fivebells, I find your take on this interesting. Would you care to explain a bit more why you think "all of this leads to a deeply unskillful state of mind"? And also, considering the following linked article, why do you think that it leads to "a strong mind-body identification"?
My first reaction to what wylo wrote were the words "chop wood, carry water".
I was actually going to post
this link in a separate thread, but the theme of this thread is now roughly the same that I wanted to discuss, so I might as well post it here.
Reading that article and resonating with it produces a wide variety of phenomena for me, ranging from sense of vacuum and oblivion, emptiness and insubstantiality to strong A&P-like energetic phenomena.
What the author of that article calls "Ring 0" and another particular mode or type of experience that I have yet to explain on this board are what I see as the top, the best, modes of experience that I have ever come across, and I strive to align my everyday experience as much as I can to this.
I find language very transparent and fractal-like. Lately the western concept of flow has been spilling all over my current understandings of Life, The Universe and Everything, and I see a little glimmer of flow in almost any endeavor to better our human lives. I see it in Zen & Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, Pali & Theravada Buddhism, Vedanta & Advaita Vedanta, Hinduism (mostly Shaivism and the Vedas), Tibetan Buddhism/Vajrayana, Mahamudra & Dzogchen and AF.
It's has opened up a new dimension of understanding and become a common denominator for so many diverse techniques and traditions. I am aware that this is exactly the kind of thing that is irresistible to our human brains, patterns (especially the grand ones), and that such things should be skeptically investigated. So far, it's has held up under scrutiny and I'm warming up to posting about it here on "ze D'oh!".
fivebells .:
(...) the difficult problems require so much bandwidth for abstract modeling that it is difficult to maintain present-moment awareness.
There are many ways to put into words what I'd like to point out about this sentence. I'd like to try to cut it very short, hopefully that'll produce the gist: how is abstract modeling not present-moment awareness?
fivebells .:
The capacity to get lost in the world of the program you're working on is in fact celebrated among computer programmers, and managers of computer programmers are encouraged to provide environments where this can happen.
Here I'd like to point out something very similar to above: that capacity to get lost in the world of the program is the same capacity by which we're trying to "get enlightened", ie. it's the capacity to get lost in the world of the world. Consider the meaning of "getting lost" in this context.