I loved his book "The Ego Tunnel"
I just downloaded the free book and glanced thru it....it looks very interesting, gonna watch the video first...

Book: Metzinger 2024: "The Elephant and the Blind"Available for free here: https://mpe-project.info/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Metzinger_MIT_Press_2024.pdfSee also:

• https://mpe-project.info/the-mpe-project/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc7xwBZC9Hc

~D

Oh sweet baby Jesus it's 650 pages of phenomenological reports of pure awareness


the best quote from the YouTube talk - "these people [meditators] say very hard to understand things"

I know! Exciting isn't it? Barely a weeks reading but hey, the longer the enjoyment, um something something.
To the bookmobile padawan!
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Ha! Just a week to read all that?! Talk about yourself! Im a slow reader! I will need an Eon to go through that pile of info! 

I only ever heard about him in that 3 part podcast with Taft and Kenneth Folk where they go through stuff using his ideas! Very funny and useful stuff! Very much enjoyed it! I ought to start with the The Ego Tunnel! 

Uggg, the video shows what happens when someone who can't map worth a crap creates a questionaire to capture from a mass of nonmappers.
Then they apply stats to try to find order within the worst of word salad......I'm laughing my ass off. 
I hope it gets better.....like - How we got some idea of the complexity of trying to measure disparite vocabulary and talking past each other with no ground rules.
I'm still gonna read the book....
~D
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I just read the introduction to the book, and it reminds me of Jeffery Martin 

Well, trying to take out our biases of being mappy people, I think from a research perspective it complicates things quite a bit. For instance, this brings up several questions off the bat

• Do maps even exist? (you meet a lot of people that swear by them, and a lot of people who swear they dont exist!)
• What would a map even look like? (Like you have michael tafts POI map which is basically like mode of attention (conceptual, phenomenological, flow, pure awareness), you have maps that added psychological content (fear, misery, disgust, etc), you have more strictly phenomenological version, etc)
• If so, who's maps should you use?
• Who gets to say where someone is on a map? Is it the yogi, a teacher, a questionnaire, etc? (all of these are going to have their biases. Yogis love to overreport, teachers may be orthodox or conservative, a questionnaire might like the nuance, etc).

Secondly, my understanding is this idea of "pure consciousness" does get used differently across the different traditions (except theravada wouldn't be caught dead with this), with different practices, at different points. So there is a real question of if they are talking about the same thing. So like clustering on buzz words in the world salad answers might not be a bad approach here (like maybe there are really N different pure consciousness experiences, that are different).

Have you read MCTB?
Do you practice?
Who is the lot of people who swear by 'them' and who is the lot of people who don't? (Vague as that one thing sometimes either or)
You might try a jhana or two, see if that is to mappy. Or tell your experience of any POI.
ya, biases, people have them.
your "understanding is this idea of "pure consciousness" does get used differently across the different traditions?" (Imagine that.) What might be 'your understanding'?

stuff is different, kinda, vaguely, ya, I agree. You didn't say a whole lot here.

I guess I agree with what you said, hard not to. ;) ;) (smiles)
~D

hahahah, totally
toss enough spaghetti on the wall and some will stick. 
~D

Yes

Yes, you can check out my logs that are updated almost daily on this very site.


It's a mix of people. I'd say around ~30-40% of practitioners I meet don't go in for the maps. Either they don't dabble in them (like early buddhist theravada folks), or they know about them and say stuff like "oh i didnt have a dark night" (or they just don't like Daniel). Furthermore, you see a substantial amount of teachers that don't go in for maps either. Rob Burbea says they are nonsense in seeing that frees. Michael Taft specifically doesn't like POI (for unspecified reasons). Dhamarato doesn't like them. (I've seen probably 3-4 of the more orthodox/thai tradition people really dislike the idea that meditation could bring on psychologically dark territory, and they cite the Buddha saying that it should just make youre life better).

Generally the POI lines up pretty well with my practice history. IMHO the obvious flaw in it though is that I (and it seems to be common amongst reports on DhO) will cycle between DN and EQ ,so its linearized form isn't accurate. To me this strikes me as an issue with what exactly it is modeling. If you make the assumption that SE is working to eliminate gross attachment (the phenomenological thickness/grippiness that makes your body feel different from the world, and somehow you for example), then the DN to EQ cycles make perfect sense, because as a strong sense of a self appears, it creates a lot of attachment, which then magnifies the apparent unpleasantness, which is suffering. As this sense of self disappears, relief, peace and ease come. As this sense of self appears and disappears again and again, gradually overtime the attachment disappears permanently, and a yogi is slowly transitioned from more DN like states to more EQ like state.


Well there is several spiritual concepts that might fit the bill of "pure consciousness". In the yogic tradition sahaja samadhi (as cited here, but im not super familiar with yogic stuff so this could be wrong.), in Mahayana you have "mind of clear light", you have the awareness in deep sleep, you have all the luminous/clear light in tanric as well (could be similar or different), then obviously you might think of the 7th or 8th jhana. I would personally be relucent to use that specific label, because it seems that awareness is mutually dependent on some object [in fact, i dont think I've ever seen awareness or consciousness...], so it wouldn't be 'pure consciousness' more it's probably describing a very subtle object/flow. I also have questions about what happens to the visual field during these events, because at least for me in the few times I've been able to do the 7th jhana, it still seems that there is a visual field, so using the label of 'nothing' is a bit misleading.

Great response, Thanks for doing so.
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