I didn’t know whether to put this in GD or MPSIMS, but I figured we’d find out quick enough.
Non-duality, basically the idea that every atom that makes up your body, every electron and proton and neutron are linked to those which make up everything else. That there is no separate ‘I’ outside of everything else. Eckhart Tolle likes to say that it’s the ‘nature of oneness.’
What do you think? Do we exist outside of our selves? If we are connected on the quantum level to everything around us, why does our mind naturaly create dichotomies, categorizations and labels?
What does the word “quantum” have to do with anything?
Obviously, there is a sense in which my body is linked to the rest of the universe (you hardly need high-end, relatively modern physics to see this; any little kid can grasp this), and yet, just as clearly, the label and concept of me as apart from the rest of the universe is in many ways both usable and useful.
What does it mean to ask “Do we exist outside of our selves”? If you answer that, you’ll probably no longer feel the need to ask the question.
The electrons and quarks which make up our bodies interact with electrons and quarks in the rest of the planet, or with particles in the Andromeda Galaxy, according to exactly the same rules by which they interact with other particles in your body. The real question is, so what?
So what? To a physicist like yourself it may be so what, to a layman like me it’s very cool. I’ve been reading a lot of Ken Wilber lately, but I’m also involved with a project on transpersonal psychology. Its an emerging field where we are studying the “spiritual” side of human development. And when you get scientists doing that - you get discussions on non-duality. It’s cool stuff if you ask me.
Well it may be obvious to you, but there are quite a few people studying this ‘sense’. Try convincing funders to pay for a study on spirituality, chi, life force etc…etc…it’s not easy. I’d love to see the kids who are talking about this concept. Its neat stuff for sure.
When I asked about existing outside of ourselves, I should have further clarified what I was trying to convey. Basically, the idea of self and your physical body as being separate is an idea that’s been around for eons. Some people call it soul. It’s that basic idea that people in the transpersonal psychology field are looking to study. It’s that idea that has dawned religions and complex human emotion over the millennia. It’s simple, but that’s what makes it so powerful, and to me very interesting.
It’s called Integral Theory. The wiki article gives a good overview. It’s spawned from early work by William James, Carl Jung, and Freud. Jung called it the animus, or animus mundi. The spiritual side to human beings. The side that questions our own sentience. It’s not 100% pure science of course, but we’re working on finding quantifiable measures. There are a few.
The the fact that everything interacts is not what we are studying, we’re looking at our senses in relation to our understanding of the interconnectedness.
Philosophr, your gravity is pulling on me at this very instant, and mine is tugging you toward me.
The thing is, it ain’t doing so in any meaningful way: the decisions you make with your brain are probably never in your entire life affected by the gravity of anything except for the planet on which you stand and the sun around which it rotates and the moon that rotates around it. And even those last two interactions are indirect (that is, you’re not directly affected by the moon’s gravity, but rather are affected by tides that are affected by the moon’s gravity).
Quantum mechanics is the same thing. Yeah, we may all be connected, but not in a way that influences us.
We don’t really know if we are influenced by the interconnectedness of various forms. I’m not talking about gravity or phases of the moon, I understand how those work. I’m specifically looking at human emotions and development in relation to our own perceptions of self. Trying to continue on where the late great psychologists of our time left off. Jung didn’t develop his theories of the animus fully before he died. There are a lot of people at places like the California Institute of Integral Studies, and other places that are looking at the science behind spirituality.
There is nothing about you that is not your atoms (or quarks or energy distribution; whatever…). None of the mysteries of the quantum or large-scale behaviour of the physical world support any such concept.
The thing is, it’s pretty much a testable hypothesis. You can knock off someone’s brain a neuron at a time (theoretically, one atom at a time; in practice a handful at a time with certain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and the like…) and bit by bit, all of the stuff that was that person slips away. And it slips away bit by bit exactly in step with the loss of the physical structure.
I have never understood why, in the face of such obvious evidence that our consciousness and our personality (and whatever other characteristics lead us to suspect there is something more in the first place) is provably a consequence of (only) the physical world, that this insistence on examining “duality” exists.
I think people examine duality because of it’s impact on all humans. We can clearly see the empirical reasons for existence. It’s the things we cannot see, touch, taste, hear or smell that we are trying to study.
One does not have to be spiritual to understand spirituality and the concept of soul. An Atheist can look at non-duality as a level of energy or consciousness, thats really what we are looking at, levels of consciousness.
I can give a hearty nay to duality without denying that our personal growth depends on our environment and others in it. What about this supposed connectedness is any different from my purely non-dualistic view? The difference between science and philosophy is that science can test its conclusions. New thoughts in philosophy are valuable in giving us new ways at looking at the world, but they are never conclusive. Ditto for Freud and Jung.
Integrated studies sound like the common thought that knowing everything would be cool. We actually need to put a structure on all this knowledge. It’s a lot easier to talk about this than to actually do it.
I’ve read most of Jung’s Collected Works :eek: and about one hundred other books on jungian psychology; that doesn’t make me to decide what Jung thought or didn’t. - But this definitely needs a cite, because it doesn’t sound like anything Jung wrote on animus, much less “animus mundi”, a concept I don’t believe I’ve heard before. I you mean “anima” it’s closer to Jung, but still… I cite would be needed.
Just because it’s a pseudo science, doesn’t mean Jung is involved.
I think what you’re getting at is the study of the structure of the human mind. We naturally generalize and categorize as a way of comprehending the world around us. The impression of self is a consequence of that. It is useful to keep a mental model of oneself as distinct from other things in the world.
Hi **Wakinyan **- I always hated writing on Jung, because he had so many nuances every other word had to be a cite! In the Handbook of Junian Psychology there is a passage about his anima, animus and anima mundi. Check it out, it’s basically Jungs ‘professional opinion’ on enlightenment.
He writes about it in other books as well, but rarely concentrated on it because of it’s inherent problem of not being able to be measured.
Transpersonal psychology was born from writings like these from the early greats.
Until Monsieur Tolle offers some empirical, verifiable, repeatable evidence to support his contentions, I will assume he is talking out of his ass to sell books. Should he offer such evidence I will consider reducing my mocking of him.
I have the answer to this one. The primitive man who didn’t figure out that a predator was different from him got eaten by it. Then he did become one with the tiger, on the inside.
Your car is able to draw in fuel to a small chamber, perfectly mix it with air, and detonate it all in the period of under a thousandths of a second.
That’s very cool!
But just because something is cool and complex doesn’t mean that one should be attributing any sort of stoner hippy interconnected universe stuff to it. There’s an infinite number of mindblowing cool stuff in the universe, but I think you’ll find that these are things which “just are” and any sort of deeper meaning that you may try to impress onto them is only saying anything about how you would like to see the universe, and not anything that actually has anything to do with the object being discussed nor, indeed, anything about how the universe is actually put together.
Well, Stoner Hippies came up with some pretty cool stuff over the years - Carl Sagan smoked more than his fair share of Mary Jane while working with gaussian distribution curves!
I’m not talking about Unscientific Folk Tradition stuff either, the field of psychology is a science, transpersonal studies are part of that science. We’re not impressing feelings onto anything, I know it’s not as flashy as studying techy stuff, but someones got to study it right? I’m only part of one part of a study, there are competant scientists and theorists doing their share. The field as a whole is still working on a shared group of methodologies for assessing and quantifying data. We’re working on it.
