[P2P-F] Fwd: is there no p2p spirituality because there is no spirituality
Poor Richard
poor_richard at att.net
Mon Sep 12 20:10:16 CEST 2011
Oh my. I haven't ever used my webcam, and don't know from skype. I'm
camera shy and people shy, too. But I'll think about practicing some and
see how it feel.
PR
On 9/12/2011 9:36 AM, Amaia Arcos wrote:
> What about a Skype based video-conference? We can make our own coffee
> and sip along, as if we were physically in the same place?
>
> I think this sort of discussion is more fun "in person" :)
>
> It could be recorded for archival and publishing purposes..
>
> On 12 September 2011 16:26, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net
> <mailto:michel at p2pfoundation.net>> wrote:
>
> 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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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
>
>
>
>
> --
> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net -
> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>
> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com;
> Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
>
>
> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens;
> http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens;
> http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>
>
>
>
> --
> “We would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans
> if we moved continuously on foot across the surface of the earth”
> Bruce Chatwin
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