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Stalking the Wild Pendulum
Conforming the Nervous System to Consciousness through the Focus of Attention
Greg Sipp
The premise of this workshop is that spiritual exercises found in the practices of yoga and Buddhism as well Vedanta are a means of conforming the brain to consciousness as the only means of truly understanding the nature of consciousness. After all, how could a part, (i.e. our limited self-awareness) ever know the whole?
The mystical way of understanding is not an intellectual attempt to understand consciousness but a means toward communing with it. This is
done prior to thought, prior to the brain/mind's instantaneous ability to collapse the wave function that are its' many drafts of reality, to create a single feeling of what happens.
The model for consciousness in this workshop will be the standing wave, and so the various primary oscillators of the body; the breath, heart beat, circulatory system, enteric nervous system will be looked at and experienced through this template. The goal of the workshop is for the participants to have an experience of self that is spacial rather than linear, (a story in time/space). This space is defined as the standing wave, similar to Johannes Kepler's description of soul: “The soul has the structure of a point in actuality...., and the =20figure of a circle in potentiality. It pours itself forth from that punctiform abode into a circle. Whether it is obliged to perceive external things that surround it or whether it must govern the
body..., the soul itself is hidden within... It goes out, then to the exterior
of the body according to the same laws by which the surrounding lights of the firmament come in towards the soul that resides in a point.”
Harmonices Mundi, 1619 A.D.
David Chalmers as well as others have speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental aspect of things like the dimensions of space and time. From the Mystical prospective these four dimensions arise out of consciousness. The brain does not create consciousness, the brain is in consciousness. In yoga, Vedantic teachings, and Buddhism an attempt is made to silence the mind so that which is prior to it can be known. From the linear point of view of the particle of classical physics, nothing is nothing. From the wave point of view of quantum physics, nothing is everything.
The Mystic comes to realize that consciousness is a feed back loop, an iteration as reflected in fractals. The mind and its' illusionary sense of self, is an interference pattern keeping us from knowing "the big loop" of consciousness itself.
In his book Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating
Universe, Henry Stapp argues that we can not understand consciousnessfrom the paradigm of classical physics. Yoga, Buddhist, Meditation and various mystical practices attempt to bring attention to a point prior to the collapse of Daniel Dennett’s multi-draft wave function, in other words, prior to the brain/mind’s creation of experience in space/time. Dennett says, “Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made up of a lots of tiny robots.” It is the premise of this workshop that, “yes we have a soul, it’s the space all those robots are in!”
About Greg Sipp
Gregory Sipp teaches courses on yoga and the mechanics of consciousness at the Santa Fe Community College and other locations throughout Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has been studying the relationship between spiritual states of consciousness and neurophysiology for over twenty years. He has been formally teaching yoga for nine years.
address: 369 Montezuma Ave. #117 Santa Fe, NM 87501
phone: (505) 986-8306
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