Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Higher Consciousness on Bicycle Day

Evidence for a so-called "higher" (or different) state of consciousness was published today, on the 74th anniversary of the first human LSD experience.

The entropy or diversity of EEG signals has successfully been used as a measure of consciousness, with lower levels indicating sleep or anesthesia and higher levels indicating wakefulness.  Experimenters found that this measure of entropy was higher under the influence of several psychedelics.

Saturday, April 1, 2017

Finders Course Techniques and Protocol

This Finders Course Techniques and Protocol post on Reddit contains some of the best estimates about what constitutes the Finders Course.  I have been interested in the course due to both the unusual and specific research efforts and the results of the participants.  The post also contains a reasonable amount of information about the controversial background of the course founder.

I found the group awareness exercise where a small group (over video chat) attempts to discuss awareness itself, to be very interesting, kind of a participatory direct pointing exercise that I felt could be very useful, if a bit difficult.  The videos of this exercise are being rapidly taken down apparently as a result of the post.  2 out of 6 are still available as of this writing.

I had spent a lot of time attempting to suss out the contents of the course myself, and had stumbled onto most of the same material.  In part, it inspired me to provide a bare bones guide to these greatest hits of the meditation world in the Basic Meditation Styles post on the other blog, also linked at the upper right.

Again, what I saw happening in the group awareness exercise, that's a very interesting exercise and it's something that I imagine helps keep people motivated and on track, because it gets people to address the key "direction" of meditation in a very direct way and it provides some social pressure to really delve into it.

I suspect the group activities as well as the weekly accountability and the cost of the program to be vital in motivating people to commit to a substantial amount of daily practice.