donjoe

I'm noticing this very late, and I'm going to be off-topic, but I still have to stop to note that there's no such thing as "IP", not in actual laws (unless they've been infected by this term very recently and I just haven't found out about it). It's a bogus name lumping together things that the law does not lump together at all, a term invented purely for use in corporate propaganda, nothing more. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

More developments on the vibratory mechanisms of consciousness: http://actu.epfl.ch/news/how-the-brain-produces-consciousness-in-time-slice/

Well, the relationship Sapolsky described wasn't linear, it was more like a bell curve. And no, he doesn't cite any particular study in that lecture, so all I have is his word on this one. I guess you could just ask him. :)

This sounds like it might be helpful for people who encountered the same problem as I did in trying to apply DavidM's method, namely knowing what to expect (or whether to expect anything) as a result of performing the first-phase meditative exercises: http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma7/enterjhana.html

It would seem that having a purpose or expecting a result could be the very thing that prevents you from getting that result, in certain phases or aspects of meditation.

Actually, the Expectancy (probability of success) component is not that simple: you don't just maximize it to maximize motivation. As Robert Sapolsky shows in "The Uniqueness of Humans" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrCVu25wQ5s), motivation is proportional to the dopamin spike you get when you start to consider performing a task, and the dopamin spike is highest the closer your estimated probability of success is to (something like) 50%! The amount of dopamin produced when you consider starting a task that you have 25% or 75% chances of succeeding at will be significantly lower than for the 50%-chance task. So it's not that you need to be certain about your success, it's that you need to be pleasantly challenged, somewhere midway between "I'm so gonna fail" and "I'm so sure I can do this I find it absolutely boring" (though this sweet spot may not be at exactly 50% for everyone).

The first time I read this article I immediately thought that if this strange notion of "vibrations of consciousness" has any overlap with reality, it must have a lot to do with what we otherwise know as "brain waves", because those happen to have the same frequencies associated with the "vibrations" in the article and the comments: 7-10-20 Hz (which seems consistent with beta and alpha waves, i.e. meditative states and normal wakefulness).

Well, it seems that lately science is struggling to prove my association right: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121121130815.htm

"instrumental values have some strange life of their own, even in a normative sense. That, once you say B is usually good because it leads to C, you've committed yourself to always try for B even in the absence of C. People make this kind of mistake in abstract philosophy"

... not to mention economics, where some people confuse the instrumental goal of "maximizing profit" with a terminal goal - instead of using something like "maximizing the total Human Quality of Life" - and end up opening car doors obsessively, all day every day, and preaching that everyone should do the same, no matter what pathological consequences that leads to or how far that takes them from any higher purpose they might agree with when pressed with enough "but why?" questions.

While I don't have subscriptions to all those journals, so I can't check exactly what those studies proved and didn't prove, all I can say is that this example: "filling gyms during in the pre-dawn hours" tells me we're still not talking about the same thing, i.e. mental energy. I think there's a big difference between feeling physically energetic on one hand and feeling mentally focussed and creative on the other.

Also, while I find it easy to accept that there are two kinds of people as mentioned above, I will still be looking for explicit proof that "most people" are "morning larks", like the original quote said.

Thanks for your patience.

I think there's an even better description of my concept of "many-I's-consciousness" in the first part of this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbh5l0b2-0o than in Gurdjieff's rather religious writings. I was pleasantly surprised tonight to finally find my suspicions about how consciousness really works confirmed by someone who claims to have done their scientific homework.