Osakatomebaby

This is the part of the first part of something that may or may not be going somewhere and may or may not be loosely connected to the part of the following part in which I will probably say something about India and my reaction to it followed by or possibly preceded by something about my PLAN for the FUTURE, and, though it will likely be rife with vagaries, it will certainly be an indicator of THINGS TO COME.

Will I spill the beans about my long-term vision? Have I come up with a new philosophy for my life? Is this the beginning of The Life of Moi Part II? Did I finally turn from wanna-be-nouveau-radical-pinko-liberal-itarian to full-on hippie? Am I a total fruitcake?

Well, yes to the last, but as for the rest, only time and future posts will tell...

I wonder what the first guy who walked on burning coals was thinking. Was he being sacrificed or tortured and just managed to surprise everyone? Was he mad? Was he a hermit? Was he just bored? Ill? Or maybe he wasn't quite awake and just stumbled over them in the morning after a serious bender.

Of course it must have happened a bunch of different ways. Probably a lot of people in history who walked on fire for a lot of different reasons.

I went to a lecture at UT once hosted by the Plan II people (I didn't pick a major but I...) about transcendent experience. There were a number of speakers but the most interesting was a psychologist prof who discussed research on the possible physiological causes/manifestations (depending on your philosophical preference) of transcendental experience. Of course I have no data or names or anything, so I'm going to make a bunch of unsubstantiated claims and then proceed to dubitable conjectures. Three cheers for armchair pseudoscience (on my part, not hers) and reliance on memory. Here goes:

Theoretically, though it is difficult to prove, there are two varieties of transcendental experience, though actually they're more like two sides of the same coin. Your nervous system has two main channels, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic. The former responds to stress--raises your heartrate, increases breathing and perception. The latter brings you back down. So if you're walking on coals for example, you would probably activate your sympathetic nervous system, whereas if you were meditating that would be parasympathetic.

So the theory goes that you can max out in either direction and when you do the other system will compensate. Max out your sensory perception listening to loud drums, exalting and whirling like a dervish (if you're not one already) till you suddenly get a kick from the parasympathetic side and you start to get high and sort of float into ecstasy. Alternately this would happen under extreme stress to, say torture. Perhaps you wouldn't experienced ecstasy, but it would be release--the sort of thing that makes people able to withstand the unthinkable. Or you can sit and meditate to lower your breathing, heartrate, external awareness then the sympathetic kicks in and--badda bing--enlightenment. Well maybe not but some transcendent experience anyway.

The other things that happen along with this are your brain goes a little haywire what with all the mixed messages and you start interpreting this stuff through whatever filter you're familiar with--angels and demons, chakras, channeling, seeing through illusion, burning bushes. Whatever suits your cosmology. Oh and your pituitary gland gets zapped a lot so it's kind of orgasmic.

Wow...I didn't get very far at all with this and the ending is very unsatisfactory. Sorry, it's obscenely late and I likes my mornings. More soon.