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The following are my main takeaways from the video, quoting and paraphrasing the content.
Experiment: probing a cup with a pen, with closed eyes.
You can be aware of the cup through the pen. So the probe is transparent to you, and the cup is opaque. Or you can be aware of the pen through your fingers. Or you can be aware of your fingers through your feelings.
You can be aware through your glasses (transparent), or you can be aware of your glasses (opaque).
This also works with psychotechnologies
. For example, you can integrate literacy with your cognition so well that you don’t look at literacy very much, you automatically look through it.
attention
is flowing in and out with transparency and opacity shifting. Subsidiary / implicit awareness vs focal / explicit awareness.
Experiment: read “THE CHT” written with bent H letters that look closer to A letters.
The letters are the features and the words are the gestalt. In order to read the words you must read each individual letter, but in order to disambiguate each letter you must have read the whole word.
attention
is flowing up and down between feature and gestalt.
mindfulness
optimizes the attention
processes.
scaling up
is moving from feature to gestalt and moving from opacity to transparency.
scaling down
is moving from gestalt to feature and from transparency to opacity.
meditation
means moving towards the center.
vipassana meditation
: people train by paying attention to the feelings and sensations that are being generated in their abdomen as they breath, and breaking their gestalt into features. This is scaling down
. Normally we do not pay attention to our sensations, we pay attention through our sensation to the world.
contemplation
comes from temple, which comes from a part of the sky that you look up to, to see the signs from the gods. contemplation
is to look up towards the divine. contemplation
emphasizes scaling up
.
There are two moments to having an insight
:
scale down
scale up
mindfulness
is teaching us to appropriate and train a flexibility of attentional scaling
so that we can intervene effectively in how we are framing our problems and increase the chances of insight
when it is needed.
pure consciousness event
is a kind of mystical experience you can have when you scale down
all the way. You are not conscious of anything, you are just fully present as a consciousness.
resonant at-onement
is a mystical experience you can have when you scale up
all the way. See everything as interconnected, flowing, impermanent. Create overarching gestalt, so overarching that it includes and encompasses you. A super-flow state, in which you are deeply at-one with everything.
state of non-duality
(prajna
) is a third kind of mystical experience that includes both pure consciousness
and resonant at-onement
at the same time. Fundamental insight
into your existential modes
of being
. One way to get into this is state is to repeatedly scale up
as you inhale and scale down
as you exhale.
Normally when we come out of an altered state of consciousness (e.g. being drunk) we say that it was not real. But sometimes, the opposite occurs: people say that the altered state was more real, and this makes them radically transform their whole life.
Most of the world’s religions that emerged at the Axial Revolution are predicated on the idea that there are higher states of consciousness that should empower, challenge and encourage us to engage in radical transformation. 30 to 40% of the population has experienced these events and found them deeply meaningful
.
Next: episode 10.
Previous: episode 8.