Re: Some brain questions i need help with

From: dan michaels (feedbackdroids_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 09/27/04 

Date: 26 Sep 2004 20:04:10 -0700

"JPL Verhey" <matterDELminds@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<41549811$0$44085$5fc3050@dreader2.news.tiscali.nl>...

> >> When I was young (<8 y/o) I frequently had "out of body" experiences
> >> at
> >> night. I think they were dreams, but in the dream I really felt I
> >> woke
> >> up, see the things as when awake but sorta dreamy-dimmed and start
> >> hovering through the room, through the corridor, downstairs under the
> >> sealing, a peak in the livingroom..and then back to nothingness.
> >
> >
> > I suspect all of these new-agers who believe in this stuff have simply
> > trained [or entrained] their internal mechanisms that produce these
> > same dream experiences. Kinda like biofeedback, but without the
> > machine. You relax, tune out the external world, and concentrate upon
> > producing those sorts of experiences internally. You're just training
> > or entraining, learning how to stimulate, the same brain mechanisms.
> > Producing the same loops of activity.
>
> Indeed. All these Lucid-Lucy things just make you feel less slave of the
> harsh dictate of the senses..you float around in the Sky with Diamonds.
>
> But it's interesting to think of our the normal healthy wake state as
> basically not different from "other dreams"..all the brain's own
> production. Kinda eery this dream-machine!
>
> Could it be that all our efforts to make sense of it, explain it, model
> it into some comfortable computations..are like trying to voo-doo the
> scary ghost back into the cosy bottle?
>

I don't know ... it's your head, why be afraid of it? In one sense,
the new-agers are internauts. Exploring places where most of us never
go, except in dreams. I doubt they're astral traveling to other
dimensions, prolly just learning to manipulate parts of their brains
that most of us do not have conscious access to. Prolly a variation on
the hindu yogi tricks of slowing breathing, attenuating the heartbeat,
etc. You do know that a lot of the time, they [new-agers] bring on
their states by using hyperventilation, which biases the acid-base
balance, and CO2 regulation, of the body.

BTW, in his book The Muse in the Machine, David Gelernter the Yale
comp.scientist spends a lot of time hypothesizing that ancient man,
primitive peoples, and children tend to be more in touch with the
emotional aspects of thinking, as opposed to the logical aspects,
which govern behavior after the early teen years. His theory is about
a multi-level spectrum of thinking, and as we "mature" and become
socialized by our western cultures, we loose some of the abilities
possessed by those 3 other groups. Maybe the new-agers are tapping
back into that.
==============

> Which reminds me: "better a bottle infront of me, than a frontal
> lobotomy."
>
> Cheers

Man, you europeans sure know how to live ;-).

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