I told you there is no such thing as mind it’s just the brain.
It’s the truth. If it were self evident it wouldn’t need to be pointed out by definition.
You haven’t I can promise that.
you haven’t really had a perspective, it’s just diverging onto topics that don’t relate to what I’m saying.
Okay, probably true,
But it does have to do “you” the physical being.
Lausten, thanks for adding that link about the brain / mind.
At first I just let it slide, but as I was getting ready for bed, trying to imagine the notion that, “there is no such thing as mind,” was getting downright distracting.
Dark, how does that work? No mind?
Ever think about “who” are you?
Or is it all about your thoughts, your inner dialog?
As for your body, do you think it’s irrelevant to what’s going on inside your mind?
You read books. You consult Buddhists. You have a computer. You have a family I think, if I understand what you’ve said. You know about medical insurance laws. You understand that you can save money by not purchasing a license to Microsoft Word. But, you say you can’t sort out a basic concept like, happiness doesn’t come from external circumstances or something someone tells you.
I can understand not feeling happy or questioning a concept within Buddhism, but to say someone doesn’t have a perspective? That’s all anyone has. We perceive and make up explanations of it. What else does the brain do?
Often, instead of digesting what is said, or responding as if we are human beings here, you simply deny that a word has meaning at all.
Use that computer to look things up, like dictionaries and actual science.
That’s not actual science that link is incorrect. What we call “mind” are just brain processes, so much so that thoughts and the like can be affected by tampering with brain areas.
Happiness does come from external circumstances or something someone tells you. It’s not a choice you make.
I do think about who I am and I get no answer.
But you don’t need mind, mind is just a dated concept from before modern neuroscience, to date everything attributed to the “mind” has been found to be the brain. Morality, personality, all that stuff.
Ist world problems are 3rd world luxuries
It’s not science. It’s a dictionary definition. What you say here agrees with that definition.
I didn’t say happiness was a choice. Have you ever seen a happy baby? They can’t understand what people are telling them.
In the brain, or of the brain?
Have you come up with this on your own?
Or does that idea come from some writings you’ve read?
If so, please do share a link, or citation.
Do you have anything useful to say?
I guess that’s true, but the where does that leave anyone. Why would people say happiness is a choice then?
No just the brain, period.
Cut that out. Be nice.
There are lots of reasons people are wrong. I don’t have time to go over them. Some people make money off of saying they can show you how to be happy.
Saying something is a 1st world problem doesn’t mean anything, it’s like saying someone can’t suffer because other people have it worse.
It’s not really a money making thing it’s just something people say a lot. They often say happiness is a choice and there’s no convincing them otherwise. I mean if we live in a world of cause and effect then that means there is a reason for it.
Like this dude who says that our feelings are the result of our beliefs and not the thing itself? I’m not sure what to do with that if it’s true.
It reminds me of Lisa Barrette and her Constructed Theory of Emotions which more or less says what we feel is based on how we interpret things, or the story we tell.
For example:
"Imagine you are standing at the top of a high cliff, and you notice that your heart is racing. If you have the story that this is a scary and you have the potential to fall to your death, the emotion you are likely to feel is fear. If however, if you tell yourself the story that, you are on top of the world, then the emotion you may feel is exhilarating.
It is not the experience that determines your emotion, its the story that you tell yourself. The story that you tell yourself is likely dependent on your earlier experiences and your beliefs about yourself and life."
Though if it is the story then what makes that story, what makes certain experiences shape that? I found the study Lisa referenced in her book and it turned out the students they tested in it didn’t reinterpret their anxiety as excitement but rather generated excitement that overshadowed the anxiety, but it was still there. In short they had two emotions but one was stronger.
It’s like how one event can make us feel multiple things at once based on different things (though given what gary says it’s not the event but our beliefs about it which brings me back to square one).
That’s more constructive. It is a comment on the substance of the post. Earlier, you made a comment on the person who made the post. That’s not constructive and kind of against the rules.
