Monkey Minded or Thoughtful – A Natural Trade Off

Carl

[cite] mr.minor:[/cite]Has anyone ever had any experiences of communicating with animals during a meditative or yogic session. This happens to me repeatedly during sunrise with birds.

This is realized for me through their singing. …

Next, try tuning into other life forms within range of your senses. Bugs are always around. ‘Listen’ to them.

The interest thing to me is that when I am able to penetrate the walls of perception that make up myself, I am generally free from these desires, and bodily tensions, but also, further away from her.

As you become ‘all’, the ‘parts’ increasingly fade. Intimacy with a ‘part’ walls off a sense of intimacy with ‘all’. Actually, biology doesn’t need us to feel intimate with ‘all’; rather, Nature’s biases us to interact with the local and the particular (to notice difference more than similarity). That interaction imparts to us a sense of security (albeit pseudo security). Thus, fear, the void, the ‘all’ , drive us to hold on to our favorites. In this way our favorites protect us and imprison us. Alas, it seems we can’t have it both ways. (Note, fear, void, all correlate.)

Maybe I am building a confused web to further validate my sense of self, but the experiences are intriguing. :?

I find the confusion comes from trying to reconcile the ‘real’ with the ‘illusion’. This always flabbergasts me and is part of my everlasting sense of curiosity and wonder. The less I feel I need to succeed at reconciling the two, the more I joy the experience.

[cite] mr.minor also:[/cite]...it is as if I then have "control" of us both...

Who is 'I' when 'I' is 'all'?

Carl

First watch this short interesting video clip (you have to watch a few seconds of ads to see it, but it is worth it I think): Are You Smarter Than a Monkey? Also, read the short article below.

To me, this shows the natural trade off made by being thoughtful. On one extreme is a completely intuitive, spontaneous approach to life that most, if not all, animals enjoy. One the other extreme is human thought, self reflection, self understanding, ‘big picture’ knowing. A natural justice lies in not being able to have it both ways… at least all at the same moment. One of the reasons ‘masters’ are so admired is that they can do their skill almost as intuitively as an animal. Naturally, this also boosts the hierarchical potential, i.e., we put ‘masters’ on pedestals.

Perhaps this sheds insight into ‘enlightenment’ as well. Eye popping, knock your socks off, crack in the universe enlightenment follows an especially intense period of quandary. When the brain’s mind reaches the end of its thoughtful rope and still can’t figure 'it' out, what else is left? Bam! It recoils into complete spontaneous non-self consciousness, for a moment at least. I imagine this experience - by whatever name or lack there of it goes by - happens to many folks in various degrees of intensity throughout life. It awaits us all at the dead end of thought.

On the other hand, daily periods of 'under the radar' enlightenment are common to everyone. Three cheers for the ‘[chref=2]the teaching that uses no words[/chref]’. (不言之教)

Chimps Beat Humans In Memory Test
By Helen Briggs
Science reporter, BBC News

Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours, research suggests.
Young chimps outperformed university students in memory tests devised by Japanese scientists. The tasks involved remembering the location of numbers on a screen, and correctly recalling the sequence. The findings, published in Current Biology, suggest we may have under-estimated the intelligence of our closest living relatives.

Until now, it had always been assumed that chimps could not match humans in memory and other mental skills. "There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said lead researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University. "No one can imagine that chimpanzees - young chimpanzees at the age of five - have a better performance in a memory task than humans. "Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection - better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure."

Memory tests
Dr Matsuzawa and colleagues tested three pairs of mother and baby chimpanzees against university students in a memory task involving numbers. The mothers and their five-year-old offspring had already been taught to "count" from one to nine. During the experiment, each subject was presented with various numerals from one to nine on a touch screen monitor. The numbers were then replaced with blank squares and the test subject had to remember which number appeared in which location, then touch the appropriate square. They found that, in general, the young chimps performed better than their mothers and the adult humans. The university students were slower than all of the three young chimpanzees in their response.

The researchers then varied the amount of time that the numbers appeared on-screen to compare the working memory of humans and chimps. Chimps performed much better than university students in speed and accuracy when the numbers appeared only briefly on screen. The shortest time duration, 210 milliseconds, did not leave enough time for the subjects to explore the screen by eye movement - something we do all the time when we read. This is evidence, the researchers believe, that young chimps have a photographic memory which allows them to memorize a complex scene or pattern at a glance. This is sometimes present in human children but declines with age, they say. "Young chimpanzees have a better memory than human adults," Dr Matsuzawa told BBC News. "We are still underestimating the intellectual capability of chimpanzees, our evolutionary neighbours."

'Ground-breaking'
Dr Lisa Parr, who works with chimps at the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta, US, described the research as "ground-breaking". She said their importance of these primates for understanding the skills necessary for the evolution of modern humans was unparalleled. "They are our closest living relatives and thus are in a unique position to inform us about our evolutionary heritage," said Dr Parr. "These studies tell us that elaborate short-term memory skills may have had a much more salient function in early humans than is present in modern humans, perhaps due to our increasing reliance on language-based memory skills."

The research is published in Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press.

Source: BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7124156.stm