Yes, it’s difficult to doubt your own honesty, but actually it is easy to prove that our brains do a lot of “guessing” and searching prior memory for cognition and interpretation.
As Anil Seth suggests that our brains make “best guesses” of what the “incoming” data represents.
The brain itself has no direct physical experience except at neural level and that can vary from brain to brain and relies on the sensory accuracy in receiving and processing of the incoming data .
A color blind person lives in a drab reality, a deaf person lives in a silent world, yet they survive.
Still I have doubts when I can’t move people over.
Even then I can’t help ask “what if he’s right”? What if nothing “makes” us feel? What if it’s our beliefs that do it (i’ll be honest I sort of forget what he said in the original thread I made and I don’t wanna check for fear of retraumatizing myself)?
I just wouldn’t know what I should do if he is right, what it means, anything really.
That is the uncertainty. That is included in the scientific methods. It’s not an arbitrary idea, it’s based on our awareness of being wrong in the past. When we get new data and try new experiments then we learn new things. If we thought we had all the answers, we would stop experimenting.
Keeping an open mind is very similar to doubting yourself. The question is, what’s probable? Is it possible that believing you are happy will change you into a happy person? Yes. But is it probable? Is it probable that eating right, working toward goals, exercising, resting when you need to, and reading good books will result in a healhier you that is happy more often? Yes, that’s very probable. So, choose your lifestyle.
I wonder if it is uncertainty or just plain self doubt. Like the more I question something just feels like I’m delaying the inevitability of accepting whatever it is I am questioning as the truth.
But the question then becomes why am I doing that? because it’s the “Right” thing to do?
All my life I’ve just followed whoever sounded like they knew the right answer or what to do. I never had any real desire or want of my own. From childhood to now I am hollow in every sense of the word. I do and act because it’s the “right” thing or “supposed to do”.
Everything in my life is like that: Buddhism, working out, resolving my internalized homophobia, the way I talk, what I pursue, even listening to guys like Gary (one thing he didn’t understand as he thought I just meant society), all of it, even thinking critically and breaking stuff down like now.
I don’t actually believe in any of this, not truly, there is no real conviction or fire behind any of it. I guess you could call it a robot following a program, or a parrot repeating stuff back to you.
It did cause my parents a lot of difficulty growing up because I never had any strong drive or desire to do much of anything nor did I really feel strongly about much.
It’s an odd type of self awareness. Aware enough of themselves to know they don’t now who they are. It’s also a useless thing I know about myself.
I don’t blame you for not knowing how to respond to that. I’ve tried all my life for 32 years and I still have nothing. So the best I can do is imitate and calculate the best response.
Also aware enough to know that stuff like what that Therapy lady said still bothers me:
When we are young, we acquire knowledge through significant experiences, which can be either positive or negative. These experiences act as foundational learnings, often reinforced by subsequent experiences. For example, a parent yells at us once and then repeats the behaviour on a number of occasions. Or we go to a birthday party and have fun and this occurs a number of times. As we internalise these lessons, they move from conscious awareness to subconscious understanding. This transition enables us to function automatically and conserve cognitive energy.
How? I’ve tried pretty much everything to find out who I am and nothing sticks or clicks.
It’s like I’m a hollow shell to be filled by whoever sounds like they know what they’re doing like this Gary guy. I can’t stop any of it, I’ve tried for years and nothing works.
Writing that is an action. You asked for help, someone tried to give it, and that’s how you responded. That shapes who you are and how we respond to you.
Usually, people find models and try to emulate them.
Beyond that, you have origins, education, and a past. You are the result of all that.
That’s an interesting philosophical question.
Roughly, what Sartre means is that whatever be your thoughts, your intentions, you live in the world and interacts with it. The word perceives only your acts. Man is a social being.
For a yoga master, there are the body and the mind. the body acts, the mind generate thoughts, but we are neither, we are our conscience who observes both.
Because you are born into this world alone and naked and you will leave this world alone and naked.
I’d probably say the wrong thing, so will hand this off to Morgan,
Why not. From whose point of reference?
You don’t think the words you are sharing with us are helping define you to us?
And the next step up in awareness is appreciating how your body (& it’s interaction with itself and the outside world) is what produces your thoughts/consciousness.
I’d suggest the real Yoga journey is in allowing your thoughts to become deeply profoundly aware of your own body - allowing one’s mind to break free of the limits of our own mindscapes, and to encompass a new level of awareness. One that makes our many connections with other (humans, creatures, landscapes) self-evident and a part of us.
