Disability and Suicide

[Mindy]

Seriously?

No Meditational experience required? I've tried meditation on several occasions and I know some people who are quite adept at it and I can say from personal experience and from talking to them there is definitely a whole lot of work that has to go into any proper meditation (which is really nothing more than thinking really hard).

Don't get me wrong. I do not think that meditation is useless, one good friend of mine has used it to help him cope with PTSD and he is a better person for the work he's put into his meditation/thinking.

Also there is no such thing as an "altered state of consciousness". You are either conscious or not. You might think of something after "meditating" (thinking really hard) that you haven't thought of in that way before but there is nothing magical or even spiritual about the act in and of itself.

Having said that I admire your determination and tenacity.

Cheers.

There are, indeed altered states of consciousness. Surely you've been so fatigued you couldn't think? Ever have an after-image? Day-dream? Reflect in deep abstraction so that you didn't hear your name called? Been hypnotized? Drunk? Ever see a diabetic start to go into an hypoglycemic state? These are systematic alterations of mental processing of cognitive stimuli (and emotional, in some cases.)

Ever see a physician rub an unconscious patient's breast-bone with his knuckle? He's administering a deep-pain stimulus to see if that patient can be aroused. Ever undergone general anaesthesia? Notice the blurred consciousness, vague awareness of things as you "came out of it?" Comas are graded as to their depth of "unconsciousness."

First you say you have experience trying to meditate, then you say you've talked to people who meditate. Then you state a generalization over "any proper meditation." Does your evidence support that generalization? Then you define all meditation as thinking. I doubt you can support that...

If two people were trying to convince you of something, and one said, "I tried it, got nowhere, it is not worth the trouble," and the other said, "I tried it, it worked for me, I got very desirable results," who, would you say, had a better logical position?

Do you also throw beer bottles onto playgrounds?

Mindy