A Work Poem

[truth seeker]

Yes, I found the post moving as well. Thanks.

 

[CNS]

If the above sounds a little flaky, there is a lot of dense neuroscientific details and published papers which are trying to make sense of this. The author's interest in the topic comes from his experience as a Zen meditator and his professional training as neuroscientist - so he is braver than others out there in seeing and interpreting similarities between two very different domains.

Anyway, bottomline is that any accidental or otherwise experience of "no-self" need not be depressing if one has the requisite knowledge. It may even be a less burdensome way of living.

The description may sound a bit flaky, but that may just be because they're trying to explain or illustrate a non-linear or simultaneously reciprocal idea or act on a 2 dimensional chalkboard of the mind. It reads like the old familiar "the seer is the seen" phenomena, describing a single act of perception going at least two ways. 3 to 5 year old children are flexible with their point of view that way...and maybe a few adults.

Whereas Davida speaks of something about a "bite", my first reading simply left me with an impression that something was just a bit off, structurally speaking. The mind wants to fit the poem into a framework of progressive realization that would read as well backwards (layers going on) as forwards (layers coming off). Subsequent readings brings the realization that there's no point in a structural analysis since it likely wasn't crafted for the public to read.

It would seem that this initially preferred reading of the poem might simply be a mental effort on my part to establish an allo-centric relationship within the poem between the author and his 'ultimate realization'. Don't know if that makes sense to anyone.

Thanks for posting!

Ok, so let me see if I'm understanding both of you (and the James Austen piece) correctly:

So ego-centric stream would be like catching a glimpse of the apple, and really just seeing a 2d representation of it in the minds eye, really just that specific side that is shown to you. Then, perhaps immediately, and without real awareness, your mind starts wandering, evoking memories of apples - what its like to crunch into one, the particularly sweet taste of the juice, maybe a memory of bobbing for apples at a Halloween party when you were 9 - and not being able to really separate the experience of looking at that apple with all the memories involved in that moment that tell you it's an apple.

Allo-centric stream would be like looking at the apple and being able to consciously understand at that moment that the apple stands alone in reality, 3 dimension-ally, with sides that you cannot currently see, and that it has juices and seeds on the inside even though you are unable to currently visualize them in the moment and that maybe they aren't as sweet as your subjective experience tells you. That even if you left the room, the apple would remain on the table, independent to your experience of the apple - whereas, in the ego-centric model, the physicality of the apple and its continued existence on the table is not able to be processed or understood, that all you take with you are your memories and subjective experience of apples in general.

Is this close?

 

[happyliza]

Thank iyou for sharing Obyvatel. I found it very inspiring and have saved and shared it as my quote of the day on FB. Not that many will understand, but we know this. :)

 

[Alada]

From my perspective, i don't necessarily disagree; i think it's the realisation that what you thought was something is actually nothing, which then contrasts with the blinding possibilities available now that you've come to this understanding. It's like when waking up and realising everything you thought you knew was a lie, well the same realisation seems to happen for the individual too, and their part in the illusion. You feel very much like a blank slate, in keeping with the theories of bankruptcy as has been mentioned.

It's like when a person begins to see objectively they realise in order to progress where they wish to go, they must try to help others, and yet when they go to do it, they realise that actually they're plagued with programs and buffers and wrong information; and they realise that in order to do better, to be better, they have to totally divest themselves of all that went before (figuratively speaking).

I've noticed when trying to help others, how much more work i see is required before i can truly give. Because you realise how complex a task that is, what with your pre-programmed machine. And again in order to realise this you kind of need a comparison of where you want to go (life), to where you've been (nothingness, death).

That’s pretty much how I understand it too, the poem is the essence of what you described above.

Maybe where we can run into trouble is in misinterpreting the word "nothing" or maybe better put, we can run false narratives depending on what the idea of being/having nothing triggers in us. The idea of one’s nothingness comes as a challenge to false personality, and yes, seems that it’s not until we really try to know ourselves and help others long the way to do the same, that we find the truth of it. False personality really doesn't like the idea of letting that concept in, where it might then grow into the desire mentioned in the poem. Would mark the beginning of the end of it’s dominant role in us, which is not nothing, is something!