One that has assimilated the Pageant of Evolution as a real thing, and that you are one rung on.
Which totally eliminates the need for the self-abuse that heaven or hell provides for so, so, so many people.
Not really. It doesn’t necessarily shape who I am, it hasn’t before. Someone could also just be lying and you think they’re being shaped when they aren’t. They already know how they’ll respond.
I told you I’ve tried that already. Though I don’t really think we are the product of our origins or education. If anything I mostly forget a lot of what I learned from school.
Debatable. Man being a social being depends on the person.
It’s not really a quest, you can’t quest if you don’t even know what you’re looking for or want.
And yoga masters have pretty much been shown to be wrong. There is no mind and we are the body, mostly the brain. We aren’t the conscience that observes both, in fact that wouldn’t exist without a brain let alone sense organs.
Nope. I can try as I might but it will ultimately depend on things I don’t control. Despite my best efforts there are some things people don’t understand. Like Lausten not knowing how to respond to me being self aware but not knowing who I am.
It does not. Having tried that I can say so and in fact the people who practice yoga are kidding themselves if they think so.
Thoughts can’t be aware of a body, obviously. There is no breaking the limits of your “mindscape” because there is no such thing as a mindscape. And nothing in the world is self evident, if it were you wouldn’t need to do anything to know it.
This is largely irrelevant to what I’m talking about, but I figured you wouldn’t understand. IT was the same in the last thread.
A friend if mine was told by her father that he would help her find herself. He took both her hands and put them on her ass. It was her father, nothing weird, he was showing her that her “self” was right there. There’s no searching required.
The Alchemist is a very famous book about this. It’s not a secret, go out and explore the world if you want, seek knowledge, but your “self” is where you are. Most people have a void of some kind, a longing for more, follow your bliss. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s the journey, not the destination. No one is coming to save us. This is it.
The Alchemist isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. The book pretty much says there was no point to the whole journey as the treasure he was looking for was right at the house where he started from. If there was a lesson about how the real treasure is the journey and not actual gold then it would have been better. But nope, it’s literal treasure and right where he was at too. The journey had no point. He didn’t need to do any of that.
None of that was about your “self” is where you are, that’s just not true. You can’t follow your bliss if you have no idea what that even is. In the alchemist there was a literal pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and the journey was pointless as the book mentions, you can see the main character doesn’t really care about it at all.
If “this is it” then we might as well just die if that’s the case.
Stories have symbolism and metaphor. You decided it was literal, and missed the point.
Some people conclude that. I think they are wrong. I find great joy in that revelation. It means I don’t have to search for an external source for answers about me. I don’t need a website to tell me what I am. I don’t need an ancient book of ultimate truths. I don’t need to argue with people about how my thoughts are affected by rain. I can watch a sunrise, see the beauty, and then see beauty in simply seeing the beauty.
A nothing statement?
What makes you consider that a nothing statement?
You appreciate that you’re implying physical reality is nothing?
Mind = mindscape.
The mindscape is the totality of your minds thoughts, the stage upon which your inner dialogue unfolds.
Speak for yourself.
I agree nothing is universally “self-evident” and that “self-evident” only happens within specific frames of reference, as observed from an individual. Education and learning from life’s lessons has a lot to do with certain things becoming self-evident to oneself.
But that doesn’t make it false.
Well, yeah because that’s where a life long pursuit of understand myself, and my place in this world has brought me.
AS for same as it ever was, do you go back and read the stuff you write?
It seems to me, you’re always playing the same tune, nothing matters, nothing is real, I know myself, but I’m nothing, my body doesn’t’ matter it isn’t real, nothing is real and nothing can be known. …
I’ve been through some very low and lost periods in my life, so on a certain level I’ve related to you here and there - I was never satisfied with those periods and saw them as lessons and hurdles, and continued moving on and growing.
You seem okay with where you’re at, yet you want to write about it, you copy and paste thousands and thousands of words on a public discussion forum. At least please don’t be offended that other’s try to share about what it looks like from our perspective.
No you’re just incorrect on what it meant. Even if you follow the journey the guy went on it was clear he didn’t really care about any of it, he even left the girl he supposedly loved because he has to find his treasure. The end was literal gold buried right by his house. I didn’t decide it was literal, it actually was. That’s what made it disappointing. Like I said, the story would have hit harder if there was no actual treasure. But even the text itself goes against your interpretation of it.
That doesn’t sound like you found the revelation, like several others you back out before going all the way.