Re: Effects of meditative trance
 

The first is a Teaching roll, or a series of Teaching rolls.

The second is the acquisition of skill in Philosophy (Upanishadic) or (Vedanta), and the making of one or more skill rolls in it.

The third is a series of Meditation rolls, almost exactly as provided for in GURPS.

The fourth is probably a Discipline of Faith, or maybe True Faith, or both together; anyway, it's not of the nature of a skill, I don't think. Shouldn't knowledge of the Absolute be, well, absolute?

Bill Stoddard

Re: Effects of meditative trance
 

I would, of course, be amiss if I didn't point out that Plotinos reached one-ness with the One through meditation, but without the benefit of the Upanishads or Vedas.

Re: Effects of meditative trance
 

Yes, well, that's why the emic perspective is a problem.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Effects of meditative trance
 

i. "Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses" goes back to Aristotle; it's not distinctive to modern science at all.

ii. There are no orders of reality that aren't accessible through the body, whether directly via the senses, or indirectly via the interaction of the senses with physical instruments. There is no knowledge of anything beyond the physical. The inability of science to provide knowledge of the non-, extra-, or supra-physical is not a defect; there is nothing to know.

iii. This is not, technical, a reductionist view at all, but an eliminativist one. See Paul Churchland's discussion of reduction vs. elimination in physical science: the progress of science reduced heat flow to random molecular motion, but eliminated the idea of phlogiston entirely. I have comparable expectations regarding trance states.

iv. Whether you accept a purely this-worldly view or not, the fact remains that in a book on technology, we can only talk about trance induction from a psychophysiological perspective, or a psychophysiologically informed ethnographic perspective. Any treatment in terms of actual interaction with the divine, or the inner self, belongs in some other book entirely. But there are known methods of inducing trance states, which different cultures invent independently; those are reasonable topics for technological discussion. Whether all those cultures are tuning in on the same ultimate reality, or whether one really has it and the others are all being snared by Satan or Maya, may be left to people who buy the appropriate premise.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Effects of meditative trance
 

Asta Kask, are you annoyed by me not mentioning Plotino or the Neoplatonism? There's no point in that: I acknowledge it had several things in common with Hindu wisdom. There were many cultures and persons achieving great things, but you can't expect the mention of all of them, right?

I chose the Advaita Vedanta frame for explaining something and I'm not going to change it just now because, maybe, a sort of chauvinism (?).

I never implied that the Enlightenment only could be reached through Hinduism.

However, Neoplatonism is less than perfect in many points. It's an incomplete doctrine. It has, for instance, the cap at the One, and that still isn't the infinity nor the Brahman in the context of the Vedanta; instead, it is the first determination as the Being. Such teachings are incomplete and their compilators didn't understand all, nor drew all the necessary nor possible implications of such doctrinal formulations.

This affected the Middle Ages thinking in a great degree, because this doctrine, capped at the One, was limited to the ontology, and from that is only possible to derive just theology and not metaphysics -I'm not using this term with the same restricted meaning that Aristotle did; OTOH eastern teachings weren't capped at all, and going beyond the One (the summit of the Prâjna state, Iswhara, etc), which is the "Tao with name" in the Taoist doctrine, they reach the Absolute Itself, (the "fourth state", Turiya in the Vedanta, Ain Sof in Hebrew Kabbalah, the "unnamed Tao" in Taoism, and is that lack of limits what usually distinguishes the eastern metaphysics from the western ones, or better said, from western ontology and theology along with diverse philosophical trends.

Also, according his biographer Porfirio, Plotino reached such one-ness with the One as you say, but only temporarily. Sufi doctrine categorizes such partial attainments as hal, temporary spiritual states, different of maqam or stations, that are permanent.

Enlightenment is only regarded as such when it's permanent. According with that, Plotino wasn't Enlightened. But other westerners were, before him and afterwards, and I'm not speaking of them right now.

Please note that there are many nuances about all this. I'm only answering in a very summary way.

Isn't that. And nobody is free of his own "emic" perspective.

Re: Effects of meditative trance
 

Fair enough. I read too much into what you said.

Re: Effects of meditative trance
 

Well, it's awfully Western, but I'm going to quote Wittgenstein: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Effects of meditative trance
 

Bill, this is a misunderstanding.

I wasn't speaking about the Low-Tech Companion 1: Philosophers and Kings book, which is nice as it is, but merely answering to some points that you raised regarding the -according to you- needless of metaphysics for understanding meditation.

I'm repeating myself saying that I think that you and TBC made a very good work in the part "Technicians of the Sacred"; I already acknowledged that -more than once in this very thread, and I did it gladly, as I am doing it now.

Please understand that I'm not asking to any Low-Tech book to cover the dimensions that you're mentioning. Obviously that would be stuff for a non-tech book; I stated this in other thread yesterday (OK you can't read all the threads!).

I thought that you were speaking about your personal opinion, not about the book nor about any GURPS book. I wasn't speaking about LCT 1 at all, after trying to answer to the OP questions for then addressing myself to Edges.

Re: Effects of meditative trance
 

That's fair enough; I got distracted by a side thread.

However, I do want to suggest that the focus in LTC1 is the relevant one for answering the OP. That is, LTC1 didn't ask about whether there is a divine, supernatural, or metaphysical reality, but about methods of inducing certain altered states of consciousness in human organisms. The OP wanted to know about how those altered states of consciousness would affect awareness of the environment in, say, a combat situation. That's a very this-worldly issue.

It's perfectly possible to run a game where you deal with the other-worldly issues. A Cabal campaign might do so, if for example the PCs went to the highest of the four planes. It would be a challenge to describe, of course. But it would be a possible game element . . . just a quite different sort of game element.

Speculatively, I think that the usual in-game representation of an ineffable spiritual experience is an ineffable aesthetic experience. If "usual" means anything for an outcome that a GM might attain a few times in a lifetime of gaming.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Effects of meditative trance
 

Hm. Sorry, but I read too little in this reply yours. Honestly.

That phrase has sense but only according with the proper context. If the Absolute, which is beyond any word, is something about which isn't wise to talk, then there weren't doctrines nor spiritual teachers.

And what's the problem with that being Western? "Awfully"? I don't think so. And I don't see the point. Clearly the East almost always had the advantage in metaphysics since historical times, although that doesn't means that similar perspectives weren't available, too, to Westerners. They were, but in more obscure and troublesome ways.

-

If you guys are upset with me, thinking that I'm against the West, you're wrong. Things are more complex than that. I acknowledge that my emphasis in eastern teachings can cause that impression in some readers, but I think that isn't my fault, or not entirely. One of the reasons because I chose the eastern frame for answering to these things is because it's much more clear than the western one, which should contain many Christian references that I have reasons to avoid.