You apparently don’t get it then. That’s not a very nice thing to say about gnani yoga.
It is trying to make a wider point about economics, for starters. I thought you’d get it.
What does it have to do with yoga? You’re probably thinking of hatha yoga, posture yoga. This isn’t that.
This thread? It’s higher education,we’re finding out what you think about it, that’s what.
I’m convinced you’re thinking of Hatha Yoga. I’m not expecting you to swallow all of this as your personal beliefs. OTOH, I don’t think you’re at all prepared to debunk Yogi Ramacharaka. If you really can it will be a credit to your perspective, and I wait to hear it.
If that is “higher education” it is of the variety that is used to identify oneself as an overprivileged member of societies class of socioeconomic “elites”. People who are either naive or affluent enough that they don’t need to study something “practical” (or anything at all really if they don’t want to). IOW it is an education whose purpose is not to prepare someone for a career or to give them the tools to benefit themselves or other people. It’s purpose is to provide a pedigre while allowing enough free time to pursue a lifestyle of suitable leisure.
Not having the benefit of extraordinarily wealthy parents, I unfortunately had to resign myself to more bourgeoisie studies like engineering and business.
I’m sorry, but just what is it about that paragraph that you think is so insightful? We are one with all life? I think Mike Myers used that one in his last comedy. That’s the kind of thing you’d see on the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s bumper sticker. Right next to the one that says, “I nailed Mia Farrow.”
Besides, it’s utter nonsense. We are no more connected to flatworms than we are to rocks.
You never did answer my devastating criticism about the last paragraph you posted. He built the whole theme of that passage out of the idea that evolution is a process of moving into higher forms of being. Evolution does no such thing. Therefore, not only does his entire thesis collapse, but building it on that ‘fact’ indicates that the man is shockingly ignorant of the science he’s trying to co-opt into his philosophy.
The stuff you have been posting is exactly what I find wrong with modern education. The banal and trite is elevated to the status of educational enlightenment. It’s kind of like when people quote Deepak Chopra then look smug like they’ve revealed themselves as intellectual powerhouses, when in fact all they’ve shown is that if you wrap bullshit up in the right kind of language, they’ll happily swallow it.
I haven’t had time to reply this week. Let me go back and respond to what I’ve missed and see if this starts to make more sense.
I originally posted the link to gnani yoga in response to this:
Sam had a bad experience with a philosophy class and came away thinking that the subject is all about professors indulging total amateurs in an attempt to move them along. To this day I guess he thinks the whole field is the equivalent of the study of Peruvian toenail clippings!
The next day my bookstore friend was talking about gnani yoga, and reading a few pages into it I brought me to Yogi Ramacharaka’s treatment of the philosophy of space and time.
On time:
On space:
These are a few excerpts, he treats the whole subject in just a few pages starting on page 4. Why he is framing things in terms of the Eternal and the Absolute, well, you’d have to follow along for the first few pages before that.
I just thought that since you’d had a curiosity about the subject in college and came away disappointed, you might appreciate a concise treatment of the subject by someone who is not stoned, not being paid to indulge amateurs, and is completely serious. I also thought you would find it interesting that it is a part of the foundation of this guy’s rational, structured philosophy.
The point isn’t to sell you on the philosophy itself (though throughout this guy’s work it is step-by-step from one thing to the next, so be careful about latching onto an isolated section and declaring it bullshit unprepared) or turn you into a Hare Krishna or something. Only to point you to a serious treatment of the subject, in a context. That’s pretty much it!
What I’m trying to get you to understand is that your opinions on this subject- which you could perceive is bigger than the remote subject of Hindu philosophy if you were properly educated- have no merit whatsoever as you are unprepared to defend those opinions. You haven’t debunked so much as a single phrase of this guy’s work, and I doubt you can. Your ‘opinions’ are pretty much a defense mechanism.
I’m not talking about school. This isn’t something I recommend teaching in all the universities across the country. This is about what you don’t understand.
Obviously your idea of poetry amounts to belle lettres:
If I’m wrong about you, maybe you can explain better what you mean. I agree there is a sort of poetic quality to the guy’s writing, but it takes the form of a rational step-by-step argument. An argument you call bullshit- again, without debunking so much as a single phrase! You must have a rather distended sense of pride to think you have the authority to make such judgments.
Again, you’re thinking of Hatha Yoga. Kind of like gym class or aerobics. Gnani yoga doesn’t deal with getting fit or striking any poses. It is a philosophical approach. Again, the point isn’t to get you to buy into it or go become a Hare Krishna, but to get some familiarity with these issues.
He doesn’t say that the structures he’s referring to will necessarily be ‘better’, but that it is the process by which things can arrive at a higher expression of being- as he conceives it. He allows them to go backwards as well. It’s about attempts at adaptation, obviously with a little bit more packed in there due to his yogi perspective. Don’t buy it? That’s fine. At least you tried to debunk one of his ideas directly, though I think you’ll have to do better than that.
Maybe you can give examples of what you don’t see as ‘rigorous’. There is plenty of implicit rigor in this guy’s writing if you know how to perceive it. For instance, in just the first few pages he takes a hard stand on a number of classic, multiple choice type philosophical arguments. He draws the line between what can be known and not in a way that Wittgenstein would be satisfied with, only arriving there without the tortuous p’s and q’s and x’s of his formal proof. Maybe you’d like him to go into that kind of explication- and I have a feeling Yogi Ramacharaka could hold up his end of that conversation- but he’s actually more clear and concise.
Again, you don’t give a specific example so it is hard to respond more directly to you.
Pretty much an ad hominem dodge. If you want to mock it that’s your business, but it is clear that you don’t understand the subject and would benefit from a clearer understanding of it.
Gah. You’re not helping your case. Clearly, we’re approaching this from two completely different mindsets. What exactly is the Maharishi’s expertise in physics that allows him to tell us definitively what space and time really are? And working words like ‘relativity’ into a discussion of time, when all he’s talking about is differences in the attention of the brain, strikes me as an attempt to sound all sciencey while not really knowing what he’s talking about.
BTW, I didn’t have just one ‘bad experience’ in that course. The course came with a lot of reading requirements from the various philosophers who have studied space and time. Some of it was thoughtful and reasonable, but a lot of it was new-age nonsense, and it was all treated the same in the class.
If you’re talking about me, you’re wildly mistaken. I’m certainly no member of any overpriveledged elite. Haw, haw, haw. Affluent? Har de har har har!!!
Pedigree? Me??? ROTFL. The only thing special about me is that I quit watching television at a young age. Hardly unearned ‘leisure’.
I didn’t have extraordinarily wealthy parents either. Quite the opposite In fact, I’ve had a job since I was 12. My academic performance was such that I was invited to attend schools like Yale, for example, but being from the family I am meant I had no choice but to attend pretty much the last school I wanted. I had a nice scholarship for that, and originally set out to study engineering myself. The school I attended didn’t offer the programs I wanted though, so I got a number of engineering minors and switched to pre law as a plan B. I learned about some formal logic and the history of philosophy from that. Being effectively though not formally bankrupt after college (even though I’d worked all through it, no help you see) I got to work, applied what I learned and am doing quite well now thanks. Nothing impractical about it you see.
I think you have more to gain from this than Sam, msmith. There doesn’t seem to be anything to distinguish your ‘opinions’ from superstitions as they seem grounded on a shallow foundation which, even so, you seem unable to articulate or defend. I’m trying to help, that’s all.
Go back to the metaphor of steam power running either a coarse motor or a delicate instrument. In the same context, let’s say it isn’t steam power, or the Absolute running through a structure, but rather money flowing through the structure of a business. It goes in, in goes out, and depending on if the business is well-designed or not it either grows or goes bankrupt, no? All pretty obvious.
