GENIUS FORUMS

reedsch wrote:Check out "The Spectrum of Consciousness" by Ken Wilber, which I believe is one of the seminal books on the subject...

Link

I shall add it to the ever growing list. I am working on another by someone a little more obscure that I found by accident while wandering through a used bookstore on holiday out of town. I picked it up as a lark only because of the title: A Guide for the Perplexed by E F Schumacher, but it has turned out to be a very interestingly argued theory, thus far. Copyrighted in 1977, kind of old but yet timeless.

Thanks for the suggestion!

reedsch wrote:

Check out "The Spectrum of Consciousness" by Ken Wilber, which I believe is one of the seminal books on the subject...

After finishing this book by E F Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, I decided to look up Ken Wilber. Wilber has a dot com, so I perused some of his writings. What is so incredible is that Wilber picks up where Schumacher left off.

Wilber's Great Chain of Being is very similar to Schumacher's Four Levels of Being.

Schumacher's book was palatable. His notion that the "Higher Being" we relate to in our higher states is somewhere outside time and space is questionable, but the rest of his theory is interesting. It was written in 1977 and is a bit dated in places with regard to his arguments against science, but the core is useful.

Wilber is a practicing Buddhist, which is interesting because Schumacher converted to Catholicism six years before this book was published [and his untimely death that year], however, he seldom quoted any Catholic mystics but relied moreso on Buddhism thought and teachings.

I couldn't really find any connection between the two on my limited search, but it is interesting how their theories coincide. But Reed...tell me why I won't get a large headache reading Wilber. Schumacher wrote like David Quinn writes, without the use of complicated philospeak. Wilber seems almost too technical in issues that should be easier to explain...and maybe, perhaps, I was just perusing some of his more complicated materials.

reedsch,

Would you please use the labeling function on your links? By leaving them unlabeled, everyone has to scroll across the screen to read what is posted.

This is done by hitting the URL button, cursor back one space to get past the "]" then add the = symblol, then between the = and the ] put the link. then cursor over to the space after the ] and label the link, then hit the URL button again. Be sure there are no spaces between the ] and the first letter of your label.

Thank you in advance for making the threads easier to read.

Alas, unmasked as a poseur and not a true genius who would have know such things beforehand...unconscious, as it were.

reedsch wrote:Check out "The Spectrum of Consciousness" by Ken Wilber, which I believe is one of the seminal books on the subject...

(look it up on Amazon yourself)

*smacks head in disbelief*

Here - just hit quote, paste it in, and observe how it was done. The code will show up when you hit quote, so you will be able to see how it was done. I quoted you for the purpose of this post, but I hit enter a few extra times around the part you will want to paste so as to not confuse you when you are trying to look at what to do.

reedsch wrote:


Check out "The Spectrum of Consciousness" by Ken Wilber, which I believe is one of the seminal books on the subject...

"The Spectrum of Consciousness"

Passthrough - would you please similarly fix where you quoted reedsch so we don't have to scroll back and forth on this page, too?
.

20 years as a software engineer (8 as a certified Java programmer) ALL WASTED. Truly a dark night of the soul.

I will go and sin no more.

reedsch wrote:Alas, unmasked as a poseur and not a true genius who would have know such things beforehand...unconscious, as it were.

Passthrough - would you please similarly fix where you quoted reedsch so we don't have to scroll back and forth on this page, too?

I suppose someone beat me to it, however, I have no idea what you are talking about. I clicked on the link Reed gave earlier, which looked like any other cut and paste hyperlink - and it sent me there. What is the scrolling thing about?

And Reed, I still would like to know about his book. Does it take a PhD to read it? After all, he is very well educated and speaks almost as if a clinician.

I am beginning to wonder how much more analysis of an issue is necessary. It seems that there comes a point in time when you have to live your "leap of faith" rather than analyze it so critically. I'm not quite sure I can "prove" anything that I may understand to be true because, as Schumacher put it, this type of understanding uses descriptive science which takes into account so many "inner experience" variables. To explain them to someone who hasn't had them before or in the same fashion is really moot...they simply won't believe you and think you mad...or think you made it up to gain some foothold somewhere or with someone. I could use millipodium as an example.

Since I have already admitted to having one break with sanity in my life, I'm sure anything I might say will just be chalked up to another delusion of my own making.

What is most interesting about what I quoted David on earlier, is that this same "idea" is present not only in Buddhist thought but St. John of the Cross also said it in "Ascent to Mount Carmel", which I finished reading a while back. Schumacher quoted both in his book. I think it is why now I understood what David meant.

Having those "moments" where you realize something different or special should not be held onto in the event that it could have also been a shot of serotonin or dopamine to the brain, but it is something to seek after nonetheless...that is, a connection with God.

Let me know about Wilber, but I may just go back to Bertrand Russell's "Wisdom of the West" where I left off before I found Schumacher.

passthrough wrote:
I suppose someone beat me to it, however, I have no idea what you are talking about. I clicked on the link Reed gave earlier, which looked like any other cut and paste hyperlink -

Except that it was over a hundred continuous characters wide, and therefore distorted the post box so that this thread was over two screens wide. Both pages of it, thanks to your quoting the same link. This required the annoying back and forth scrolling by one to read any and all posts.

and it sent me there. What is the scrolling thing about?

Elizabeth kindly and lucidly explained how one can compress any given link so the need for nasty scrolling in any thread with a mongo-long link address never arises.

All Hail Elizabeth. Hail, hail!
[/quote]

Carl G wrote:

Except that it was over a hundred continuous characters wide, and therefore distorted the post box so that this thread was over two screens wide. Both pages of it, thanks to your quoting the same link. This required the annoying back and forth scrolling by one to read any and all posts.

Ok, now that is odd. It did not do that to my computer. My computer just wrapped it around to a second line. In fact, when Dan (I think) first put up that warning about URLs I really didn't know what the problem was then either.

Why are your (collective) computers doing that and mine does not? I think I know what you are talking about though because at work we use MS Outlook Express for our e-mail and sometimes it wraps when you reply to a message and sometimes it goes forever right before it wraps. This must be the same type of thing, although the URL Reed posted wrapped properly. Strange, very strange.

passthrough wrote:
Why are your (collective) computers doing that and mine does not? I think I know what you are talking about though because at work we use MS Outlook Express for our e-mail and sometimes it wraps when you reply to a message and sometimes it goes forever right before it wraps. This must be the same type of thing, although the URL Reed posted wrapped properly. Strange, very strange.

Maybe it depends on who is using firefox vs IE?