Posted by Ivan on January 27, 19101 at 13:16:48:
In Reply to: Re: Christ OS- Psi integrative vs Px ascesis Processes posted by johnboy on January 27, 19101 at 10:35:50:
: Friends: A friend of mine recently returned from an international conference for Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (I think is what it was) and said that, from their working group exchanges, he learned that it was not uncommon for people, in both traditions, to confuse psychological integrative processes with spiritual practice/ascesis processes and that much unnecessary harm and suffering results therefrom.
People, you don't need to inject an immaterial, spiritual scheme here. All that we need to distinguish is between the various forms of neuroses and psychoses, whether we're dealing with obsessive-compulsive behaviors, addictions or schizophrenia, for instance.
Is the processor dysfunctional or maybe just the math co-processor? Is it the graphics or sound card or maybe some RAM modules which need fixing? Maybe it's only a corrupt *.dat or driver which needs reinstallation?
DarwinOS is already functional in two modes of consciousness; let's say it has two chips, a processor and a co-processor, plugged in to the motherboard. These modes are distinguished by their predominant traits, some contrasted below:
receptivity vs activity
intuitive vs rational
creativity vs strategizing and decision-making
conjunctive awareness vs disjunctive awareness
holistic operators vs causal operators
logical causes vs efficient causes
alpha & theta waves vs beta waves
relaxed muscle tone vs increased muscle tension
nonlingual vs linguistic
nondiscursive vs discursive
noetic clarity, creative synthesis & intuitive leaps vs narrowed attentional field, engaged intention and analysis
ineffable vs verbal
passive vs active
does not vs does discriminate, filter, analyze or describe sensory input
no control vs control of soma/psyche/environment
deautomatization vs automatization of habituations
reconciling vs polarizing/dichotomizing/atomizing
nonrational vs rational
preconscious/inner world vs conscious/outer world enters awareness
mastery of internal vs external environment
experience of unity vs separateness
intense affective vs cognitive experience
non-self vs ego/self
perceptual expansion vs contraction
phenomenological vs scientific
During the course of DarwinOS development, as the processing
capability of these processors increased exponentially (a la Moore's
Law, for instance), there were protorational, protomoral and
protoaesthetic adaptations selected
in a prelingual stage of our cognitive evolution.
These adaptations, system upgrades, account for the deeply felt but ineffable experiences of truth, goodness and beauty.
Furthermore, they are experienced both as absolute presuppositions
and as a highly evolved social hedonism, all residing in both the
limbic and the right-brained nonrational,
inutitive aspect of our bimodal consciousness.
It is very difficult to uncover such adaptations, hopelessly entangled as they are with the products of cultural evolution. Still, we can learn much from the subdisciplines of comparative developmental psychology (cognitive, personality, faith, affective, moral development, etc), of comparative transcultural anthropology.
And, what we have learned is that the ontological discontinuities being discussed in this forum, between one operating system and the next, are only appearances, DarwinOS upgrades that "carbonize" based on cultural evolution software programs.
Further, sometimes people, through meditation practices, undergo profound epistemological shifts (some permanent, but usually transient) and tend to want to call these carbonization processes "spiritual phenomena".
Why introduce needless ontological discontinuities? Even your OS 9.6 upgrade to OS 10 doesn't deal with anything having to do with true "being". That discontinuity is not ontic but noetic; it's a cognitive departure, not a physical departure.
Who knows where DarwinOS will go as we approach the next Axial Period? I'm sure it will not involve being transformed by having sex with aliens though. Neither will it involve our bodies being inhabited by ghosts with a separate agenda, Holy or otherwise.
I suspect, strongly, that the confusion you refer to between psychological integrative processes and spiritual practice/ascesis processes and any harm and suffering resulting therefrom, is more likely a confusion between various disorders:
organic psychotic conditions, dementia from alcoholism, drugs, chronic organic brain syndromes, schizophrenia, affective psychoses, paranoid states,anxiety disorders, reactive psychoses, dissociative disorders, neuroses, obsessive-compulsive disorder (ever see those little old ladies with their beads running around touching statues?), reactive depression, personality disorders, and NEED I GO ON?
As Scott Peck says: human behavior is overdetermined and very complex. Having pscyhologists, psychiatrists and spiritual counselors poitning fingers at each other is unnecessary. Introducing a spirit realm is especially uncalled for.
DarwinOS has its bugs! But that's to be expected.
BE PATIENT! Evolution hasn't finished with me yet!
Ivan