Comparing the structures of various businesses though, educated people are able to perceive things that the purely business educated seemingly are not. Compare a grocery store to a payday loans operation. Both are businesses, both turn a profit. The store however takes on the character of a public institution- there is a genuine two-way transaction there that benefits all parties involved. The payday loans operation OTOH has a structure like that of a colossal mosquito, ramming its proboscis into the wallets of vulnerable people and sucking them dry.
To a business-minded person, the only consideration is whether or not a profit is being made, even if they become the guy at the center of a swarm of these social parasite establishments to the point that they resemble the goddamn Witch of the West with her troupe of thieving, flying monkeys.
An educated person doesn’t follow profit to the point of sociopathy. I’d like you to figure this out before you acquire the kind of influence that allows you to really fuck things up.
The guy doesn’t seem to deny scientific discoveries-he cites plenty of experiments- though I wouldn’t be surprised if this was written decades ago.
There are two mindsets here though, you’re right. Just check out the first 2-3 pages again. The physics he seems to latch onto the most are simple things like the conservation of energy- you know, e=mc^2, energy and matter are effectively equivalent, and energy is neither created nor destroyed. So, energy lasts forever, going both backwards and forwards in time. This is suggestive of deeper ideas to Yogi Ramachakara, which he walks through in a surprisingly not-long-winded way. He steps out of the field of physics at a certain point, describing what he sees as the bigger picture and which he’s defend as including physics. Again, the point isn’t to get you to adopt his view, but to be able to deal with what is actually a sophisticated philosophical work without embarrassing yourself.
He claims there is a single thing (The One or whatever) back of matter, energy, life, that includes and is the source of all of them. Kind of a unified theory of philosophy. He says why he thinks so in just the first couple of pages.
Why not?
His point isn’t about higher forms of being per se, but a higher expression of the One Life, as he puts it. Again, go back to the beginning pages if you want to chop down the root of his point. Thing is though, you might be obliged to take a contrary position on one or many of these classic philosophical arguments, and would then be obliged to develop the logical structure that includes all those positions in a non-contradictory way. Good luck- I’ll read your argument in full when you’re done, I promise.
The point is to not be susceptible to bullshit. We’re swimming in a sea of bullshit all the time in this country, and lots of people swallow it whole without realizing their own ignorance. Deepak Chopra? Never read him, but we’re probably better off studying math judging by what I know of his reputation.
Maybe someone will come along and defend Mr. Chopra for us.
I said that often this writing is trite and banal. For example, his description of space as merely being the distance between objects is not a new or insightful observation. This was basically the position of Liebnitz, who first described this in the 17th century. But a real, deep understanding of space has to go far beyond this. For one thing, Einstein proved that space is non-Euclidian. There is interaction between space and mass and velocity. Space itself appears to have energy, called vacuum energy. It’s been measured. There’s much we don’t understand about the nature of space. To say that space and time only exist in our perceptions confuses perception with reality. The fact that a boring job seems to pass more slowly than one that’s interesting really says nothing at all about the nature of time. It’s a description of how our brains process information, and nothing more.
That’s my biggest problem with people taking the philosophy of space and time too far. They are simplifying what is in fact an extremely complex subject, and then stating their simplifications as revealed wisdom.
This is common in pop science, pop psychology, and pop philosophy. Complex issues are simplified to fit some elaborate model the pop philosopher has come up with. The smart ones make it seem to fit together very well. But in the end, they’re just bloviating. They have no expertise from which to draw their sweeping conclusions.
Let me give you an example. Consider Erich Von Daniken’s ‘Worlds in Collision’. The book is an attempt to explain biblical and other historical claims through science. The parting of the red sea was the result of a gravitational interaction as a planet flew by. Manna from heaven was residue from a close approach by Venus. And so on. And it pulls together information from so many different specialties that no one reader can hope to know all of it. So a physicist would read it, and say “Of course, the physics in the book is idiotic. But I’m very impressed with Von Daniken’s knowledge of history. Maybe there’s something there.” Then a historian would read it and say, “Of course, the history is ridiculous. But I’m quite impressed by Von Daniken’s understanding of physics. Maybe there’s something there.” So they’d dismiss the book as a statement of fact, but conclude that regardless of the errors made, there are valuable insights to be found. And the people who know just a little physics, and just a little history, are often left thinking that the whole thing is brilliant. That’s how you baffle people with BS.
Von Daniken’s flaw is that he’s dealing with subjects that he really doesn’t understand. For example, to make his theory work, he claimed that Venus’ atmosphere is full of carbohydrates (the ‘manna’). It appears that Von Daniken was a little fuzzy on the difference between carbohydrates and hydrocarbons. Likewise, he claimed that Venus was calved out of Jupiter - spit out through some undetermined process. Unfortunately, he wasn’t up to doing all that math stuff, and it turns out that any spitting out of Venus would require so much energy that the planet would basically be a glowing plasma or something, and certainly a lot hotter than it is today, even allowing for the cooling effect of thousands of years.
Likewise with your Yogi. When he uses ‘the relativity of time’ to describe the fact that our peception of the passage of time is affected by the state of our brain, he’s either being careless with terms, or intentionally injecting a world like ‘relativity’ in a discussion of time to try to inject a patina of scientific respectability to his philosophy. At best, he should understand that a lay reader might read this and think, “oh, so THAT is what they mean by relativity! I get this Einstein stuff now.”
Now, I’m not saying there aren’t useful insights in his work. Hell, even Tony Robbins makes a good point now and then. I just don’t think it’s the revealed wisdom of the ages, and I certainly don’t think that his descriptions of the nature of space and time come even close to the understanding of it that you can learn by studying math and physics.
And all pretty useless. Again, that is a trite observation, using a metaphor that may or may not even remotely fit the circumstances. I guess it sounds good, though. So it’s got that going for it.
Tell, me - just what business decisions would you change, given the insight gleaned by the metaphor of steam running through an engine, that a less educated person might not get? And what if the metaphor of the business is more like electrons flowing through a pnp junction? Maybe if you reverse the business process, you can block your losses!
Or maybe the takeaway is that driving business processes through metaphor is a really bad idea, and you’re better off applying actual understanding of the business and how it works.
Actually, this is a good example of how a little education, applied to an area of which you know nothing about, can allow you to convince yourself that you have deep insight that others lack, when in fact all you’ve done is justify your own biases.
A more nuanced understanding of payday loans might lead you to conclude that they are simply a form of very high-risk loan, for which the lender must charge high interest rates in order to make a profit. There’s nothing intrinsically evil about them, and for some people, they are a godsend when sparingly used. Others over-use them and get themselves into trouble. But there’s nothing about the concept of payday loans that make them even remotely like the sucking proboscis of a mosquito, even if you did take an intro biology course.
You managed to add biology AND literature to your analogy. Truly you must have brilliant insight. Now if you could just manage to add some actual economics and math.
So your hypothesis is that all educated people are opposed to payday loans? And that payday loans are profit to the point of sociopathy?
Here, let me throw my own analogy out there: You’re treating the symptom, not the disease. There’s nothing wrong with payday loans, but there may be problems with the people who come to rely on them because they can’t control their impulses. Perhaps your mosquito analogy has caused you to focus on the wrong thing.
I didn’t say you. I said it’s the type of nonsense stoners and kids from affluent families studied in elite colleges so they would have more time for ultimate frisbee.
And they often end up going to law school once they can’t find meaningful work after graduation.
I’m curious as to how any of the mumbo-jumbo you posted makes you any less suceptible to deception. If anything it is the language of deception (which, as someone who studied pre-law, you probably know). It requires no support or evidence. It’s purpose is to influence others towards a particular end using emotional appeals and colorful metaphores.
