Effects of meditative trance

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by demonsbane

A science that is empirical and based in the perception of the senses, by definition can't gather a knowledge that is beyond the physical ambit. Honestly, such science can't claim much about orders of reality that aren't accessible through the body. Totalism here means the pretension of explaining all through the modern scientific method, which unavoidably means that all that can't be studied and positively checked by it is unreal, false and delusional. It results in reductionism.

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