I'd say that you've never reached enlightenment.

@JeffMesser: That or I have a really good bullshit detector.

@Benthoven well, I can tell you ... as a former southern baptist I was pretty close-minded when it came to studying eastern "mysticism". But when you consider that western science has only been addressing the human mind for maybe 125+ years while the Indus valley has focused on it for 3,000 then it comes as no surprise that many authorities and experts have come to embrace mindfulness meditation and the like now. The double slit experiment is opening many eyes and minds to the possibilities of ties between awareness and probabilities and the hidden world of quantum mechanics. So I wouldnt just be writing things off.

@JeffMesser: It sounds like you're regurgitating "What the Bleep do We Know" which has been fairly soundly refuted. Not embracing "mysticism" doesn't make anyone close-minded. In fact, it has nothing to do with being open or close-minded... it's about observable science versus gullibility. Mindfulness meditation has the same effect on our brains as sitting with a cat, or walking in the park. They're good for us, but one isn't better than the other.

Science itself has nothing to do with "Western" or "Eastern" thought. In fact, scientists around the world will arrive at similar conclusions regardless of language, spiritual bent, gender, or even location in the galaxy. And that's how science works. It doesn't "write things off," it investigates them. However, when the evidence is lacking, or even contrary to the hypothesis, then science goes with the evidence, regardless of preferred ideology.

[skeptoid.com]

@Benthoven today's mysticism is tomorrow's theory and a rule next week. The substrata to existence is an infinite mass of rules and probabilities and effects upon which our perceptions of things paint a picture. You affect those rules and that guides the universe for everything and us within our part. The double slit experiment shows us that probabilities are part of those rules and gears and that our mere thought affects them. The things we experience are just as much rules and formulas and math as they are actual sensations or thoughts. That swirling sun you're viewing is actually a complex orchestrated awareness of other incidents causing probability changes quite some distance away in what we call physical space. You may have to be of certain open thoughts to even be stimulated enough to experience some of these rules and probabilities. Maybe they create a vibration or something. I just know I don't always have to know how something works before I can learn to anticipate an expected response ... and often it seems as though my response was a pre-condition to the thing happening in the first place.

There is a probabilistic increase in the chances of increasing experience and knowledge simply be being open-minded.

@JeffMesser: You keep using the phrase "open-mind." I do not think it means what you think it means.

@Benthoven are you just trying to be the king of irony or what?

@JeffMesser: I'm trying to point out that this is the wrong place for New-Age bullshit. We read on this site, we tend to think skeptically, and our bullshit detectors are pretty well defined. As the old saying goes: You can believe what you want but you don’t get to misrepresent science.

Also, you keep going back to the double slit experiment, but you clearly know nothing about how it works, or what it really means. Here's a link explaining it.

The Double Slit Experiment Demystified. Disproving the Quantum Consciousness connection
[medium.com]

@Benthoven new age? what's new age about reading the vedas? I know exactly what the double slit experiment means and refers to. I think you have some reading to do. tying theoretical physics to neurology is far from new age ... something which you might be aware of with some education.

@JeffMesser: Says the guy who hasn't put together a single cohesive sentence in this whole discussion.

But it goes back to my original thought: It's been my experience that those who think they're "mind blowing and completely enlightening" should cut back on the edibles before they go online. You clearly think you're deep and compelling and whatever else, but you're just another New-Age woo panhandler who really needs to sober up before he goes online.

@Benthoven the fact you choose the word "woo" tells me a lot about you - especially when you use it in a response to claim yourself open-minded. After 10 years in nuclear engineering I certainly understand the point Lea is trying to make. The matrix algebra and accompanying summations he is trying to use to prove his point are the same ones we use for neutron flux in core design to calculate necessary rod positions and boron poison loading in core history to achieve supercriticality safely for Rx power while overcoming xenon accumulation. His suggestion is that wave functions serve to describe a different characteristic than newtonian physics application to particle movement and that ascribing a cause for that difference is a gross conceptual error. Lea's oversight is he doesn't properly grasp the field within which this threshold occurs. He completely misrepresents that term consciousness in a manner suggesting he has never read the vedas at all. Close-mindedness. Just as you are doing. Calling 3,000 years of scholarly efforts "woo" is akin to western medicine dismissing accupuncture and accupressure up until a decade ago. The same as western psychology dismissing 2,500 years of Indus Valley meditation and counseling research until recently. I think you need to wake up.

@JeffMesser: Again with the open-minded BS. I have never applied that term to me and that you keep saying it shows you're not even bothering to read my comments, you're just looking for keywords so you can "respond."

You may have been a nuclear engineer for ten years, but that means nothing. Gregg Braden claims to have worked for NASA, and he's one of the biggest woo purveyor in the New-Age community. Deepak Chopra is supposed to be a great doctor, but you can't trust anything he says. Ben Carson is a neurosurgeon, and he can barely string two sentences together. Degrees and education mean nothing if you're wrong. The appeal to authority fallacy is still just a fallacy.

Calling 3,000 of superstition and woo somehow scientific is a sure sign that the closed-minded person is the one who can't seem to accept scientific studies, and instead must wrap their New-Age BS around them instead. And way to bring in acupuncture. Those who think they're woke are really just hallucinating. You want me to "wake up..." I want you to sober up... maybe grow up. And step away from the New-Age BS.

@Benthoven I am going to go ahead and get rid of you from my purveyance. You're close-minded and apparently very myopic. good luck in what you do.