 

[Buddy]

Ok, so let me see if I'm understanding both of you (and the James Austen piece) correctly:

So ego-centric stream would be like catching a glimpse of the apple, and really just seeing a 2d representation of it in the minds eye, really just that specific side that is shown to you. Then, perhaps immediately, and without real awareness, your mind starts wandering, evoking memories of apples - what its like to crunch into one, the particularly sweet taste of the juice, maybe a memory of bobbing for apples at a Halloween party when you were 9 - and not being able to really separate the experience of looking at that apple with all the memories involved in that moment that tell you it's an apple.

Allo-centric stream would be like looking at the apple and being able to consciously understand at that moment that the apple stands alone in reality, 3 dimension-ally, with sides that you cannot currently see, and that it has juices and seeds on the inside even though you are unable to currently visualize them in the moment and that maybe they aren't as sweet as your subjective experience tells you. That even if you left the room, the apple would remain on the table, independent to your experience of the apple - whereas, in the ego-centric model, the physicality of the apple and its continued existence on the table is not able to be processed or understood, that all you take with you are your memories and subjective experience of apples in general.

Is this close?

My comments in the quote just represent what I comprehend from the text as well as any inadvertent interpretation, so I could be off. That said, I'll try to answer by rephrasing myself first, to see if this helps:

Go get a child's ball, toy or something you can 'play' with and start playing with it. This might work best if you're in motion. Really get into playing with the ball. At some point, maybe the possibility that the ball is playing with you comes to mind, or that the entire environment is in 'play mode' and each object is waiting its turn to play with you from its own point of view. There is no requirement at all that your point of view must stay in your own head.

The authors seem careful not to say that an 'external' object has its own visual point of view, but that's ok. "Independent" can work because you can imagine that the ball is ignoring you. If you're familiar with the concept of the inductive cognitive mode, then just imagine that awareness is a property shared by both you and the ball (this is easier to imagine if you replace "ball" with something alive, like a pet), but there is a layer atop that more general awareness and it belongs to you (maybe not literally). It rides on the lines of sight that converge in your visual cortex and we learn to fix our point of view so that we tend always to think we are seeing from behind the eyes somewhere.

If the above is not working for you, then think of the area of the thymus like a staging area for mirror neurons of the sort that their very activity creates reality on the fly for you to feel with the heart. Imagine a cognitive loop operating between the head brain and this area and that you can oscillate between seeing the ball from the point of view behind the eyes or you can see yourself from within this thymus area as if it were the ball's point of view. Cognitively you could move around this loop (so to speak) as if your eyes were actually traveling an external loop between you and the toy you're looking at.

If that doesn't help, I don't know any other way to explain it without referring back to Austin's words and advising you to just try to feel what he's saying in the simplest possible terms. After all, he does say that young children can do this.

Finally, having said the above, obyvatel may have a different take.

 

[obyvatel]

[quote author=CNS]
Ok, so let me see if I'm understanding both of you (and the James Austen piece) correctly:
[/quote]

From the empirical neuroscience perspective, when one views an object :

Egocentric stream: tries to answer the question "where is it in relation to me"?
Allocentric stream: tries to answer the question "what is it" ?

Both these streams are unconscious and they merge and present the processed result which is available to the conscious mind.

From what I understand, the state of the art research methods available today are not capable of imaging the brain at speeds which can provide data about brain circuits involved in initiating more complex thoughts about the object and delineate the two processes.

Added:

There have been memory recall experiments correlating neural activation patterns. For old and very familiar memory recalls, brain circuits associated with the egocentric processing stream showed higher activation. It was as if more familiarity led to the object/location being treated as "mine" or "on my turf". Not so for memory recalls for newly learned events.

 

[obyvatel]

[quote author=Buddy]
The authors seem careful not to say that an 'external' object has its own visual point of view, but that's ok.
[/quote]

Austin comes close though with

It is a foreign, ‘‘farout’’ notion to think that any object might appear to manifest its own ‘‘lines of sight.’’

And I agree with your example description of the "play mode of the environment".

