It adds more qualitative diversity to life, which to me is a good thing.
Or a con artist.
I had an interesting thread a while ago which sort of, kind of touched on this idea: Is Evolution a Mistake?
Surely, you can answer this for yourself.
But how can that be? If pleasure is possible at all, it is an experience, no?
That gentleman must be either unable to comprehend what he experienced and feels or a con artist. There is no third possibility. Tough, i would bet on second option.
with love,
sanjay
Even after all these years I can’t wrap my head around why evolutionary reward mechanisms actually correspond to the feeling of satisfaction, reward. Why do we actually feel happy when we prolong our lives? i think it has something to do with the sensation of “free will”.
Imagine a moment if you will that the opposite is true. Imagine that we feel happy when we are starving, that we feel happy when our bodies are sick. What would happen to our free will? Surely all of our decisions would seem “opposite”. We would will ourselves to starvation, we would will ourselves to suffering and fire, suicide, but our bodies would do the opposite of what we want. We would seem to have no “free will” to do anything. I have experienced similar phenomena, sometimes I would fantasize about mutiliating my body, but when I go to do it, my body puts up a resistance. Same with suicide.
So the conclusion is that happiness can be found in doing the opposite of our evolutionary mechanisms…but still many questions remain…
Con-artist? In what way?
I’ve often wondered if people get payed to sell their religion. Are those people who claim to see Heaven and Hell being honest or just getting paid off?
Or maybe he’s just insane. Maybe he only thinks he doesn’t think, but in reality, he thinks all the time–some kind of delusion of grandeur.
Or maybe he just woke up one morning and realized Eliminative Materialism is correct–there are no such things as thoughts–and so now he walks around claiming to have no thoughts.
Or maybe he’s constantly high on drugs. He did say, in the video that Trixie posted, that the psychedelic drug users are right up there with mystics like him (although I’m not sure we can say “mysticism” = “Enlightenment”… then again, the psychedelics, as he calls them, scored 150–10 short of 160, the top of the scale). If that’s the case, of course he walks around all enlightened and stuff.
I think our feeling of free will stems from our connections with the universe. The universe, in its totality, is free. Only the parts of the universe, as distinguished from other parts, are unfree–simply because they are always affected by those other parts. But the universe itself is all there is–there is nothing outside it. So it is free.
As participants in the universe, as parts of it, we share in that freedom, but as individuals distinct from other individuals in the same universe, we can only “feel” that freedom, but not quite have it.
As for your question about why we feel evolutionary reward mechanisms as pleasurable (or satisfactory, as you put it), that’s a bit more complicated. You seem to believe, with the analogy you provided, that the experience of feeling pleasure or feeling pain can be split off from what the actual biological mechanisms in our brains and bodies make us do–wanting the pleasure from starvation but not being able to have it because our bodies do everything in their power to eat and gain nutrients.
My answer to this question is kinda complex, but in a nutshell it is: the mind will experience whatever the body does. So if the body acts as though starvation is horribly painful, the mind will experience it thus. This is not to say I believe schisms between mind and body like in the scenario you described can’t arise, but I believe evolution weeds these cases out of existence.
I’ve attempted both myself–and I know what you mean. I tried jumping off a building once, but my body just wouldn’t let me. I’d run to the edge, but just feet before I reached the edge, my legs put on the breaks. I tried several times, but I just couldn’t do it.
Cutting myself, however, is a different story. In the few times I tried it in my life, I never experienced resistance from my body, though the cuts weren’t anything severe–the pain was quite tolerable.
Yes, this is true–but I don’t think it’s the norm.
Knowing human nature, there’s probably equal numbers of both, and everything in between.
No, he is not insane. On the contrary, he is quite smart. My guess is that he is doing all this for name and fame.
That is quite possible, if he is not playing con.
Gib, the fact of the matter is that the mind is a perpetual entity. It cannot be stopped even for a fraction of a second, right from birth till death. It cannot be zeroed down ever. That is beyond our capacity. Yes, one cam minimize its activity to some extent through control and practice.
This delusion of grandeur happens a lot to the majority of such people, who experience some extraordinary phenomenon, intentionally or unintentionally. Then, they tend to consider it a Eureka Moment, and think they got it all. But, what they do not understand is that this is just a tip of iceberg. In many cases, it is not their fault either because they are not aware how far it goes. Most of the modern spiritual preachers fall in this category, including Krishnamurti, Deepak Chopra and so on. They do not know what and how much they know exactly. That is why a worthy Guru/guide is essential during this journey.
I felt the same when that events unfolded to me for the first time about 25 years ago. I became very exited and thought that now i have it all. But, over the time, i realized that it was just a beginning and there is very long journey ahead. I was fortunate to have a friend at that time, who made me realized the real picture, and where i exactly stood in the terms of spirituality.
