sapphi_snake said:
Here's a book written on the subject. I think you're giving a negative connotation to the word 'hallucination' (though, if you consider the hallucination world to be real, I can easily see why you'd think find this ideea insulting). I'd also be careful when playing the whole 'your body is a temple' card. The body has a very bad reputation is Christianity. To see things 'as they are'? You mean, because this world isn't real? Because it's illusory? And the state you're describing is called 'trance'. |
Look man,
People may see hippies meditating and doing drugs and playing on their drums and therefore always have this cheap connotation with meditation and yoga, but the fact that there is some negative sentiment towards these things in you is not my problem.
(EDIT) The book mentions fasting for a fortnight - OF COURSE you'll start hallucinating then. That's a weak, incomplete argument about a subject the author hasn't even bothered to properly research like with his stupid Hawking quotes. Just because there's a book written doesn't mean anything - I've seen (even in physics journals) some really poorly written published literature. There is a lot more literature glorifying the benefits of meditation than the opposite.
Do you really want me to answer your questions with philosophy? Somehow I doubt it so I don't know what the point would be of answering(?).
What I do understand is when people scoff at the idea of these things due to a 'scientific' or 'mechanistic' view of this world. If indeed consciousness is simply a product of the complexity of the neural networks in our brains and ultimately everything can be described by physics alone then yes - I guess in that world meditation and yoga and spiritual knowledge would be a joke. That does not make it a joke however, since we can hardly claim to live in such a world. Funny how the people still see the Newtonian picture of the world and have no idea just how insanely strange everything around us is.