 

[Buddy]

Awesome, obyvatel and thank you!

 

[Andromeda]

This reminds me of something I read the other night in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In the section about crossing the threshold, it talks about how Inanna descends to the underworld by passing through seven gates where she has to give up an article of dress at each one. When she finally reaches her destination she is judged and 'killed' or reborn as merged with her underworld sister. And this is supposed to be just the beginning of the adventure.

 

[obyvatel]

This reminds me of something I read the other night in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In the section about crossing the threshold, it talks about how Inanna descends to the underworld by passing through seven gates where she has to give up an article of dress at each one. When she finally reaches her destination she is judged and 'killed' or reborn as merged with her underworld sister. And this is supposed to be just the beginning of the adventure.

From a Jungian perspective, this is an example of the archetypal motif of redemption. Mythologies and fairy tales often describe this archetypal process with different images in different contexts.

Descent into the underworld: effort towards understanding the unconscious contents of experience

Levels of underworld: layers (or concentric circles) of the unconscious; personal layer, familial layer, cultural layer, national layer, .....

Articles of clothing: elements of personality or conscious attitudes held with different degrees of identification

Being killed or dismembered: displacing the conscious egocentric perspective from the dominant position in the psyche

Rebirth in underworld/merger with underworld sister: new synthesized perspective informed by the hitherto ignored unconscious contents. Previous person (conscious attitude) is the "thesis", underworld sister is the "antithesis", the new person is the "synthesis".

Connecting this with the egocentric (more conscious) and allocentric (more unconscious) attitudes, what is sought is a synthesis rather than annihilation of one or the other. The feeling of "nothingness" ( or being dismembered or killed) comes from the unseating of the long-held egocentric attitude from its primary position. If or as the process progresses, this void is filled with new possibilities coming from the hitherto unrecognized (unconscious) contents.

OSIT

 

[Andromeda]

From a Jungian perspective, this is an example of the archetypal motif of redemption. Mythologies and fairy tales often describe this archetypal process with different images in different contexts.

Descent into the underworld: effort towards understanding the unconscious contents of experience

Levels of underworld: layers (or concentric circles) of the unconscious; personal layer, familial layer, cultural layer, national layer, .....

Articles of clothing: elements of personality or conscious attitudes held with different degrees of identification

Being killed or dismembered: displacing the conscious egocentric perspective from the dominant position in the psyche

Rebirth in underworld/merger with underworld sister: new synthesized perspective informed by the hitherto ignored unconscious contents. Previous person (conscious attitude) is the "thesis", underworld sister is the "antithesis", the new person is the "synthesis".

Connecting this with the egocentric (more conscious) and allocentric (more unconscious) attitudes, what is sought is a synthesis rather than annihilation of one or the other. The feeling of "nothingness" ( or being dismembered or killed) comes from the unseating of the long-held egocentric attitude from its primary position. If or as the process progresses, this void is filled with new possibilities coming from the hitherto unrecognized (unconscious) contents.

OSIT

Well, it makes good sense to me! :)

 

[David]

If I’m in the ball park of understanding correctly the egocentric and allocentric streams...

Being born in to this world, could be considered an underworld merger... emerging/manifesting from what seems to be nothing, with only the allocentric stream, and the architecture in place for the development/formation of an egocentric stream... and normal consciousness just a bio-diaelectric logic, a synthesis of the two streams, when in the beginning its mostly ‘what is that,’ and through experience/play with ‘what is that,’ the egocentric stream begins to flow/develop.... and if there’s only the manifestations of the PTB’s egocentric stream in the environment, I guess it would give rise to a diabolical synthesis, a maladapted dissociated state of being/non-being, maybe with some element of ‘accident’ as to what ‘happens.’

I’m wondering if not assuming already that a lot of the ‘what is that’ stream is eventually filtered out, simply because of the egocentric stream... cognitive bias and all that. ?

 

[CNS]

[quote author=CNS]
Ok, so let me see if I'm understanding both of you (and the James Austen piece) correctly:

From the empirical neuroscience perspective, when one views an object :

Egocentric stream: tries to answer the question "where is it in relation to me"?
Allocentric stream: tries to answer the question "what is it" ?