For example:
Well…it doesn’t really represent a mosquito, does it? I mean aside from the obvious physical inconsistancies, a payday loans operation doesn’t ram anything into anyone. People decide to use their services of their own free will and they do so because they lack the analytical understanding to realize it’s not a good deal. Your metaphore is simply a nice (if biased) way to present that message.
And clearly there is a demand for bullshit artists in modern society - media, advertising, sales, marketing, PR, law and so on. The problem is that unsustainable bullshit will not sustain itself indefinitely.
YR is talking about infinite space, and the mind’s inability to comprehend it. On the one hand science suggests an infinite universe. OTOH, this reality confounds our conception of distance, and there is really nothing satifactory to replace it in this instance. I don’t know if that is ‘new’ or ‘insightful’- I don’t think novelty is the criteria though. I thought the criteria was ‘debunkable’ or ‘not-debunkable’.
Sam Stone said:
I’m glad you brought that up. Let me know if you don’t think this is a satisfactory rebuttal, but that seems to confirm YR’s yogi teachings:
YR says elsewhere there is no ‘nothing’ or inert matter. There are philosophical problems with the existence of a ‘nothing space’ anyway. So, thanks to Einstein, ‘space’ isn’t inert either, but can be associated with it’s own vacuum energy, and so, having energy, can be reduced to a form of matter. How do you like the name ‘ether’?
Point is, you seem to be on the same side as YR on this point. Maybe you’re fighting me and confusing us?
Sam Stone said:
Yah probably.
Sam Stone said:
You’re going back to the root of gnani yoga. It’s on page 1. YR says:
YR doesn’t want to confuse anything with reality. I don’t think he is saying that time and space exist only in our perceptions, but that our perceptions cannot perceive their ultimate realities.
Sam Stone said:
Sure it does. The perceived duration of passed time is relative to the perceiving mind involved.
Sam Stone said:
I don’t thing YR is doing that. And I don’t think gnani yoga presents itself as ‘revealed wisdom’. You aren’t asked to believe anything unquestioningly. It is all supposed to make sense, once you understand it. Of course if it is debunkable it might not make sense, or maybe it will ‘make sense’ but not be true… you know what I mean.
Sam Stone said:
But that is kind of a sweeping conclusion, no? We’re talking about YR, and you’ve created this strawman category of ‘pop ----’. Cut it out. He could be wrong, but his expertise is evident.
Sam Stone said:
So this guy talked some bullshit. Who cares? Don’t confuse either this guy, or me, with YR.
Sam Stone wrote:
Are you seriously making an analogy between Van Daniken and YR? Forget Van Daniken and debunk YR’s writing already. I already told you to cut out the strawman thing. YR’s use of the word ‘relative’ seems justifiable- you’d need some definitive proof that YR’s intent is to deceive (inject a patina of scientific respectability) to salvage this point.
Sam Stone wrote:
Gnani yoga isn’t targeted at your ‘lay reader’. He said what he meant, you’re putting words in his mouth.
You won’t hurt my feelings if you can debunk YR. I do kind of prefer that you hurry up and get to it though.
Sam Stone said:
What good point did Tony Robbins make? Can you post a cite? I thought we were talking about YR.
If you’re going to compare the two, why don’t you make a more specific, substantial comparison?
Sam Stone said:
It isn’t ‘revealed wisdom’. That is what the Bible is supposed to be, and you’re supposed to believe that through faith. As I said, gnani yoga is supposed to make sense to people who understand it, without any ‘leaps of faith’ at all. I don’t think any accurate piece of math or physics is excluded from YR’s view, so again you’re aiming at a false target. That’s my take anyway. If YR is wrong and you can debunk him, that’s great, let’s see it already. Your opinions I suppose answer the op, so it’s a win-win question on my part, no?
If you get to keep your money then who pays for the courts that enforce your voluntary agreements? I mean without court won’t your agreements become a bit too voluntary?
Have you been in a coma for the last 30 years? Maybe not most but I can identify a few people on this board and a pretty good chunk of one of this country’s political parties (at least until it becomes inconvenient for them).