I suppose you have a point.
Honestly, I think all this stuff I read just broke me. Can’t get it out of my head and can’t see how it’s wrong and I can’t sleep because of it.
And here we are in the middle of the night. My mother is dying, but I’m not broken, not anymore than everyone else, alone, dealing with this life we are thrown into. When were we together? Whole? One with the universe? A billion years ago maybe.
There are ways to deal with lack of sleep. Progressive relaxation. Physiological breath. Melatonin. Doctors. To me, and I’m not a doctor, it’s more likely the lack of sleep is causing the obsessing, not the other way around.
You miss the answer to your question. It’s in Lisa’s quote. Your earlier life experiences tell your brain about your body’s reaction and the brain learns to handle them. I think the amygdala is included in that, the part of our brains that include our fight or flight reactions. We can’t out-think that part of ourselves. Lisa isn’t saying we can.
She’s saying, if you had some set of experiences and genetic makeup, you are afraid of the height, if you had a different set, you feel exhilarated. You can’t change your evolution. You can’t change your childhood. As an adult, you can choose your experiences.
But your brain grows and forms until you are about 27. It is malleable, but it’s not a computer program that you can rewrite. You can’t remove memories. I’m getting tired of this conversation. There are only so many ways that I can say you are a human being, not a robot with replaceable parts and switches that turn emotions on and off. You have choices, but they are limited within a range of what it is to be human.
It’s the other way around. The obsessing is causing the lack of sleep.
That’s not really a quote by Lisa it’s that therapy lady, but what she said reminded me of what Lisa Barrett argues which is similar.
But the implication in their words is that anxiety is “bad” (despite their insistence otherwise) and you have to change your story to not be anxious anymore. But then what does that mean for other stuff like joy, love, sadness, is that just a story? Are we at fault for not making a story to be happy? Are we choosing to be sad?
I attended a zoom call with them where the point was about how beliefs form. The point he made with a glass of water, drinking, spiting it back in and then drinking it again was about how automatic the stories our minds make are. Like disgust at that because an auto reaction. That it’s conditioned and the same could apply to other automatic reactions we have. There was some questionable stuff about assuming it’s due to some childhood trauma one has but aside from that it was about looking at the layers to emotions. The story behind it, the thoughts, the emotion, and then the identity we put behind it. The implication being we can choose otherwise.
Though my question is why would I choose otherwise? Or even if I can? What’s motivating the “want” behind the change and “Choice”? Why doesn’t he apply that to negative emotions? Why assume ego is responsible for suffering?
Like…I’ve done that awareness of my emotions, reasons, blah blah because I learned it from Buddhism and psych courses and therapy, among other sources. But being aware of these patterns and likely reasons behind those reactions didn’t lead to any changes, it just meant I knew why that was likely the case.
I guess my greater point is that we don’t have the control he thinks we do over our lives.
You are reading this into what they say. We are part of the human story, 200,00 years old. You can’t change that. You can play a part in writing the future, but you can’t override every aspect of who you are. The joy is in discovering what you can do.
What stuff can you not get out of your head? Give an example.
And how exactly are you obsessing?
This: “I can’t get it out of my head”, is a very interesting observation.
Rumination occurs when you have constant and repetitive thoughts about something; it may involve making repeated attempts to solve a perceived problem you’re having.
When you ruminate, you are directing a lot of your attention to a particular thought. It’s the difference between having a thought which can go away as quickly as it appeared, and being actively focused on a thought that you’re fixated on and that may be interfering with daily functioning*.*
Well according to them all you need is awareness and changing the energy and emotions behind your beliefs to shift it. But what they don’t understand is that isn’t under their control, none of it really is. We can expose ourselves to new information and that can shape us, but the process is out of our hands.
I know you said you don’t believe in free will, and I’m leaning that way too. But trying to explain that is like pulling teeth. No one there want’s to admit they were shaped by everything to that point and had no say in it.