That reality check forced me look further in the issue and then i started reading the literature regarding meditation and all that (irrespective of what religion they belong), along with pushing myself to that path in person. And, the process is still ongoing. That is how i am able to grasp some gist of the issue. Still, the job is half done. I do not have any precise benchmark to check where i stand actually, but my guess is that i have been crossed half way mark. I do not know how much i will be able to cover further.
Gib,[b] knowing something is certainly good but it is also necessary to know how much one knows. Telling your knowledge to others is also good but one should have the honesty to say how much one knows. This is precisely where most of the spiritual preachers commit a mistake. They hesitate in accepting truth publicly, either because of ignorance or greed/ego. Then, they start projecting mere some initial steps as a complete ontology and it does not serve the purpose.
Had they said that only this much they know, instead of claiming that what they know is complete, others would have been benefited far more than now. But, in that case, those preachers would have not been got the status, which they got otherwise. And, that is the real issue.[/b]
with love,
sanjay
By “mind”, I understand more than just thought–emotion and perception are also mind in my opinion. In fact, any state of feeling or subjectivity is mind. In that case, I would agree with you that mind cannot be stopped. But you know as well as I do that thought can be stopped, at least temporarily.
Sanjay, if you watch the video, you get the impression that what happened to Chris Weber is somewhat different. He describes his transformation as sudden and without his intending it. As I said to Trixie, it sounds like a stroke. That doesn’t mean what you said is wrong, but we should be aware that Weber seems to have gotten there by a much different route than the usual one most travel.
I agree with this. For my own part, I rarely claim to know anything. There is very little that, by my standards, truly counts as “knowledge,” very little about which I feel absolutely certain and have reason to believe that certainty is perfectly justified.
I didn’t see anything to indicate that Weber was a con. I understand what it is that he is talking about and he seems merely to be trying to construct a way to teach an understanding of it. Such is very common (all too common) amongst spiritualists and psychologists. They don’t have a firm ontology with which to theorize like the hard sciences do, so their explanation get pretty inventive at times. Then they want to sell a book or a lecture tour.
When he say that he is not thinking, he means that he no longer waists mind-time on trying to think about this or that ow worrying about things. When that happens, his mind is very much more free to attend to surroundings and make better choices. The sense of joy stems from a perception that one is accomplishing whatever one is desiring. By making better mental choices, he will gain a sense of accomplishing what he chose to attempt and thus feel a sense of joy or bliss.
He speaks of it all being a surprise because one cannot watch oneself during such a process else the mind-time is being wasted again. It all must occur while you are not watching yourself do it. It is being UN-conscious of ones inner self so that one can be more conscious of one’s situation and truer needs. If you are aware that you are doing it, you are not doing it.
It is analogous to a manager standing over an employee in the attempt to guide everything the employee is doing. Such is done out of the fear of something going wrong or not being done right. It expresses a lack of confidence or lack of trust in ones inner self or the employee. When the manager trusts the employee to do his job and goes away, the employee can then do his job much better and the manager can then go make sure that the right kind of jobs are being queued up (better choices for what to pursue). Everything works better when the manager (your consciousness of your own performance) goes away and does his job rather than trying to do the lower level jobs.
In another video he goes through a typical regressive deconstruction therapy to alter the mind’s perceptions and presumptions of itself (“Who Am I ?”). Such practices do work to instill a new perspective that can lead toward less self-consciousness.
The opposite extreme is performance anxiety and/or ADHD.
… so at least he isn’t a complete nutter.
Me neither–not at first, at least.
But then Trixie asked:
And I wondered: Why just those two options?
That’s when I came up with a third option: a con-artist.
Then after thinking about it some more, I came up with three more options, as I said to Sanjay:
This is all notwithstanding my interpretation of his having a stroke.
There’s also the possibility that when he says he doesn’t think, he doesn’t mean to say there is a bland nothingness going on through his mind, but that his thoughts have become something wholly different–call it thought’ (thought prime)–such that it functions in his mind in a similar way to thought, performing similar mental tasks, but the subjective experience is different enough from thought that one really couldn’t call it that if one were to experience it.
i think i can relate to him (weber) actually. 6 years ago back when i had a semblance of sanity i remember walking down the street one mile. i didnt have any thoughts, just bliss. well actually i had some minor thoughts, like “i love” “oh oh oh” and “so nice, so nice.” i just remember seeing a flow of 3d sidewalk and scenery moving in me, at me. no ego at the time, no thinking about myself. now could i have sustained this state for infinity, probably not, my neural net would have depleted and i would have turned into a nut for sure.
now is this state of mind condusive to a civilized society? probably not. my state of mind was like a female woman, hypersenstive.
but why do we need a civilized society? other than plumbing? i mean all it does is chop down the rainforest everyday.
therefore i believe native americans are the ultimate lifeforms.