Friday, February 25, 2011

3-02. Privileging Those Without Privilege

10:26 - love all sentient beings without exception

13:30 - structures of consciousness are not chosen

26:34 - the bulk of development rests with the infant

34:41 - meditation is the most effective thing demonstrated to move people through the stages

37:12 - and even then, the social environment has to encourage growth

38:21 - meditation alone isn't powerful enough to override social pressure

39:39 - certain states can accelerate movement through stages

Thursday, February 24, 2011

3-01. Ken's Introduction to Stages

0:10 - both structures of consciousness and states of consciousness can unfold in stages, but states of consciousness usually don't, and structures of consciousness almost always do

1:16 - a structure is any stable pattern

2:10 - the whole often determines what the parts do

2:22 - the structure is a dynamic pattern (think of a whirlpool)

5:10 - most stage conceptions are forms of developmental structuralism

5:54 - Gebser's Integral is the collection of green and above

6:30 -Baldwin outlined the developmental levels in the cognitive line, the aesthetic line and the normative line (among others)

9:02 - Kant examined the structures as the preconditions for having experience (and thus, they're transcendental and a priori)

10:38 - only structures that have developed can be conceived

10:55 - structures can't be experienced (states, experiences, phenomena can)

12:30 - this is why the structure-stages have no history in the great traditions

17:49 - the kind of stages we find in the traditions are state-stages, states of experience that unfold in a sequence

18:01 - most states of consciousness come and go with no development or sequentiality

18:23 - five major states of consciousness according to the great traditions

23:12 - waves are another word for stages, to give the idea there is an amount of fluidity in play

23:54 - structures are probability clouds

Thursday, February 10, 2011

2-04. Spiritual Practice and Cultural Embedment

8:08 - structures of consciousness have a hand in the structure and form of phenomena that appear

8:20 - there are a priori conditions that determine the type of phenomena that do appear

8:55 - pre-Kantian thinking is called metaphysical, post-Kantian is called critical

9:01 - structures were thought to be inherent in objects; Kant found that they were in part created by the subject

10:27 - culture is a magnet

12:19 - the structure of pre-operational and concrete operational thinking are universal, with varying surface structures

13:09 - pre-operational thinking represents objects to thought, but cannot operate on them

13:32 - concrete operational can start to operate on an object (as well as represent it)

14:01 - formal operational can perform the operations mentally

15:35 - the moment of experience is the most fundamental reality

20:36 - each stage adds some amount of freedom

20:50 - lower levels are strongly deterministic; higher levels aren't as deterministic

24:27 - getting lost in a perspective is the experience of samsara

27:42 - modernity requires evidence; post-modernity says that the subject is involved in the phenomena being perceived

28:16 - there's a narrow empiricism and a broad empiricism

30:09 - contemplative prayer or vipassana will free you from your ego, it will not free you from your culture

31:38 - there are several ways culture seeps into your cognition that your cognition is unaware of

31:50 - one of the simplest ways is the structure of language

31:54 - if you think in English there are a whole lot of implicit assumptions about reality that are in the structure of your language that may not be the structure of reality

32:06 - a satori will not break you from cultural influences

36:50 - meditation will not free you of cultural biases, but it will give you higher perspectives that have a capacity of reflecting on them, making it more likely that you will question them

37:08 - (but it's still not a guarantee)

37:39 - anybody can get enlightenment at any level

37:47 - but enlightenment won't get you free from your level

38:02 - absolute reality is not something you can see, it's the seer

38:10 - vertical growth adds the number of perspectives your enlightenment can exist in

40:48 - a tradition gets you to transcend your individual ego; the next step is to transcend the tradition

41:08 - identifying oneself as a member of a tradition is another drawing a boundary

41:31 - cafeteria style mix and match spirituality is generally a bad idea

Sunday, February 6, 2011

2-03. Kosmic Address and the Pauli Exclusion Principle

4:51 - self-reflexive awareness doesn't get started until second person

5:14 - self-reflexive introspective awareness doesn't get started until orange

6:19 - an electron interprets its shell as empty or full (not self-reflexively)

14:02 - a holon has its own unique perspective (first person source of prehension)

15:32 - manifestation is not just perception (a subject perceiving objects), it is perspectives

16:16 - the only time there is a perception is through a perspective

16:21 - the universe is composed of perspectives

16:34 - subject perceiving an object is only part of it, it is an I prehending a me, we or it

