Og

You're suggesting that this state that you call "superconscious" is something other than a physical state of neurons in the brain?

I call BS on "going beyond reason, transcending ordinary human nature"... I don't think you get what the yogis are talking about. I think this is just western thick headed idolatry given an eastern makeover. Or maybe the ideas came out of the east into the west and have always been there.

The whole point of enlightenment is that you're already there. You don't have to "go beyond" or "transcend" (same thing as go beyond) anything. When you get to the "yonder shore" in buddhism and turn to look at where you traveled from, there's nothing there. There's no distinction between pairs of opposites. That's nirvana. The center of the cyclone of rebirth and suffering (samsara) where all oppositely spinning forces sum to zero and there is no distinction.

It's a brain state of neurons in your head. It's not supernatural in the way you're talking about something beyond reason.

This sounds just like the crazy bible thumpers in alabama saying that God is beyond logic. They don't even know what words are coming out of their mouths when they speak like that. They're just repeating something that makes them feel good, not truth.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

niranjan

I have not suggested that anywhere. Maybe it is, maybe it is not. I am only saying that such a state exists.

niranjan

When Swami Vivekananda says about going beyond reason, he is saying that one is leaving the limited circle of reason, and entering into the field of intuition, which has no limitations in terms of accessing knowledge.
And I believe superconsciousness is a state where intuition is at its peak.

Thanking you,

Niranjan.

The An-Jel

Well I guess what I was asking is that none of the enlightened masters are household names. It seems to me that these types of people are doing it for themselves and vonlunteers. They aren't in the business like so many other religious type folk of power and money as I think you are explaining here. Your stating the world would be a better place but what are they doing or do they think it's even necessary to spread the possibility of this superconsciousness a bit more publically like the Prophets have in the religions... like say oh the Islamist folks you are questioning the veracity of...

I hope you don't mind the questions because I am not really knowledgeable in this superconsciousness. I have heard it barely on the news when it comes to celebritys and such. I saw it on a world religion class on PBS... they touched on it but much more brief than I wanted. I am building a foundation.

Basically the heroes of pop culture today are business folk making billions, Jesus or insert religious icon(s) here, and celebritys. The enlightened ones know whats going on, greater than Mohammad and people like that, what are they doing for people because you never really hear anything about them.

__________________
"And let there be Light!" said the Blind man.

Life is simple, people make it complicated - Basilisk

Nulli Expugnabilis Hosti - Royal Gibraltar Regiment

niranjan

Here are some quotations on intuition.



There is no logical way to the discovery of elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.


The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.


The only real valuable thing is intuition.


The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.


The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why.




No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
~ Albert Einstein
20th century physicist, creator of the theory of relativity.

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All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

Immanuel Kant

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Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.”


Aaron Copland( american composer)

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“I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.”
Socrates

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This, therefore, is a law not found in books, but written on the fleshly tablets of the heart, which we have not learned from man, received or read, but which we have caught up from Nature herself, sucked in and imbibed; the knowledge of which we were not taught, but for which we were made; we received it not by education, but by intuition.

No one was ever great without some portion of divine inspiration”
Marcus Tullius Cicero

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The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.

Mahatma Gandhi

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Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way. ~Florence Scovel Shinn


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“Knowledge has three degrees—opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.”

~ Plotinus
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Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth


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INTUITION is the clear concept of the whole at once.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

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A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his INTUITION lead him wherever it wants.


The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.

Lao-Tzu (Chinese Philosopher, Founder of Taoism, Author of the ''Tao Te Ching'')

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All great men are gifted with INTUITION. They know without reasoning or analysis, what they need to know.


Alexis Carrel (1873-1944, French Biologist )


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It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.

Jules Henri Poincare


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Moral education, as I understand it, is not about inculcating obedience to law or cultivating self-virtue, it is rather about finding within us an ever-increasing sense of the worth of creation. It is about how we can develop and deepen our intuitive sense of beauty and creativity.

Andrew Linzey (1952 - )

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Proverbs are the sanctuary of the intuitions.


The primary wisdom is intuition.


Ralph waldo Emerson
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There are two types of mind . . . the mathematical, and what might be called the intuitive. The former arrives at its views slowly, but they are firm and rigid; the latter is endowed with greater flexibility and applies itself simultaneously to the diverse lovable parts of that which it loves.

Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)

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The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we able to know everything, because it's all written there.


Paulo Coelho
Source: The Alchemist

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As with truth of religion, so with the highest and deepest truth of beauty, the intellectual reason cannot seize its inner sense and reality, not even the inner truth of the apparent principles and processes, unless it is aided by a higher insight not its own. As it cannot give a method, process or rule by which beauty can or ought to be created, so also it cannot give to the appreciation of beauty that deeper insight which it needs; it can only help to remove the dullness and vagueness of the habitual perceptions and conceptions of the lower mind which prevent it from seeing beauty or which give it false and crude aesthetic habits: it does this by giving to the mind an external idea and rule of the elements of the thing it has to perceive and appreciate. What is farther needed is the awakening of a certain vision, an insight and an intuitive response in the soul. Reason which studies always from outside, cannot give this inner and more intimate contact; it has to aid itself by a more direct insight springing from the soul itself and to call at every step on the intuitive mind to fill up the gap of its own deficiencies.

Sri Aurobindo, Social & Political Thought, pp. 132-3
~~~~~~~~

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A working hypothesis is that the Self is at the core of the superconscious, just as the 'I' or personal self is at the core of the personality and its various functions (physical, emotional and mental). Interaction between the Self and the 'I' can occur or flow in either direction. When the contents of the superconscious descend into our conscious experience, we receive inspiration, intuition, insight or peak experiences. These moments happen to us, particularly when we least expect them or have not been actively seeking them. However, the flow may also occur in the other direction, through elevating our personality, through consciously aspiring, in a realistic, grounded and purposeful way, towards the heights or depths of our being.

Diana Whitmore, Psychosynthesis in Education, pp. 174-175


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Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.

Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)

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Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside the province of reason.’
— Carl Gustav Jung

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I’m saying that we should trust our intuition. I believe that the principles of universal evolution are revealed to us through intuition. And I think that if we combine our intuition and our reason, we can respond in an evolutionary sound way to our problems.’
— Jonas Salk
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The fact that modern physics, the manifestation of an extreme specialisation of the rational mind, is now making contact with mysticism, the essence of religion and manifestation of an extreme specialisation of the intuitive mind, shows very beautifully the unity and complementary nature of the rational and intuitive modes of consciousness; of the yang and the yin.”
Fritjof Capra

Og

I think that saying that there's some sort of limiting circle of reason is a silly thing to say. Intuition can be mistaken. Intuition itself is a complex process going on in your brain. It's certainly reasonable in many senses of the term "reason."

What I was saying was that this feels like more of the dressed up anti-intellectualism that you see in the western world (i.e. bible belt christians). There are not limits on reason. There is no "beyond" logic and reason. And by this, I don't mean to place a limit on the concepts of logic/reason or to call them ends to expansion. The words beyond and reason just don't make any sense when you put them together. It's like saying "purple" "smells bad." Its just gibberish.

Reasonable approaches such as the scientific method are what is called a "basis set." They define a "perspective" or "coordinate system." They allow for ideas to be expressed. They do not define limits nor are they limited.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

niranjan

I don't think I have ridiculed logic or reason in any of my posts. In fact Swami Vivekananda emphasises the need of logic to eradicate the superstitions from the intuitive knowledge that one gets by accessing the superconscious state.


And from the quotations of Albert Einstein and others, you can find that logic does have its limitations in immediately accessing knowledge.


Again I wish to repeat the teaching of Buddha....

"Believe nothing, merely because you have been told it, or because it is traditional or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for your teacher. But whatever after due consideration and analysis you find to be conducive to the good , the benefit, the welfare of all beings, that doctrine , believe and cling to and take it as your guide. "


This shows that a logical, scientific and rational frame of mind is not alien to spirituality and religion , and they have been emphasised very much.

niranjan

Here is an article on the Indian mathematician Ramanujan, considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time....



