation of a scientist-shaman.
>
>
>
>>  Hence the dialogue is always between those three levels, that of
>> understanding material laws, that of understanding human meaning, and that
>> of experiencing directly the transformative power of spiritual experiences.
>>
>>
>>  In that scenario I'm not sure I see any difference between direct
>> spiritual experience and, say, direct experience with a microscope.
>> Experience with microscopes is also transformative.  Direct experience is
>> integral to science, and science is transformative, too. So is torture.
>> (Different strokes....)
>>
>
>
> well it is the difference between physical torture, mental torture, and
> what it all means to the human being doing and experiencing it ... multiple
> levels of reality, not reducible to the physical correlates ... each new
> level of complexity is based on the lower level and cannot exist without it,
> but brings new 'laws' to the table .. i.e. emergent realities
>
>
> Not reducible to the physical correlates -- I haven't said that. It is
> correlates + living brain. But if we can play the brain like a player piano,
> it means we don't need anything else (except more detail) to explain it.
> That's not irrational reductionism, that is rational parsimony.  An Amazon
> tribesman might wonder what kind of spirit animates a chain saw or an
> excavating machine, but we don't. We understand the machine performs its
> function without requiring a spirit. In my opinion there is no credible
> evidence that we are anything but amazingly subtle and complex machines.
> That is not a reductionist position unless I hold it in the face of reliable
> contradictory evidence.
>
>
>    That doesn't require anyone to believe anything said by such
>> experiencer, but only, if we want, to follow the injunctions that may lead
>> to those occuring in us as well. There is no obligation, but in my mind,
>> there should also not be a rejection.
>>
>>
>>  I disagree. Many (perhaps all) altered states of consciousness can be
>> induced by secular means free of any association with religious or spiritual
>> trappings. What the religious and spiritual terminologies, narratives,
>> rituals, sacraments, art, architecture, etc. mostly seem to contribute is to
>> make a practice or procedure more interesting, entertaining, or emotionally
>> compelling (sometimes frightening) to many. This is a way of exploiting
>> human nature.
>>
>
>
> well again, "a means of exploiting human nature" "hoaxes", instead of :
> different cultural and historical ways to experience human and other
> realities
>
>
> That is not a fair characterization of my position. However it would be
> foolish not to acknowledge that a great portion of what most people
> (including modern, educated westerners) actually believe is contradicted by
> fact, and that (a separate issue) there are many people in all cultures who
> exploit human nature and perpetrate hoaxes.
>
>
>   ... there is a sea of difference between the dead western funerals I
> experienced in Belgium (for my father) and the lively, communal, rich
> funeral rites I experienced here in Thailand (for my mother). An incredible
> difference in effectiveness, psychological, social, spiritual ..
>
>
> There are many levels on which traditional funeral rites comfort the living
> and assist in their adjustment and I don't quarrel with that at all (with
> some possible exceptions) because at that point people are generally not in
> a balanced, integral state. By the same token prayer is known to help many
> people recover from illness, although there is also evidence that
> non-religious guided imagery has a similar impact. In the absence of other
> evidence I attribute these to a type of placebo effect. The downside of the
> spiritual versions of psychoneuroimmunology and suggestion is that false
> belief systems or biases may be reinforced which could have negative as well
> as positive consequences at some point int the future. For example, a person
> convinced that gods had healed them my become fundamentalist or apocalyptic.
> Of course if the interventions are truly life saving I suppose future
> consequences can be damned.
>
>
>   there is really a sea of difference between artificially creating a
> altered states through drugs and machinery, and the collective process that
> goes on through a spiritual path. Which is not to say we could not develop
> and are developing, contempary methodologies, such as John Heron's
> Cooperative INquiry and many others,
> http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Spirituality#Key_Articles
>
>
> I strongly agree that good collective process is often more powerful than
> individual practice, though of course they are complementary, and that
> altered states achieved without drugs or machinery, if possible, are
> preferable--or perhaps I should say they reflect a greater achievement.
>
> However, altered states acheived au naturale do not escape my scrutiny. I
> have had many unassisted "mystical/religious" experiences for which at the
> time my highly educated, practiced, and subtle mind had little recourse but
> to spiritual interpretations. Drugless, in prayer, I was once enclosed in
> two giant, cupped hands that were a translucent, glowing greenish-blue
> color. This was visible to my open eyes. I was certain they were the hands
> of Jesus. Another time while meditating (drugless) in a group of experienced
> meditators in a very special, highly conducive place, I watched myself as I
> lay in a small rowboat floating across a smooth, silvery blue lake towards a
> far shore that was not visible at first. As the far shore just became
> visible, I heard the unmistakable voice of Jesus --not in my mind but
> speaking softly in my ears--giving me a blessing. I realized that the far
> shore was the threshold of the heavenly world where my wife (dead for two
> decades) might be. As I began to anticipate reaching that shore, I was told
> in a different voice, unfamiliar but nonthreatening, that it was not
> permitted. My consciousness gradually returned to the room and I felt better
> than I ever had in my life. Was this a spiritual experience? In form and
> content, perhaps; but in time I came to consider it a self-induced
> hallucination. Curiously, the experience was so incredibly remarkable that I
> did not feel disappointed to think of it as an hallucination. I was very
> impressed with my brain. Despite its past injuries and some genetic
> handicaps, it is a very  fine brain and I gotta love it.
>
>
>     Apart from the rejection of the semantics of the concept of spirit and
>> spirituality, it is now a historical time to go beyond the rejection of 19th
>> century rationalism against anything that is not purely 'rational', to a
>> time of integration and dialogue between the various levels of the human
>> being.
>>
>>
>>  That's what I'm all up in here about. My rational arguments would not be
>> what they are without decades of practical experience and observation of all
>> things mystical and shamanistic from a highly open and sympathetic point of
>> view. I do not reject the experience, but I do reject many of the common
>> interpretations of it.
>>
>
>
> Understood, so do I, but I believe what is needed is participant
> observation, not a superior condemnation from a morally higher vantage point
> (i.e. rational thinking vs. hoaxes and human exploitation)
>
>
> I understand. Despite what I said about loving my brain, I don't think my
> interpretations are ecessively ego-based. But I agree that is not always the
> case for others who object to spiritual interpretations. In the past I was
> often a sympathetic participant-observer of many cultural traditions and
> practices. In the present, my aim is not condemnation but cognitive
> emancipation and evolution. I only reject (for myself) beliefs that are
> contrary to evidence or for which I have compelling (at least to me)
> naturalistic hypotheses; and I only discuss these in what I think are
> appropriate venues.
>
> PR
>



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