17:21 - perspectives without pure awareness is samsara, perspectives with pure awareness is nirvana plus samsara, nonduality

19:16 - your awakening will be expressed through your unique perspective

19:21 - your unique perspective is necessary for the expression of the awakening

19:42 - God needs humans to awaken to God (some traditions have said)

19:59 - even God cannot have your unique perception, your unique perception is your offering to the world

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

2-02. 4th-, 5th-, and 6th-Person Perspectives

15:56 - when you can have a perspective on another's perspective, you start to transcend your own

16:09 - every holon up to red is stuck in its own perspective (1st person perspective)

16:30 - when red hits, concrete operational thinking emerges, the ability to think about thinking

17:31 - thought operating on thought, hypothetico-deductive reasoning

17:41 - conditional reasoning, what if I did this, or as if I were doing this

17:57 - science is a third person, universal, objective view, requiring a third person perspective capability (late amber and above)

20:08 - the insight of green - there are different perspectives beyond the reductionistic universal truth of science

21:37 - the disaster of green - multiple truths with no way to judge them

22:50 - unchecked pluralism degenerates into nihilism, narcissism and fragmentation

24:00 - the insight of 2nd tier - there are universal currents that tie together these different perspectives

28:15 - the ideas of each stage tend to come as a package - orange introduces scientific third person concepts, green introduces post-modern, fourth person concepts, etc.

28:57 - understanding the AQAL model is taking a fifth person perspective

33:23 - each increase in perspective is an increase in capacity to take more roles, to understand more sentient beings, an increase in freedom and love

35:01 - the reason for using morphogenetic fields - an evolving kosmos solves the metaphysical problem of pre-existing structures, the great chain of being, etc.

39:34 - there are a few givens, a certain amount of things that have to be presupposed to start a universe

40:08 - pre-fixed structures are dependent on perception

40:18 - this moment prehends, transcends and includes, the previous moment, the subject of this moment becomes an object of the subject of the next moment

40:44 - once you have that, you have holarchy

40:50 - each moment has two components - continuity and novelty (include and transcend)

42:45 - if you're starting to stably transcend turquoise, that doesn't mean you're at indigo (it hasn't formed yet)

43:01 - the earlier structures were mistaken for pre-determined and fixed and eternal because they are so solidly formed

49:51 - the structures could have formed differently

49:55 - the gift of orange - the differentiation of the value spheres and the quadrants

50:14 - the mistake of orange - science colonizing art and morals

Friday, January 7, 2011

2-01. Quadrants and the "Big Three"

12:10 - A boundary creates a universe (cf. G. Spencer Brown)

13:18 - saying that a universe comes into existence when you demarcate an inside from an outside is the same thing as saying that the subject of one moment prehends the previous moment's subject as object (cf. Whitehead)

13:33 - you can't have a singular without a plural

14:29 - the inside and the outside of a singular and a plural is the four quadrants

14:33 - and the four quadrants are irreducible

17:04 - there are a lot of trinities in the traditions, some identifying levels, some identifying quadrants, some identifying states, some identifying types

24:34 - where the danger is, there the healing power lies

24:41 - seen apart from spirit, every occasion is hell, when seen as a manifestation of spirit, every occasion is fully realized heaven and the path to heaven

25:16 - the samskaras / the beginning stages of prehension are the foundation of a path, the path of the creation of the illusion of a self if misunderstood and the path of realization if understood

Thursday, January 6, 2011

1-05. Misinterpreting States and Stages

9:21 - quadrant absolutism

18:39 - structures are structures of first person consciousness

18:49 - bodies hold up the structures

21:21 - technically, gross, subtle and causal do not apply to consciousness - they apply to matter/energy bodies in the upper right quadrant

24:35 - but, yes, occasionally gross, subtle and causal are used to refer to the states of consciousness supported by those bodies

26:12 - you can't move to a different stage by permanently acquiring an altered state - the most you can achieve is a plateau experience

26:31 - you can extend certain understandings that come with states and make that understanding permanently available

27:37 - states can be trained and trained states unfold in stages

28:08 - here's why structures is the better term to use than stages - both structures and states have stages

28:34 - states are mostly random, and tend to not unfold in stages unless trained

28:42 - for the stages of unfolding of trained states, see Underhill, Brown, etc.