Computing the Mathematical Face of God: S. Ramanujan

He died on his bed after scribbling down
revolutionary mathematical formulas that bloomed
in his mind like ethereal flowers -- gifts, he
said, from a Hindu Goddess.

He was 32 the same age that the advaitan advocate
Adi Shankara died. Shankara, born in 788, left
earth in 820. Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in
1887. He died in 1920 -- an anonymous Vaishnavite
brahmin who became the first Indian mathematics
Fellow at Cambridge University. Both Shankara and
Ramanujan possessed supernatural intelligence, a
well of genius that leaves even brilliant men
dumb-founded. Ramanujan was a meteor in the
mathematics world of the World War I era. Quiet,
with dharmic sensibilities, yet his mind blazed
with such intuitive improvisation that British
colleagues at Cambridge -- the best math brains in
England -- could not even guess where his ideas
originated. It irked them a bit that Ramanujan
told friends the Hindu Goddess Namagiri whispered
equations into his ear. Today's mathematicians --
armed with supercomputers -- are still
star-struck, and unable to solve many theorems the
young man from India proved quickly by pencil and
paper.

Ramanujan spawned a zoo of mathematical creatures
that delight, confound and humble his peers. They
call them "beautiful," "humble," "transcendent,"
and marvel how he reduced very complex terrain to
simple shapes.

In his day these equations were mainly pure
mathematics, abstract computations that math sages
often feel describe God's precise design for the
cosmos. While much of Ramanujan's work remains
abstract, many of his theorems are now the
mathematical power behind several 1990's
disciplines in astrophysics, artificial
intelligence and gas physics. According to his
wife -- Janaki, who still lives outside Madras --
her husband predicted "his mathematics would be
useful to mathematicians for more than a
century." Yet, before sailing to England,
Ramanujan was largely ignorant of the prevailing
highest-level math. He flunked out of college in
India. Like Albert Einstein, who toiled as a
clerk in a Swiss patent office while evolving his
Special Theory of Relativity at odd hours,
Ramanujan worked as a clerk at a port authority in
Madras, spending every spare moment contemplating
the mathematical face of God. It was here in
these sea-smelling, paper-pushing offices that he
was gently pushed into destiny -- a plan that has
all the earmarks of divine design.

Ramanujan was born in Erode, a small, rustic town
in Tamil Nadu, India. His father worked as a
clerk in a cloth merchant's shop. his namesake is
that of another medieval philosophical giant --
Ramanuja -- a Vaishnavite who postulated the
Vedanta system known as "qualified monism." the
math prodigy grew up in the overlapping
atmospheres of religious observances and ambitious
academics. He wasn't spiritually preoccupied, but
he was steeped in the reality and beneficence of
the Deities, especially the Goddess Namagiri.
Math, of course, was his intellectual and
spiritual touchstone. No one really knows how
early in life ramanujan awakened to the psychic
visitations of Namagiri, much less how the
interpenetration of his mind and the Goddess'
worked. By age twelve he had mastered
trigonometry so completely that he was inventing
sophisticated theorems that astonished teachers.
In fact his first theorems unwittingly duplicated
those of a great mathematician of a hundred years
earlier. This feat came after sifting once
through a trigonometry book. he was disappointed
that his "discovery" has already been found. then
for four years there was numerical silence. At
sixteen a copy of an out-of-date math book from
Cambridge University came into his hands. It
listed 5,000 theorems with sparse, short-cut
proofs. Even initiates in the arcane language of
mathematics could get lost in this work.
Ramanujan entered it with the giddy ambition and
verve of an astronaut leaping onto the moon. It
subconsciously triggered a love of numbers that
completely saturated his mind. He could envision
strange mathematical concepts like ordinary people
see the waves of an ocean.

Ironically, his focus on math became his academic
undoing. he outpaced his teachers in numbers
theory, but neglected all other subjects. He
could speak adequate English, but failed in it and
history and other science courses. He lost a
scholarship, dropped out, attempted a return but
fell ill and quit a second time. By this time he
was married to Janaki, a young teenager, and was
supporting his mother. Often all night he
continued his personal excursions into the math
universe - being fed rice balls by his wife as he
wrote lying belly-down on a cot. During the day
he factored relatively mundane accounts at the
post office for 20 pounds a year. He managed to
publish one math paper.

As mathematicians would say, one branch of
potential reality could have gone with Ramanujan
squandering his life at the port. But with one
nudge from the invisible universe, Namagiri sent
him Westward. A manager at the office admire the
young man's work and sensed significance. He
talked him into writing to British mathematicians
who might sponsor him. Ramanujan wrote a simple
letter to the renowned G. W. Hardy at Cambridge,
hinting humbly at his breakthroughs and describing
