I think I have only one or two VHS tapes, being the equivalent of /tmp. yes "have"; I still have all the tapes I recorded neatly organized and mothballed in boxes, and except for that two particular tapes I can not recall of overwriting any other.
I'm curious to know more. But I also think it's important not to paint all meditation with the same brush. Transcendental Meditation® is it's own weird thing.
Meditation and yoga have taken the ‘Western’ world by storm. This is because they are extremely easy to instruct. Close your eyes, breathe evenly, etc.
Those who know (yah pasyati, sah pasyayi - are initiated in scripture and are able to ‘see’) understand that meditation is the end portion of a spiritual path, the last stage before enlightenment.
Every single canonical text mentioning meditation mentions how essential it is to control the mind first, before meditation. Yet most people end up using it as a way to calm down which is not the intended use. It is unsurprising that they end up hurting themselves. Most can’t continue the practise long enough to do that anyways because for a beginner your mind will be jumping within 5 seconds or less.
It doesn’t matter much anyways. Most people are not Really meditating when they attempt to do so, more just relaxing.
Source: Scholar of important ancient Indian texts.
I can't speak for the author of that comment, but here's my take:
When you meditate, you're creating in essence an open space in your mind. (A head space, if you will. I will not, because that's pretentious. But feel free.)
That empty space is an invitation to anything out there that wants to fill it. If you're spiritually minded, you might think of it as an invitation to spirits to come and fill your head with new ideas, and wouldn't you know it, evil spirits love that sort of thing.
If you're secular/rational/scientifically minded, just know that if you calm your mind, you WILL get other thoughts replacing the ones you just calmed down. If you sit down feeling guilty, your meditation will likely be dominated by thoughts of guilt. If you're angry, you'll likely obsess about that anger.
The usual advice I've been given is to let it happen. Let those "evil" thoughts come, take note of them, and then let it go. If they come back (and they always come back), note them again, let them go again.
The danger is if we get attached to these ideas. Then they grow and become the basis for depression or anxiety or any number of other ailments.
The opportunity is to be able to see that these thoughts and feelings aren't any more real than anything else; that we don't have to act on them; we don't have to identify with them; we don't have to let them control or even influence how we really feel, think, and act. They're just passing thoughts. We don't have to hop in their car and go for their ride. We can keep walking.
It's probably because they directly conflated their experience with TM with meditation in general. Many people in the meditation community have strong views on TM in particular, in my experience.
Do you mean we should switch to using another theory, which reproduces all existing results, also correctly predicts some currently-unexplained observation or experiment, and has also correctly predicted previously-unobserved results (i.e. isn't just a "fudge factor")? If so, I would love to know what that theory is, since I certainly didn't encounter any such thing in the dark matter module of my masters degree (the options were basically MOND or (various possible forms of) dark matter, and the former is certainly much more of a "fudge factor").
If by "put to rest" you mean we just throw away our current theories without having a better replacement, then I don't even understand what that would mean. Would we ground all rocket launches since we don't completely understand gravity?
We know how stars work, and we know how gravity works...These two numbers don’t match, and they don’t match spectacularly. There had to be something more than just stars responsible for the vast majority of mass in the Universe.
I think the problem here is that maybe there is something else we don't understand. We also did not understand the propagation of light in a vacuum in the 19th century, and invented a hidden medium called the "aether" to explain it. I think there is some fundamental thing we are missing, and we're inventing dark matter to explain it.
I'm not a physicist, but my basic understanding of the state of the science tells me you're simply incorrect. We can observe the effect of dark matter via gravitational lensing, and folks much smarter than me have devised studies to exclude differential behavior of gravity at classical and galactic scales.
Give me a recent and well supported study indicating that dark matter may be something other than matter, and I'll happily read it.
My understanding is that the existence of dark matter is uncontroversial among physicists, and that the best bet is some sort of WIMP.
Neutrinos are almost as strange. They interact a tiny bit via the weak force, and they interact via gravity like everything else, but that's it. We know they exist because of the weak interaction.
Maybe dark matter interacts with things via the weak force, but even less than neutrinos- not quite zero, but just small enough that we can't measure it, or can't measure it yet. Hopefully, they do interact a little bit by some other mechanism otherwise they'll be very hard to detect- I believe this is what current attempts to find dark matter are relying on.
Nothing in science is assumed with 100% certainty. I would argue that working from our best available theories (while always looking for ways to falsify them) is perfectly reasonable.
It doesn't really work. Overwhelmingly the evidence points to mass, which is gravitationally affected by other mass, and nothing else.
I know the mind rebels against the notion of invisible matter, but is it really so much more implausible than the invisible spookiness of gravity to begin with? If the scientific evidence points that way, your monkey-brain intuitions do not provide a reliable veto.
MOND does work a lot better than Lambda Cold Dark Matter (L-CDM)... but only for explaining the rotation of galaxies. It can explain this rotation almost perfectly given only the mass distribution: no tuning is required. Dark matter, on the other hand, has issues with dwarf galaxies and has no predictive power: you just fit the dark matter to the results you observe (Which is why you end up with some dwarf galaxies that are almost entirely composed of dark matter, and ones that almost have none. With MOND it just works).