Both these streams are unconscious and they merge and present the processed result which is available to the conscious mind.

[/quote]

Thank you obyvatel and Buddy. I think the "what is it?" question is what I was trying to grapple with the "apple being independent of my experience" allegory. But instead of looking so deep into the meaning, I probably should have just stuck with the idea that it was just an apple, in order to explain the allocentric stream. The egocentric stream, to use Buddy's imagery, would have the apple in "meal mode" like the ball and the child being in "play mode". The apple then becomes an extension of the psyche in which I then see it as something that can serve me, as opposed to just seeing it and wondering what it is?

This is taken from a research project done at Harvard:

_http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/mkozhevnlab/?page_id=308

They simply state the differences as egocentric being where the object is in relation to the observer, and allocentric being where the object is in relationship to other objects besides the observer.

Also, on Wikipedia, I found a Two-streamed Hypothesis: _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-streams_hypothesis

This seems to be very similar to the Austin piece and suggests that there are two visual and two auditory pathways in the brain that answer the "where" and "what" questions. The ventral stream, akin to allocentric, answers the question as to "what" the object is, and the dorsal stream tries to convey "where" the object is in relation to the observer (more egocentric).

So I think I am understanding this better. Am I coming across that way?

Furthermore, trying to associate all of this with the poem, I can see how Daumal might have been trying to look past his own egocentric views of reality and himself, to be more allocentric in approach, perhaps to see things as they are and not how he wants them to be. So being allocentric is homologous to being more objective, I would say.

 

[Joe]

Connecting this with the egocentric (more conscious) and allocentric (more unconscious) attitudes, what is sought is a synthesis rather than annihilation of one or the other. The feeling of "nothingness" ( or being dismembered or killed) comes from the unseating of the long-held egocentric attitude from its primary position. If or as the process progresses, this void is filled with new possibilities coming from the hitherto unrecognized (unconscious) contents.

That's what I thought when reading about the allo and egocentric attitudes, that both are necessary to come close to an objective assessment of not only reality, but in determining what reality can be, as in the creative principle. Simply constating "what is it" is only the first step, and not really very creative. The creative side of observation involves imbuing things with meaning, which is by necessity based on our own experience and knowledge. So anyone can determine "what is it" but "what it means" is where the egocentric attitude come in to play. So the extent of the objectivity of an assessment of the meaning or qualities of any given thing by a person is determined by the extent to which the person's egocentric attitude is coherent with the 'rules' of creation.

On the "I am nothing" idea; I think that idea can only be conceive of by someone who has had an inkling of something against which they have been able to 'weigh' themselves in their current state.

 

[CNS]

Connecting this with the egocentric (more conscious) and allocentric (more unconscious) attitudes, what is sought is a synthesis rather than annihilation of one or the other. The feeling of "nothingness" ( or being dismembered or killed) comes from the unseating of the long-held egocentric attitude from its primary position. If or as the process progresses, this void is filled with new possibilities coming from the hitherto unrecognized (unconscious) contents.

That's what I thought when reading about the allo and egocentric attitudes, that both are necessary to come close to an objective assessment of not only reality, but in determining what reality can be, as in the creative principle. Simply constating "what is it" is only the first step, and not really very creative. The creative side of observation involves imbuing things with meaning, which is by necessity based on our own experience and knowledge. So anyone can determine "what is it" but "what it means" is where the egocentric attitude come in to play. So the extent of the objectivity of an assessment of the meaning or qualities of any given thing by a person is determined by the extent to which the person's egocentric attitude is coherent with the 'rules' of creation.

That makes sense. One must use both to their highest potential to effectively see and understand the world around them. I suppose actions like perspicacity and discernment would not be possible if one was not able to answer "what is it?", "where is it in relation to me?" and "what is it's meaning?" - all these questions needing egocentric and allocentric input to develop specific conclusions.

On the "I am nothing" idea; I think that idea can only be conceive of by someone who has had an inkling of something against which they have been able to 'weigh' themselves in their current state.

Perhaps like hitting bottom. It doesn't read like a self-pity thing from Daumal, more of a sense of freedom.