My comment was not about mechanics, medicine, or technology that science is responsible for, but about reality, which is what Mr.Sprinkles was referring to.
That's what the sciences are concerned with: understanding reality.You see some distinction between applied sciences that is quite artificial.
I far from agree that it is the best method for determining reality, although it is an excellent tool for the discovery of factual knowledge.
Factual knowledge is by definition true knowledge. Are you saying that reality is that which is not true? And that a better method for determining reality is false knowledge?
are basically all tools of dissection.
How so?
Again, these are fine tools for uncovering facts which lead to technological, medical, and other developments, and can be used to predict behavior and properties of materials, but are of little use in reaching an understanding of the nature of reality. For that we need another kind of knowing, and we come with that already built-in.
Why your dichotomy between, on the one hand, things like technology, medicine, etc., and on the other "reality"? Especially when many technologies used in medicine are based on theories about reality. X-rays, MRIs, MEGs, ERPs, etc., are all fundamentally due to the results of discoveries about the nature of reality. When someone has a broken bone, a brain lesion, cancer, etc., the imaging technology used in the medical science was developed through empirical study of reality itself. Physicists who discovered the atom, and then atomic constitutents such as protons, and then atomic spin, were not thinking "I wonder if, down the road, this will be used in MRI scans".
By seperating things like "medicine" and "technology" from reality, you are creating a line which doesn't just divide human experience from reality, but also creating an artificial divide between e.g., machines which are used for some purpose, but were made possible because of advances the sciences made towards understanding the fabric of reality.
Not true. Science sees what it calls 'mind' as something real. I see it as illusory.
1) It doesn't matter if you see it as illusory, you still talk about it the way everyone else can.
2) The "mind" in science is a term, and can't be real. It's like saying a variable in an equation is "real". The word is a useful way to talk about a particular phenomenon with particular properties.
3) You believe you have some access to reality that is not accorded to others or is not possible to obtain through a very generalized version of what "science" is. Fine. Show this. And if you can't, then "science" may lack your access, but at least the sciences have understood enough about reality to provide you with things you rely on and/or use all the time.
It is like an ocean wave. We talk about it as if it were something real, when in reality, there is no such thing called 'wave'.
Yes, there is. It's called a "wave", and if you go to certain beaches, you'll see them.
Science talked about 'matter' for years as if it were something real. Then Einstein and Planck came along and said it was not real. Quantum Mechanics adds the observer to the issue.
Einstein said nothing of the sort. He argued that quantum mechanics was incomplete. Planck didn't say that either. In fact, nobody at that time said it. Nor did they suddenly realize that observation matters. They already knew that. What they realized was that they couldn't measure with infinite precision.
But I have, and so far, the best it can do is the 'emergent' theory of the mind.
The fact that you say "emergent" theories are the best science can do could mean that you have 8 PhDs and an MD, or that you spent two minutes on the internet (and everything in between).
Mystics, on the other hand, have understood the nature of mind for centuries, and most of their conclusions over time and independent of each other have been consistent.
1) You haven't lived across the globe and through the centuries, which means you depend on those who have used empirical methods to determine what happened in the past. I know this, because I've seen you do so:
That's entirely ridiculous! The scapegoat is a function of the interplay between the Persona and the Shadow:
...
excerpted from: Freud and Jung, by Storr and Stevens
Freud and Jung may not be scientists by modern psychology's standards, just like Skinner, but they were scientists in their day.
2) You claimed above that you're familiar with research. And now you're making claims about history. But this is not the first time you've done the latter:
Mithra's pre-Christian roots are attested in the Vedic and Avestan texts, as well as by historians such as Herodotus (1.131)
There are 2 items of note here. First, as Herodotus didn't write in English, it means you've trusted an empirical method used for centuries to understand ancient Greek. Second, I translated that line for you:
Let's just start here. What does Herodotus actually say? In Greek:
τούτοισι μὲν δὴ θύουσι μούνοισι ἀρχῆθεν, ἐπιμεμαθήκασι δὲ καὶ τῇ Οὐρανίῃ θύειν, παρά τε Ἀσσυρίων μαθόντες καὶ Ἀραβίων. καλέουσι δὲ Ἀσσύριοι τὴν Ἀφροδίτην Μύλιττα, Ἀράβιοι δὲ Ἀλιλάτ, Πέρσαι δὲ Μίτραν.
"Although from the beginning they [the Persians] sacrificed to these [deities] only, they later learned to sacrifice to the heavenly [goddess], being taught by the Assyrians and Arabians. But the Assyrians call Aphrodite "Mylitta", and the Arabians, "Alilat", and the Persians "Mitra." (translation mine).
So apparently worship of a goddess mentioned in Herodotus is evidence for a god somehow.
Actually, throughout that thread you made references to various empirical, analytical, and logical approaches to various fields from linguistics to archaeology. You relied on bad sources and misunderstanding, but the point is you at least belived that these empirical methods could yield what you believed they did.
3) It is quite untrue that mystics have "understood the nature of mind for centuries, and most of their conclusions over time and independent of each other have been consistent." First, looking only within groups active especially in the the 2nd, 3rd, & 4th centuries, we find a label (gnostics) which originated in early modern Western scholarhip, and as it progressed and scholars realized that the label applied to groups holding radically different beliefs, it became a term that was at best awkward and at worse so misleading M. A. William wrote an entire monograph devoted to showing how poorly a single label fit the very diverse mystic groups lumped under that category.
And although certain mystic traditions from late "gnostic" groups carried over into later centuries in Europe (see e.g., Cohn's
The Pursuit of the Millenium, and in particular for Jewish mysticism Bloom's
Jewish Mysticism and Magic), we find very clear references not only to the mind, but on its purification and it's relationship to God.
Finally, thanks to first ethnography and then anthropology, we have extensive records of detaills from various rites, practices, and self-described beliefs from different cultures and mystics from around the world. Most of the older commentary is questionable if not useless as it ascribed Western notions to the rites, but the descriptions and the transcriptions are quite useful. We know, for example, what types of techniques were used in the Americas, across Africa, Siberia, etc. Hutton's book on shamans devotes at least as much time to outdated notions resulting from ethnocentric early scholars as he does to the re-evaluation of the evidence. Hayden's
Shamans, Sorcerers, & Saints is not as willing to give upon the Western romanticism of "shamanism", but he is at least far superior than those like Campbell or Margaret Mead. It's hard to tell in many cases what "altered states of mind/consciousness" meant for those who would hang from hooks, experience hypothermic shock, rhythmic chanting, etc., in terms of the nature of the mind. However, while some groups focused far more on meditation and emptying the "mind' or letting go of it, others did the precise opposite. Mental/astral projection may be mostly limited today to books for teenage wiccans, but it was certainly taken seriously and perceived as real, whether to fight off rival shamans or rivals within a group.
I will say this to you and everyone else here right now: the pursuit of science and technology, without an understanding of our own spiritual reality leads to mindsets that created Nazi Germany and the Holocaust at worst.
We have multiple accounts from across the world of "shamans"/"witch-doctors" who were both revered and feared mystics by their community, and who would use their spiritual powers to kill. Even Campbell talks about this, as well as the use of a creation story in a particular tribes' cosmology which served to explain why women were not allowed to participate or play any role in leadership.
