Re: A possibly valuable quotation

[Ayten Aydin <***>]

Jack,
If you are interested in knowing more about Ken Wilber's insight, his Book
"No boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal growth", one of his
earlier books (1979), has useful self-teaching elements in it. It is also
easy to read/grasp.
Ayten

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jack Park" <***>
To: <***>
Sent: Saturday, March 27, 2004 6:31 PM
Subject: Re: A possibly valuable quotation


> Hi Judith,
>
> I don't know what's available on your side of the planet, but here in
> California, there is a
>
> Vipassana  retreat that has you sit on your butt for 10 days straight, not
speaking to anyone except during certain times of the day. People I have
talked to said it was hell, but completely worth it. I may yet enter those
gates of hell in the hopes of surviving and seeing something, I'm told, I've
not yet seen.
>
> I find Ken Wilber hard to read, but, in theory, there simply has got to be
something going on in there.  One of my docs went off to UCLA and studied
acupuncture because he had several patients for whom western meds were
failing. He ended up solving the problems those patients experienced. He
knocked my alergies out of me for an entire season. Then, when you read
Candice Pert's _Molecules of Emotion_ and see that her maps of endorphin
receptors conform to 2000 year old acupuncture site maps, you begin to
suspect that thousands of years of emperical science has a lot to offer a
few hundred years of theoretical science.
>
> In the same sense that the analogy I chose says that enlightenment has
room for all points of view, so, I think, does that which we call science.
If a medicine man has to appeal to ancient traditions to solve some modern
problems, then so, it would seem, must our modeling systems search for those
combinations of traditional and theoretical methodologies which open new
vistas of inquiry. A thorougly enlightening read for everybody would be
Andrew Weil's _Spontaneous Healing_.
>
> Cheers
> Jack
>
>
> Judith Rosen wrote:
>
> >Hi Jack,
> >
> >It's interesting that you chose an analogy that comes from a meditation
> >oriented perspective. I'm investigating Vipassana mediatation which is
based
> >on learning to "see things as they really are", also called "insight
> >meditation" and is not connected to the religious side of Buddha's
teaching.
> >(It actually was lost to India for centuries, while Buddhism was
springing
> >up. So it is not part of the "ism" at all. It was kept alive in Burma and
> >has finally been reintroduced to India in the last 50 years or so. In
fact,
> >it's proving so useful that it's being used all over the planet now. But
> >even the Dalai Lama didn't know about it. Interesting stuff to me!)
> >
> >Anyway, I first heard about this meditation from one of my father's
cousins.
> >She was describing what the purpose of it is and how to learn the
technique.
> >>From the sound of it, what Buddha was experiencing was his own
complexity as
> >a system. That tends to sound a little new-agey, even though this is an
> >ancient technique. But there are relations between human beings and every
> >other aspect of this planet. We breathe air because we evolved here. We
> >drink water and need salt because we evolved in the ocean (and blood is
> >almost an exact salinity match for sea water). We need sleep because we
> >evolved on a planet that is rotating as it also orbits the sun, so we
have
> >light and dark phases... But there are even more widespread analogies to
be
> >seen in Rosennean Complexity in the meditation setting. The mind and the
> >body are both complex systems. Vipassana talks of the "mind/body" and
says
> >they are both one.
> >
> >I find it fascinating that both mental pursuits; meditation and science,
can
> >arrive at some strikinly similar concepts.
> >
> >Judith
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Jack Park" <***>
> >To: <***>
> >Sent: Friday, March 26, 2004 1:05 PM
> >Subject: [ROSEN] A possibly valuable quotation
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >>The mention of Ken Wilber got me to looking around. Google really is my
> >>friend, sometimes.
> >>
> >>Here is a particularly interesting snippet that I found in an interview
> >>at
http://www.shambhalasun.com/Archives/Features/1996/Sept96/KenWilber.htm
> >>
> >>" The traditional analogy is the ocean and its waves, which is a really
> >>boring analogy, but bear with me. The wetness of the water is suchness.
> >>All waves are equally wet. One wave isn't wetter than another. And thus,
> >>if I discover the wetness of any wave, I have discovered the wetness of
> >>all. When I directly recognize Suchness or Emptiness, or the wetness of
> >>my own being, right here, right now, then I have discovered the ultimate
> >>truth of all other waves as well. Emptiness is not a Really Big Wave set
> >>apart from little waves, but is the wetness equally present in all
> >>waves, high or low, big or small, sacred or profane-which is why
> >>Emptiness cannot be used to prefer one wave over another.
> >>
> >>Enlightenment is thus not catching a really big wave, but noticing the
> >>already present wetness of whatever wave I'm on. Moreover, I am then
> >>radically liberated from the narrow identification with this little wave
> >>called me, because I am fundamentally one with all other waves-no
> >>wetness is outside of me. I am /literally/ one taste with the entire
> >>ocean and all its waves. And that taste is wetness, suchness, Emptiness,
> >>the utter transparency of the Great Perfection.
> >>
> >>At the same time, I do not know all the details of all the other
> >>waves-their height, their weight, the number of them, and so on. These
> >>relative truths I will have to discover wave by wave, endlessly. No
> >>Sutra of Wetness will tell about that, nor could it. And no Tantra of
> >>the Soggy will clue me in on this.
> >>
> >>That's why I earlier said that Buddhist contemplation is sufficient for
> >>ultimate truth: it will directly show you the wetness of all waves, the
> >>radical suchness of all phenomena, the Emptiness in the heart of the
> >>Kosmos itself, the primordial purity that is your own intrinsic
> >>awareness in this moment, and this moment, and this. But meditation will
> >>not, and really cannot, tell you about all the details of all the
> >>various waves that nevertheless arise as the ceaseless play of Emptiness
> >>and spontaneous luminosity. As you say, it will not automatically give
> >>you calculus, or the human genome, or quantum physics. And historically,
> >>it definitely did not, which should tell us something right there."
> >>
> >>OK. It's cast in a vocabulary that's not all that familiar to me, one
> >>that I'm only of late starting to want to grok, given that one of my own
> >>physicians recently studied acupuncture because his western meds were
> >>not solving the problems presented by a few of his patients. But the
> >>snippet echos my own intuition that there really is a big picture
> >>(enlightenment) that we are all looking for. Maybe in the context of
> >>this list, that big picture is Robert Rosen's what life is. The snippet
> >>suggests that no single modeling means is to be favored by the big
> >>
> >>
> >picture.
> >
> >
> >>Just my 0.02 EURs for the day.
> >>Jack
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >
>