Reason Rally

[BikerDude]

Fellow in the video is very Reasonable. As expected

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JKhBDo3-uI

[Hominid]

I like the point he made that ridicule is like satire: nothing is sacred, even religion.

The "Sacred Cow" of religion should be, in my opinion, totally dismantled.  The fact that North America holds religion in such high esteem indicates how willing we are to maintain cognitive dissonance... ignoring evidence and believing such childish bullshit.  We're phonies.  It's the same mindset that prefers image over substance.  It's all one in the same. 

Makes me ill.   

Of course, it's all, like, IMDO.

[cckeiser]

You might like this as well...Ethos the Movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN3IhEae68o

[Boston Rockbury]

It seems very sensible to make decisions based on reason but as a yogi I make a lot of decisions based on intuition, feeling and awareness. There are ways of perceiving and appraising which are not rational and yet not superstitious or counter-rational.

[cckeiser]

It seems very sensible to make decisions based on reason but as a yogi I make a lot of decisions based on intuition, feeling and awareness. There are ways of perceiving and appraising which are not rational and yet not superstitious or counter-rational.

I'm INFJ....the F is for Feeling:
http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/myers-briggs/infj.htm

[BikerDude]

It seems very sensible to make decisions based on reason but as a yogi I make a lot of decisions based on intuition, feeling and awareness. There are ways of perceiving and appraising which are not rational and yet not superstitious or counter-rational.

As usual you insist on a false dichotomy.
Feeling, awareness and even intuition are not outside the realm of reason. Certainly not feeling and awareness. Intuition depends on it's usage. But if it means the common ability that we have to process information unconsciously then it is also a perfectly reasonable act.
Many things like meditation are perfectly reasonable and the effects can be verified with things like EKG monitors. The problem happens when people begin to insist that meditation can reveal things to them that they don't in fact have any knowledge or understanding of. That is unreasonable.  The typical Deepak Chopra drivel.

[forumdude]

Personally I'm totally on Biker Dude's side on this. It's a very commonly-repeated false dichotomy. And I'm tired of the implicit undertext that many self-termed progressive folks employ which assumes that intuition is somehow more important or overlooked or underrated in our current society. If anything most people put waaaaay too much faith in their intuition and have a weak and  flabby rational muscle in their mind. There's an amazing book I'm reading right now called "Thinking Fast and Slow" which explains scientifically that intuition and reason are two distinct parts of the brain and each have their own strong suits. But the book implies that intuition (what he called "system 1", which is older, faster, and easier to employ) is the result of the majority of our errors. The problem is that system 2, or reasoning is much more difficult, often counter-intuitive, and requires a great deal of training to use properly.

This is very important for Dudeism, because Dudeism isn't about being lazy. It's about learning the right way to think about things so you don't have to spend all day chasing your tail, paying heed to the dictates of intution and getting led down blind alleys. The Dude may have let his intuition make some provisional stabs at solving the case but what made him the man for his time and place (and the slothy sleuth for this case) was that he was profoundly reasonable. He gathered info, changed his hypotheses to suit the new data coming in and never held onto an idealistic notion of anything. Everyone around him was a slave to their reptile brain, while the Dude was ironically and surprisingly the most wise of them all.

I also agree that meditation is actually a very reasonable practice. In fact I think when done right it increases rationality. It allows you to see your mind as a computer program and hack into it a bit. The mystical mumbo associated with it does it a disservice in my opinion. I hope that Dudeism will develop more rational forms of Eastern practices for this day and age and any help is welcome.

[forumdude]

Of course, may I add that the Dude did get led down many blind alleys (that was the whole conceit of the movie's humor) but the rational man knows when he's reached the dead end and turns around. Everyone else was stuck in their own dead end as a result of their idealism or egotism or narcissism or greed or willful ignorance. And you can't go with the flow if there's no where to flow to.

Today I chased a cat out of my house. It was a nightmare. It came in and our cats beat the shit out of it so it was holed up in the corner of the bathroom with no way out. I tried to give it some space and locked my other animals away but it still wouldn't come out. I finally had to soak it with a hose and throw tennis balls lightly at it before it finally ran out the bathroom and through the open door. Not sure if this is a good metaphor for what we're talking about, but well, maybe it is.

[Boston Rockbury]

It's a very commonly-repeated false dichotomy.  If anything most people put waaaaay too much faith in their intuition and have a weak and  flabby rational muscle in their mind.

I also agree that meditation is actually a very reasonable practice. In fact I think when done right it increases rationality. It allows you to see your mind as a computer program and hack into it a bit. The mystical mumbo associated with it does it a disservice in my opinion. I hope that Dudeism will develop more rational forms of Eastern practices for this day and age and any help is welcome.

I agree with a lot of what you say FD, but I'm not sure that I was presenting a dichotomy (false or otherwise) more an example of competitive inhibition. If we use the flabby muscle analogy there are three ways of training the muscles: strength, flexibility and stamina. It is possible to do weight-training, yoga and running and thereby develope all three - there is no intrinsic trichotomy. But there is an element of competitive inhibition whereby if one places undue emphasis on say body-building then it becomes difficult to also be flexible and staminated. Reason needs to be balanced by contemplative awareness and intuition. Why use only a small part of what we are?

[forumdude]

Good point, BR. Perhaps I let my inner rationalist policeman beat the truncheon down too hard.

I think you're correct that we need to better understand our intuition, but I feel that the main way to improve the quality of our intuition is to apply reason to it. I think that the clear-sighted perception afforded by a lot of spiritual training is actually the application of a form of rationality to our creative impulses. Of course, that's my opinion. And to be honest I think discussions about intuition and rationality are flawed because those words carry so much baggage and mean different things to different people. Is intuition the subconscious, creative mind? Or is it evolutionary baggage that is ill suited for modern living? Is it pure emotion? Is it something at the edge of consciousness? Depends on what we're referring to.

I guess as a fanboy for rationalism and also a musician, artist and writer I have my own ideas about these things. I also was saddled with a devout Freudian psychiatrist for a father and so have inherited a certain fascination for the old school ideas about the subconscious. My personal model of it is that we should cultivate the creative impulse, the pattern-recognition, emergent power of the subconscious mind, but then we need to give that raw energy shape with the aid of an efficient rational mind. Either one alone is incomplete.

I guess I'm also biased against a lot of that stuff because the vast majority of people who are interested in so called "metaphysics" like Chopra really are full of narcissistic shit. There are a few in the field who are not though - Jon Kabat Zinn and Michel Ricard come to mind. As well as good old Alan Watts perhaps. I used to be a big fan of Ken Wilber but now I think he's descended into the muck of mysticism as well. You yourself sound pretty amenable to the more rational approaches to yoga, however. Much more than most.

I've always dreamed of developing a rational form of yoga called "Loga." But I'm not good enough at either yoga nor logic to do it.

[Boston Rockbury]

I guess I'm also biased against a lot of that stuff because the vast majority of people who are interested in so called "metaphysics" like Chopra really are full of narcissistic shit. There are a few in the field who are not though - Jon Kabat Zinn and Michel Ricard come to mind.

There is a link between the narcissim of Chopra and the rational applied buddhist psychology of Jon Kabat Zinn, which is the somatic grounding of consciousness. Sanity seems to require that mind be rooted in the matter of the physical self. When self is separated from somatic exerience (breathing, physical sensations etc') it quickly becomes defocused and divided. Over-emphasis on the rational is sometimes a fear-based reaction to discomfort in inhabiting the body because of the painful emotions tied into patterns of physical tension.