his vegetarian diet and spartan needs if he should
come to the university. He enclosed one hundred
of his theorem equations.

Hardy was the brightest mathematician in England.
Yet, as he knew and would write later at the
conclusion of his life, he had done no original,
mind-bending work. At Cambridge he collaborated
with an odd man named Littlewood, who was so
publicly retiring that people joked Hardy made him
up. The two, though living within a hundred yards
of each other, communicated by exchange of terse,
math-laden letters. Ramanujan's letter and
equations fell to them like a broadcast from alien
worlds. AT first they dismissed it as a
curiosity. Then, they suddenly became intrigued
by the Indian's musings. Hardy later wrote: "A
single look at them is enough to show that they
could only be written down by a mathematician of
the highest class. They must be true, for if they
were not true, no one would have the imagination
to invent them."

Hardy sensed an extremely rare opportunity, a
"discovery," and quickly arranged a scholarship
for the then 26-year-old Ramanujan. The
invitation came to India and landed like a bomb in
Ramanujan's family and community circle. His
mother was horrified that he would lose caste by
traveling to foreign shores. She refused to let
him go unless it was sanctioned by the Goddess.
According to one version of the story, the aged
mother then dreamt of the blessing from Namagiri.
But Janaki says her husband himself went to the
namagiri temple for guidance and was told to make
the voyage. Ramanujan consulted the astrological
data for his journey. He sent is mother and wife
to another town so they wouldn't see him with his
long brahmin's hair and bun trimmed to British
short style and his Indian shirt and wrapcloth
swapped for European fashion. He left India as a
slightly plump man with apple-round cheeks and
eyes like bright zeroes.

(continued in the next post)

niranjan

Arriving in 1914 on the eve of World War I,
Ramanujan experienced severe culture shock at
Cambridge. he had to cook for himself and
insisted on going bare foot Hindu style on the
cold floors. But Hardy, a man without airs or
inflated ego, made him feel comfortable amidst the
stuffy Cambridge tradition. Hardy and Littlewood
both served as his mentors for it took two
teachers to keep pace with his advances. Soon, as
Hardy recounts, it was Ramanujan who was teaching
them, in fact leaving them in the wake of
incandescent genius.

Within a few months war broke out. Cambridge
became a military college. vegetable and fruit
shortages plagued Ramanujan's already slim diet.
The war took away Littlewood to artillery
research, and Ramanujan and Hardy were left to
retreat into some of the most recondite math
possible. One of the stunning examples of this
endeavor is a process called partitioning,
figuring out how many different ways a whole
number can be expressed as the sum of other whole
numbers. Example: 4 is partitioned 5 ways (4
itself, 3+1, 2+2, 2+1+1, 1+1+1+1), expressed as
p(4)=5. The higher the number, the more the
partitions. Thus p(7)=15. Deceptively though,
even a marginally larger number creates
astronomical partitions. p(200)=397,999,029,388.
Ramanujan -- with Hardy offering technical checks
-- invented a tight, twisting formula that
computes the partitions exactly. To check the
theorem a fellow Cambridge mathematician tallied
by hand the partitions for 200. It took one
month. Ramanujan's equation was precisely
correct. U.S. mathematician George Andrews, who
in the late 1960's rediscovered a "lost notebook"
of Ramanujan's and became a lifetime devotee,
describes his accuracy as unthinkable to even
attempt. Ramanujan's partition equation helped
later physicists determine the number of electron
orbit jumps in the "shell" model of atoms.

ANother anecdote demonstrates his mental
landscape. By 1917, Ramanujan had fallen
seriously ill and was convalescing in a country
house. Hardy took a taxi to visit him. As math
masters like to do he noted the taxi's number --
1729 -- to see if it yielded any interesting
permutations. To him it didn't and he thought to
himself as he went up the steps to the door that
it was a rather dull number and hoped it was not
an inauspicious sign. He mentioned 1729 to
Ramanujan who immediately countered, "Actually, it
is a very interesting number. It is the smallest
number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two
different ways."

Ramanujan deteriorated so quickly that he was
forced to return to India -- emaciated -- leaving
his math notebooks at Cambridge. He spent his
final year face down on a cot furiously writing
out pages and pages of theorems as if a storm of
number concepts swept through his brain. Many
remain beyond today's best math minds.

Debate still lingers as to the origins of
Ramanujan's edifice of unique ideas.
Mathematicians eagerly acknowledge surprise states
of intuition as the real breakthroughs, not
logical deduction. There is reticence to accept
mystical overtones, though, like Andrews, many can
appreciate intuition *in the guise* of a Goddess.
But we have Ramanujan's own testimony of feminine
whisperings from a Devi and there is the sheer
power of his achievements."

niranjan

I believe Ramanujans intuitions was the result of activation of his superconscious mind.