Of course MOND can't really explain the third peak of the cosmic microwave background radiation, so it isn't perfect either. It is also phenomenological, with no underlying physical theory at the moment. Still, it's surprising that it does work at all.
I should also mention that the bullet cluster, which is touted as proving dark matter, causes issues for dark matter as well as MOND. The velocities involved in the collision are higher than can be explained by the current dark matter models. MOND kind of sucks at dealing with clusters, as well.
TL;DR
MOND is a lot better than LCDM at explaining galaxy dynamics, LCDM is a lot better than MOND at explaining the cosmic background radiation. Both aren't that great at dealing with clusters (but you can also make dark matter work with enough fiddling).
This is another possibility, and would be exciting.
But it's very very hard to come up with plausible models for such modified gravity. There are lots of people trying, and their ideas tend to break all sorts of other things we know. For example (IIRC) lots of candidates gave a slightly different speed for gravitational waves, and were ruled out by recent detections where we also saw X-rays from the same event.
Sure, but all data we have rather points out to some undetected matter than problems with the theory of gravitation. The article shows several measurements which would be well explained with particles we did not detect yet.
Who knows what future physics holds (I’d love to know!) but our best theory of gravity (Einstein’s general relativity) is shown to be amazingly accurate in every experiment ever conducted for it.
Some form of only-detectable-via-gravity matter fits the math. Coming up with provable alternative math would be the greatest scientific breakthrough of the past century...or possibly of all time.
I’m sure people are working on it (along with quantum gravity). So either it’s wrong or it’s dark matter.
Maybe our assumptions about how momentum, gravity and inertia work are incomplete. General and special relativity describe it as a warping of spacetime, but while I've read all sorts about the equations, I have not yet read any description of how that phenomenon physically manifests (I'm not a physicist). Maybe relativity works well enough, but doesn't describe things completely, just like Newton's laws weren't complete and were superseded by relativity.
Physics is wrong on many fundamental levels, but everytime physicists find fundamental errors, they propose another entirely theoretical layer of complexity, with the "benfit" that no one is able to practically refute it.
It's not adding a layer of complexity, it's peeling off a layer of abstraction. With the "benefit" that it describes better what we observe and that it allows to successfully make new predictions.
What's your alternative to the scientific method exactly?
Physics, when practiced according to the principles of the scientific method, is never wrong (or right). Physical laws try to explain the world around us using mathematical models. Those models can be tested over a certain domain of experimental parameters D. A physicist, when speaking accurately, would never say that a physical law L is correct. They would say that L correctly describes our experiments on domain D. New or more accurate measurements can expand or shrink D, and in the worst case D can become empty. This constant refining is the essence of physics and the scientific method.
Arguing that physics is wrong implies a lack of understanding of what physics actually is.
It was "disproven" based upon a different philosophy.
You can't disprove a philosophy though, you can only try to understand different philosophical models next to each other.
The Einsteinian philosophy represents materialism and a world without meaning. It was problematic right from the start when mental gymnastics was needed to explain how energy can move through nothing, or how nothing (space) can have properties.
Funny that you mention experimental evidence, as most of physics is basically theoretical nowadays. (That's why it's called theoretical physics, dark matter included)
> It was "disproven" based upon a different philosophy.
It was disproven based on experimentation[0], no "philosophy" involved.
>The Einsteinian philosophy represents materialism and a world without meaning
There is no "Einsteinian philosophy," nor does anything in Einstein's theories relate to "meaning" or any lack thereof, in a philosophical sense. Whether you want to believe in aether, or God, or that the Machine Empire built the universe as a VR simulation, E=MC^2 remains true. It can be tested, has been tested has been proven true.
And its probably worth mentioning that the same is true for aether theory, because it also was not a philosophy, but a scientific theory (which was, as mentioned earlier, disproved by experimentation.) The universe is no more or less meaningful or materialistic either way.
>It was problematic right from the start when mental gymnastics was needed to explain how energy can move through nothing.
On the contrary, the mental gymnastics were needed to continue supporting aether theory after experiments and observations continually failed to produce any evidence of it, and the properties aether would need to have to conform to the current cutting edge of science started to become ludicrous.
>Things that don't appear logical, probably aren't.
At the time that Galileo proved that objects fall at the same rate regardless of their mass[0], the prevailing and more intuitive theory was that heavier objects fell faster. Miasma theory[0] was far more intuitive and "logical" to people than "tiny invisible monsters."[1] Newton's theories of gravitation alone couldn't account for the orbit of Mercury... but the illogical theory of relativity could[2].
Tesla was an uncontested genius, but genius isn't omniscience. Empty space does have properties (notwithstanding that the aether would have been one of them) like warping under gravity and vacuum energy[0]. Relativity, quantum mechanics, dark matter and dark energy are counterintuitive, sometimes profoundly so, but the universe isn't obliged to conform to human intuition.
All that we can say is that, as far as we know, based on observation and experimentation, the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but still stranger than we can suppose. And that the luminiferous aether isn't a thing (although the Higgs field is probably close enough...)
“Waymo's lidar firing circuit showed current passing along a wire between the circuit and the ground in two directions—something generally deemed impossible. ”
It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.”’17 The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it.
Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry
