The Dire Search for Meaning and Purpose in a Finite Life.

[MBM]

I think the term "mysticism" is one of those loaded terms where we would be better off using another one. However, it has been used historically in the sense that is given in the article (despite Rand pushing the meaning in a different direction and a lot of weird people pushing it that way, too). Rich gives four points in common for reported mystical states (and like I said, I prefer to come up with another term as we go along, but for now I will start by using my own words, not his, for the four points in his article):

1. It is a mental event difficult to communicate to someone who has not experienced it. Like I said earlier, it is like describing red to the color-blind. (Incidentally, there have been a lot of monkey-shines in describing this state with the most bizarre speculations flying all over the place as if they were facts. That's the part Objectivists like to mock and, frankly, some of it deserves some serious mocking.)
   
2. It is experienced as a normal state of induction. Just as you are sure red is red when you look at it, you are sure that what you experience is real. (Rich and William James call this "having authority for the person experiencing it.") This same feeling of "realness" that accompanies sensory induction, like what happens in seeing red, is an essential part of the mental event.
   
3. It lasts about a half-an-hour. This varies somewhat with different people, but half-an-hour is a pretty good average.
   
4. It is experienced as a passive state, although it can be induced by outside elements. This can be described as the passivity of seeing red. One does not think "I am willing myself to see red" or "I fully intend to see red." One just sees it. The mental event can be induced, however, by a number of ways - some relatively simple like meditation or hypnosis (or entrainment), and others more physically drastic like alcohol or drugs. It also can come on of its own accord. Using our "red" analogy, these outside inducements are like making a person open his eyes while putting something red in front of him.
   

That is a start. The most important aspect I see of accepting the reality of such a mental event is that it observably lasts for a specific period of time.

Now does this mental event access a part of reality not accessed by our five senses, or is it merely a part of the brain's operations, like sleep is, which has no principal awareness function?

This is the million dollar question and this is what needs to be discussed, studied, subjected to experiments, measured, etc.

Some years ago, I read a book by Carl Sagan called The Demon-Haunted World. The book was about various types of "abnormal" or "paranormal" (or whatever the suitable word is) experiences some people have had over the centuries. For examples: being abducted for a period or time by a UFO driven by alien beings; or having some kind of religious vision, such as Moses and the burning bush. (Its been a long time since I read the book, so I can't remember any more examples off the top of my head).

Sagan's hypothesis, as I remember it, is that these different types of experiences people have reported over the years are in fact the same mental phenomena, and that, since its such a strange, never-before-experienced mental phenomenon for those people, they attempt to explain it in terms of ideas or concepts that "make sense" in the culture milieu of the times they live in. Perhaps they have no choice in the matter, maybe the brain's automatic perceptual/conceptual processing of the event forces it down neural pathways that cause it to be perceived in "familiar" terms.

Sagan's position on these experiences is that there is some real mental phenomenon going on, that its not some kind of craziness or insanity because too many people who are too rational and credible have (often reluctantly) reported such types of experiences. And that it needs to be studied and researched, etc.

So I am wondering, was Sagan talking about the type of mental event that is being discussed in this thread? Maybe not, since those events usually happen while the person in question is sleeping. But maybe its the same broad category of mental event.

Just speculating. Interesting discussion here.

MBM

BTW, since you don't know me yet, I think I should say that I myself have never had any of the types of experiences that are being talked about by either you or Sagan. And I usually come from a place of intense skepticism about such things (perhaps not as open-minded as I *should* be), yet there is another part of me that sometimes really longs to have such an experience. And I've gone thru phases occasionally where I've devoured books about UFO abductions and the like. But I always return to my "ground state" of intense skepticism.

[Judith]

Ken Wilber, in "Eye to Eye: the Quest for a New Paradigm", summed up his thesis pretty much as follows:

There is an eye of flesh, an eye of mind, and an eye of spirit. Each is appropriate to a specific body of knowledge, and information in each body of knowledge is validated by consensus among experts in the field.

The eye of flesh deals with empiric physical reality, such as scientific knowledge. Knowledge in this field is gained by direct sensory perception or by using instruments that extend that perception. For example, when Galileo said that the earth moved and the sun stood still, this knowledge required looking through a telescope. To gain this knowledge required looking through the scope. If one refused to look through the scope, one couldn't reasonably argue with him.

The eye of mind deals with purely intellectual concerns, such as mathematics. Knowledge in this field is gained by understanding and learning the concepts thereof. For example, if one wants to understand differential equations, one must first learn arithmetic and algebra. If one refuses to gain an elementary knowledge of the field, one cannot reasonably expect to learn and argue about advanced concepts in the field.

The eye of spirit deals with yet another level of consciousness. Wilber posits that this level of consciousness is just as knowable and learnable and repeatable as mathematics and science, and has standards and exercises that enable one to become expert in it. The exercises are meditation and koans, and the masters are people such as Zen monks. These masters have an understanding of the advanced concepts and have reached consensus on the advanced subjects in the field. They can tell if you have or have not reached an advanced level in the field, just as advanced mathematicians can tell if you understand advanced math or if you are merely scribbling nonsense on the blackboard. If you refuse to do the required steps to gain advanced understanding in the field (i.e., the required meditation), you have no more business telling the Zen masters that their field is nonsense than a savage would have telling advanced mathematicians that their equations have no meaning and are mere scribbles.

I find Wilber's proposition fascinating. I consider myself an Objectivist and an atheist, and have no problem accepting his proposition as being quite possible and entirely consistent with Objectivism.

Regarding brain studies, I've read somewhere (can't remember where) that there have been studies in which stimulation of the temporal lobes enables an experience so intense that the subject would swear in a court of law that God had been standing right next to him/her. Some would argue that this result means that all religious experience is clearly the result of electrical impulses in the brain. Others would argue that it means that other sensory experiences have also been reproduced in the lab, and that clearly if this one has too, such experiences must be real and authentic. I say that no one will resolve this argument by arguing. I do know that I'd LOVE to go into one of those labs and have it done to me, simply because I'd like to broaden my range of experiences, and that having had the experience I'd not know what it means any more than I do now. It's terribly important to distinguish between the fact of the experience itself and the interpretation or explanation of the experience.

I am very interested in Rich's experiences and in Michael's experiences, and in what others have to say on the subject.

And I'm STILL on vacation and won't be back until late Sunday night! (So I won't be posting regularly.)

Judith

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

MBM,

Here is the link to that fascinating book you mentioned.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

This looks like a marvelous book. If it really does mention the part about common mental phenomena running throughout all those allegations, I am highly interested in reading it. This is just the kind of thing I am seeking.

Unfortunately, the advertising for it focuses on debunking and the only mental thing I saw mentioned was a reference to evoking memories of sexual abuse. But I will look into it based on your observation.

As to the experience in itself, I am sorry you have not had it. Here is a description of how it works with me sometimes. I wrote about this on the old SoloHQ. I am quoting from a post of mine dated June 4, 2005. I didn't realize how articulate I was about this back then as I was just starting to get the taste for writing. I was addressing Charles Anderson in response to being pleasantly surprised by a sudden insightful post out of nowhere from him on admiring nature.

You touched on several reasons to love nature that are rational. I agree with every one of them. But how about one that is not so apparently rational? How about just marveling at the existence of nature in itself? Feeling yourself part of all that?

If you feel a strong emotion, if it brings you pleasure, if it does no one any harm, if you like feeling that way, is this not a value also? Is this not worth keeping?

I have such an emotion. It is extremely strong when it comes on and I value it highly. When I walk through an undeveloped part of the countryside, seeing the sky as an upside-down bowl with the clouds drifting way up there, contemplating the vastness of the universe and also how infinitely small it can be with all those sub-particles, watching life spring up in wonderfully varied forms all around me, seeing the fascinating rock formations and dirt I am walking on, realizing that I am stuck by gravity to a spinning ball hurdling through time and space and that I am a part of all this, not set off and alienated but a vital component with my own place in this scheme of things, a most pleasant feeling - something akin to a mixture of wonder and gratitude - saturates my entire consciousness and I even get the sensation that it spills over and permeates the rest of my body.

Religious people have told me that I am experiencing God this way. I can't rightly say what it is. I do know that this emotion exists and it is powerful. I love this feeling and I will not give it up. (I do a whole lot of soul-searching and thinking on it too, but more on that at another time. Leave it to say that I have not come up with all the answers yet, but I have arrived at some.)

So my contention is that what I called the Objectivist Inversion of Sanction of the Victim will get you to sacrifice such a pleasure for no other reason than it is not "rational." But I ask, why on earth should I sacrifice it? I love it. It even brings me extra benefits like a more positive attitude in general and serenity, but those are not the reason I value it. I simply like feeling that way.

If I swallowed the "party line" whole Randroid style, I would obviously accept the fact that I was being foolish and irrational - somehow even superficial. I would resist that emotion when it came on. I would do so willingly - with my full sanction in order to consider myself rational. And that way nobody would gain a damn thing and I would lose.

But wouldn't that be evil? Isn't that almost a flavor of Altruism?

Dayaamm! I came up with The Inverted Sanction of the Victim there. I had forgotten about that. I described it in a post right before the one above:

And this is the irony. Normally some parasite or other gains with sanction of the victim. With the Objectivist inversion, there is no payoff anywhere to anyone. Just pure loss...

This is precisely the position I am at now when I hear the scoffing. Those who scoff would deny others a very real inner value in exchange for nothing. So what's the point? (OK. I'm going to stop the ranting. I think I made it clear already.)

Notice that I needed to contemplate a huge number of referents both conceptually and perceptually to bring that state on. I was also actively using my body by walking. I described it as an emotion, but it is unlike any emotion I experience. It engages my conceptual faculty along with the emotions and there are even sensory feelings like touch along my body.

But even if the whole mystical experience, this "thing" in the manner I am talking about, ends up being only a useless mental event that sort of randomly evolved as part of our brains (which I do not believe at this point), isn't it worth finding out for sure? And if it is something more? Isn't that worth finding out too?

I will take my chances with science, but I will not give up such an intense moment of "existing only for my own sake." That is one of the most selfish moments I know of. As a matter of fact, it is time for me to take another walk in the woods...

btw - I did not know about the brain scans when I wrote about this a year-and-a-half ago.

(Edit: Judith - Our posts crossed. Thank you for that information from Wilber. I really need to read him.)

Michael

[Rich Engle]

Hey, Maestro!

What do you mean, keepin' me from having to run to some church! UU churches are a blast, dude. But actually, I haven't been going lately. I moved to the west side of Cleveland, and it makes sense for me to change from East Shore Unitarian to the sister church, West Shore. Been too busy to go lately... Seriously, UU services are quite different than regular Sunday-go-to-meetin'.

I remember having an evening dinner with UU's that felt like it was snack time at Galt's Gulch--incredible cast of power movers!

rde

Way too busy!

[MBM]

Regarding brain studies, I've read somewhere (can't remember where) that there have been studies in which stimulation of the temporal lobes enables an experience so intense that the subject would swear in a court of law that God had been standing right next to him/her. Some would argue that this result means that all religious experience is clearly the result of electrical impulses in the brain. Others would argue that it means that other sensory experiences have also been reproduced in the lab, and that clearly if this one has too, such experiences must be real and authentic. I say that no one will resolve this argument by arguing. I do know that I'd LOVE to go into one of those labs and have it done to me, simply because I'd like to broaden my range of experiences, and that having had the experience I'd not know what it means any more than I do now. It's terribly important to distinguish between the fact of the experience itself and the interpretation or explanation of the experience.

Judith

This reminds me that when I was in college taking some psych classes (no, I didn't end up in that field), I learned of some experiments that had been done on mice. I'm speaking strictly from long-ago memory here so I'm not sure if I have all of the details right. But the gist is: The mice were in a cage where they could obtain food by pressing a lever, and had long since learned to use this lever when they needed or wanted food. Then, a second lever was added to the equation. The mice were wired with electrodes which were connected to a certain region of the brain, which when stimulated would apparently give the mice some kind of extremely intense pleasure -- this was called, if I remember correctly, "inner-cranial stimulation, or ICS. The second lever in the cage would cause those electrodes to be stimulated. Once the mice discovered this fact, they would constantly use that second lever, and forget all about the first one which gave food, even to the point of starving. The ICS was so irresistable nothing else mattered.

I remember wondering if the same thing would happen to people if they could self-administer ICS. (And thinking that, if given the opportunity, I would refuse it for fear of ending up like the mice who no longer cared about food.) Maybe there is a clue to the answer in the difficulty people have in freeing themesleves from certain kinds of addiction?

Anyway, I wonder if the temporal lobe stimulation you mention IS the human form of ICS. And since, unlike the mice, people have conceptual consiousness, the ultimately-pleasureable stimulation fanned out into the brain's neural circuits which pertain to concepts that in the person's mind are already associated with "ultimate happiness", at least conceptually. Maybe if the person who received that stimulation was a true-believer communist, they would have felt as if they had just entered the ultimate worker's paradise. Or maybe a true-believer Objectivist would have felt as if he had landed in "Galt's Gulch". (I can't figure out which emoticon, if any, connotes "tongue-in-cheek").

I also seem to remember hearing that the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevski was an epileptic, and experienced something like what is being discussed on this thread when he had epileptic fits.

Much of this discussion has been about the question, when a person has this kind of experience (and I am speaking as a persion who has NOT had such an experience), are they perceiving something about the world that is not perceivable via the other senses? Also, earlier in this discussion, I think it was MSK who mentioned a bellyache in terms of perceiving something about an inner state -- of the body. Isn't it possible that experiences being discussed are also perceiving nothing more than an inner state of a part of the body -- that is, the brain? Some kind of "electrical storm" in the brain? Maybe a spontaneous episode of ICS?

JMHS (just my humble speculation).

MBM

[MBM]

MBM,

Here is the link to that fascinating book you mentioned.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

This looks like a marvelous book. If it really does mention the part about common mental phenomena running throughout all those allegations, I am highly interested in reading it. This is just the kind of thing I am seeking.

As you probably know, Carl Sagan was an astronomer and was deeply involved with (maybe the founder of) SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). But he was also a scientist with stringent standards of evidence and proof. As much as he believed in the likelihood of other intelligent life in the universe, he did not believe that any such life had visited Earth (recently, at least), despite the claims by many people to have sighted and/or been abducted by UFOs. But he also didn't believe that all of these people were lying, he believed that many of them truly believed they had had such experiences. Since the reports of these people didn't meet his standards of evidence for the actual presence of aliens/UFOs, he was seeking an alternative, more plausible explantion for those experiences. That was his motive for writing the book, I believe. I don't think his intention was to debunk in the sense of discrediting (except for obvious frauds, of course). And that led him to research earlier periods of history and the types of unusual experiences people in those periods had been reported, and to look for common threads.

Unfortunately, the advertising for it focuses on debunking and the only mental thing I saw mentioned was a reference to evoking memories of sexual abuse. But I will look into it based on your observation.

Now that you mention it, I remember now that a recurring theme of the reports of people with "abduction experiences" is that when aboard the UFOs, they had been poked and prodded and otherwise bodily invaded in various ways. And I also remember that in earlier periods of history, the reported experiences had tended to involve some sort of satanic visitations (I may have been mistaken when I mentioned "Moses and the burning bush" as something that had been mentioned in the book).

I do remember that Sagan hypothesized a "common mental phenomena", interpreted in different ways by different people -- but I guess a somewhat different kind of mental phenomena than what you and Rich have been talking about, since the experiences discussed in the book are largely scary and unpleasant. And I don't remember to what extent, if any, Sagan referred to or discussed modern brain research.

It may be that some chapters of the book would be of some interest to you while much of the rest won't be, in terms of what you're looking for.

MBM

[MBM]

You touched on several reasons to love nature that are rational. I agree with every one of them. But how about one that is not so apparently rational? How about just marveling at the existence of nature in itself? Feeling yourself part of all that?

If you feel a strong emotion, if it brings you pleasure, if it does no one any harm, if you like feeling that way, is this not a value also? Is this not worth keeping?

I have such an emotion. It is extremely strong when it comes on and I value it highly. When I walk through an undeveloped part of the countryside, seeing the sky as an upside-down bowl with the clouds drifting way up there, contemplating the vastness of the universe and also how infinitely small it can be with all those sub-particles, watching life spring up in wonderfully varied forms all around me, seeing the fascinating rock formations and dirt I am walking on, realizing that I am stuck by gravity to a spinning ball hurdling through time and space and that I am a part of all this, not set off and alienated but a vital component with my own place in this scheme of things, a most pleasant feeling - something akin to a mixture of wonder and gratitude - saturates my entire consciousness and I even get the sensation that it spills over and permeates the rest of my body.

The closest I come to feeling something as profound as what you describe here usually occurs when I am walking outdoors at night, with a clear sky above and a bright moon and all the stars, etc. And I am looking up at the unfathomable vastness of everything. And its kind of a pleasureable feeling becasuse it has a feeling of profundity to it outside of my everyday mundane experience, but there's an element of frustration to it, too. Because, like I said, its "unfathomable", I feel like I'll never "grasp" the vastness. It feels in those moments that existence itself is an unfathomable mystery. I mean the fact that I, or consciousness, or anything, exists. Sure, "existence exists", its an axiom and cannot be denied -- but does that mean that it "had to" exist? I can't be any more articulate about it than this -- its just that for me sometimes the very fact of existence is an impenetrable mystery. And I don't experience that impenetrableness as pleasureable.

Maybe all of this belongs in the realm of psychology rather than philosophy. Maybe this is my conceptual expression of some kind of pre-conceptual experience such as not being breast-fed enough. ;)

But even if the whole mystical experience, this "thing" in the manner I am talking about, ends up being only a useless mental event that sort of randomly evolved as part of our brains (which I do not believe at this point), isn't it worth finding out for sure? And if it is something more? Isn't that worth finding out too?

Are you saying that, if it turns out that this mental event is not actually a "perception" of something about the nature of the world, is not actually of cognitive significance, then that implies that it is "useless". Doesn't the fact that it is extremely pleasurable in and of itself make it "useful" -- an end in itself?

[Judith]

Well -- I'm finally home!

Seriously, UU services are quite different than regular Sunday-go-to-meetin'.

I remember having an evening dinner with UU's that felt like it was snack time at Galt's Gulch--incredible cast of power movers!

Really! Hmmm. I never would have guessed. My few experiences with UUs has been like being dropped into a family reunion of ultra-left-wing liberals; not a friendly environment for an Objectivist at all. I don't think I'd be at all welcome in any of the local UU groups, with my pro-gun, pro-war, tough-on-crime attitudes.

This reminds me that when I was in college taking some psych classes (no, I didn't end up in that field), I learned of some experiments that had been done on mice. I'm speaking strictly from long-ago memory here so I'm not sure if I have all of the details right. But the gist is: The mice were in a cage where they could obtain food by pressing a lever, and had long since learned to use this lever when they needed or wanted food. Then, a second lever was added to the equation. The mice were wired with electrodes which were connected to a certain region of the brain, which when stimulated would apparently give the mice some kind of extremely intense pleasure -- this was called, if I remember correctly, "inner-cranial stimulation, or ICS. The second lever in the cage would cause those electrodes to be stimulated. Once the mice discovered this fact, they would constantly use that second lever, and forget all about the first one which gave food, even to the point of starving. The ICS was so irresistable nothing else mattered.

. . .

Anyway, I wonder if the temporal lobe stimulation you mention IS the human form of ICS. And since, unlike the mice, people have conceptual consiousness, the ultimately-pleasureable stimulation fanned out into the brain's neural circuits which pertain to concepts that in the person's mind are already associated with "ultimate happiness", at least conceptually. Maybe if the person who received that stimulation was a true-believer communist, they would have felt as if they had just entered the ultimate worker's paradise. Or maybe a true-believer Objectivist would have felt as if he had landed in "Galt's Gulch". (I can't figure out which emoticon, if any, connotes "tongue-in-cheek").

I also seem to remember hearing that the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevski was an epileptic, and experienced something like what is being discussed on this thread when he had epileptic fits.

Much of this discussion has been about the question, when a person has this kind of experience (and I am speaking as a persion who has NOT had such an experience), are they perceiving something about the world that is not perceivable via the other senses? Also, earlier in this discussion, I think it was MSK who mentioned a bellyache in terms of perceiving something about an inner state -- of the body. Isn't it possible that experiences being discussed are also perceiving nothing more than an inner state of a part of the body -- that is, the brain? Some kind of "electrical storm" in the brain? Maybe a spontaneous episode of ICS?

I didn't get the impression from reading about the studies that the experience was the same as stimulation of the pleasure centers. It was, I believe, perhaps more related to epilepsy. Buried somewhere in the depths of my book collection is a novel that came out sometime soon after this study was published. It was about a nun in a contemplative order who had frequent ecstatic experiences and was revered by others in her order for these visions. At some point it was discovered that she had a medical condition for which she required treatment, and she knew that having the treatment would mean the end of the visions. She had the treatment, and the story ended with her dealing with the knowledge that she would never again have these ecstatic experiences.

(On a somewhat related note, there's another book I have in my collection that I haven't yet read called, I believe, "Touched With Fire", which suggests that there's a possible link between artistic genius and manic depressive illness. Apparently there's some evidence for such a link in at least some instances.)

When I spoke about Zen masters being experts in the realm of the "eye of spirit" in my previous post, I didn't mean to imply that Zen Buddhists are the only ones who have expertise in this subject, or that Wilber holds such a position. There is a remarkable amount of agreement among "mystics" of various disciplines at advanced levels of just what constitutes "enlightenment" or an advanced degree of achievement, whether the expert be Christian, Jewish, Sufi Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, or whatever. There's been some controversy in the Catholic church about some interfaith exchanges between Catholics and Buddhists who believed that they had a great deal to learn from each other; the orthodox academic Catholics, of course, would want nothing to do with that, but the more mystical types saw the commonalities.

Laboratory stimulation, drugs, epilepsy, etc. constitute handy dandy shortcuts to "opening the third eye", as the jargon of the field calls it, but according to the practitioners, anyone can see what the advanced types see if one is willing to do it the established way, which is to perform meditation practices. Personally, I've never done it because I haven't had the patience for it; maybe I should -- maybe it's worth it. I suppose that if I had a transcendent experience in a lab and it was wonderful, I might be motivated to practice meditation as a means to gain and keep it long-term.

The closest I come to feeling something as profound as what you describe here usually occurs when I am walking outdoors at night, with a clear sky above and a bright moon and all the stars, etc. And I am looking up at the unfathomable vastness of everything. And its kind of a pleasureable feeling becasuse it has a feeling of profundity to it outside of my everyday mundane experience, but there's an element of frustration to it, too. Because, like I said, its "unfathomable", I feel like I'll never "grasp" the vastness. It feels in those moments that existence itself is an unfathomable mystery. I mean the fact that I, or consciousness, or anything, exists. Sure, "existence exists", its an axiom and cannot be denied -- but does that mean that it "had to" exist? I can't be any more articulate about it than this -- its just that for me sometimes the very fact of existence is an impenetrable mystery. And I don't experience that impenetrableness as pleasureable.

I remember being a little kid, no more than four or five years old, and lying on the bed in the bedroom and being totally blown away by the fact that I existed. I used to lie there for long periods of time just thinking about that, staring at my hand or my shirt or the wall, my heart racing. Later I grew out of it somehow and could never recapture that feeling again, but for a few years there it was almost frightening to think about it. Later on, as an adult, I've never felt overwhelmed by existence. When I read "The Fountainhead", I immediately related to Wynand's statement that he never felt small when contemplating the universe. I feel like I expand when contemplating its vastness, to take it all in. I just got back from New Mexico, and I remember last week when I drove around a corner on the highway and the horizon opened up to what seemed like limitlessness. It seemed as if my eyes suddenly widened so that I could take it all in. When I look at the sky at night, or think about the vastness of the universe, I feel as if I expand to take it all in, and I get bigger.

Judith

[Robert_Bumbalough]

There is an eye of flesh, an eye of mind, and an eye of spirit. Each is appropriate to a specific body of knowledge, and information in each body of knowledge is validated by consensus among experts in the field.

Hello readers et. al.:, Respects to Ms Judith and to those to whom she refers. It is not my intent to hurt anyone's feelings or to provoke anger, so when I type that I respectfully disagree, please accept my sincerity. I meditate several times a week using brain wave entrainment software and an audio-strobe device. These technologies allow me, and almost any other person, to easily obtain to deep meditative trance states. What happens in such trance states is that the prefrontal cortex where one's rational waking-thinking mind occurs is silenced so that one's normally unconscious mind can easily communicate with the prefrontal cortex. In deep meditative states no super-natural phenomena happens; it's all brain function. Human beings can do nothing without emotions. The minds emotional context produces confidence or trepidation or any of the many other emotional states that motivate one's decisions. As a day trader, emotions inform me. My unconscious mind recognizes situations that my rational prefrontal cortex may not be aware of and communicates to what I think of as me with emotions and visual memories. This is not spirituality; it is normal brain function that can be enhanced by training the brains systems to cooperate more closely.

Time: Best Wishes an Regards.