As I’ve stated a few times, the conversation we are having here has been done many times. I came across a recent blog that refers to one that has been going on for a while with none less the famous William Lane Craig. It includes comments like this from someone who sounds a lot like our friend here:
But make no mistake: all our dreams, loves, opinions, and desires are figments of our primordial imagination. They are fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses for a moment in time.
Outside of my greedy little gene’s need to reproduce, there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife.
The full original post is quoted here, with a Christian’s perspective on it. It refers to this happening a few years ago, but no link to it that I can find.
Bob Seidnsticker at the Cross Examined blog does his best to make sense of this guy, “What I think he means is that there are no objective or transcendental forms of these traits, just the human-created ones.”
He also paints this rather amusing picture of him, (he was given the name John by the Christian site), “I imagine John Nihilist sitting alone in a corner of a café, wearing a beret and a black turtleneck sweater, reading Sartre or maybe Nietzsche, and smoking cigarettes as he sips coffee and muses about the utter meaninglessness of it all. It’s a shame that only objective meaning would satisfy him, because the regular kind works well for the rest of us.”
He states the counter to all the sites and quotes that Xian has begged for in one sentence, “We don’t disprove that love exists when we can explain the biology behind it.” All of Xian’s gurus claim that knowing the neurobiology has some effect on our personal feelings. They do only if you choose to conflate those two separate topics. If you need an ultimate explanation of ultimate meaning, then you’ve created that problem for yourself.
This recent blog at Cross Examined links to the above and more. If you want to hear someone who sounds even more like Xian, click on “You’ve Ruined My Life, Professor Craig!!”
You missed the point again, I don’t think you read the block quote.
This isn’t anything to do with nihilism or Christianity. As the link and the quote mention this is about some apparent higher reality, one that is beyond logic since the Absolute does not “make sense” which is why they speak of it in contradictory terms. This is about the possibility of living in some kind of illusion and not according to what is true. It has little or anything to deal with the easily shut down idea of Christianity and God. It’s about how all our concepts and ideas don’t describe the true reality.
I didn’t miss that. What you missed was this section in the Wikipedia page you linked
Experiencing the Absolute
Philosophers and religious adherents who aim to pattern their life after the Absolute reality sometimes claim to have experienced the Absolute. They report mystical experiences, feelings of oneness, transcendence of their everyday personality or of personhood altogether.
If anyone has experienced this thing you are talking about, they haven’t bothered coming to one of the most used sources on the internet to let us know how they do it. I added the bold to “claim” and “report”. Because that’s all we have.
I had hallucinations the first and only time I tried marijuana.
I had what could be described asa ‘mystical experience’ around age 25. Hard to describe.I seemed to be hyper aware , of EVERY THING. The feeling lasted perhaps 10 minutes, faded away and has never returned.
The cause: I can’t be certain, but reasonably sure. The feeling /altered perception began immediately as I solved a zen koan, which had been in my head for abut 5 years. I was definitely not consciously thinking of the koan at the time. The answer was non verbal .Once the feeling had gone, I could not recapture the non verbal feeling, and have not, since that time
Today: I interpret the feeling as being in the same broad area as hypnosis and meditation . IE an altered state of consciousness, caused by the brain as the result of specific and perhaps unusual stimulus. This a physical experience, containing nothing 'mystical or ‘other worldly’ I don’t believe that mind is separated from the body or that the mystical or that the supernatural exists. REASON: Complete lack of proof.
I’m unable to jump into the sophistry in which Xain seems to have gotten himself enmeshed. It’s common in religious cults.*8 I’m finding it difficult to find a premise on which to base a response. Is there ONE starting place?
PS I have never been able to solve another koan.
PPS: LSD : I read in ‘The Lancet’ perhaps 30 years ago that it had been discovered that the cause of hallucinations from taking LSD is that the drug breaks down sugar in the brain. I don’t understand the process, I mention this for interest…
I haven’t read Michael Pollan’s book on hallucinations yet, but I did listen to an interesting interview with him on Sam Harris’ podcast. They point out that reaching this point where you understand that there is no self can be difficult if you try to do it through study and meditation, but, take a pill or a certain plant and you almost immediately see what they are talking about.
I think that was the point in “The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” . Alan Watts 1966
I read it in the late 70’s; it did my head in.
A few Quotes:
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
“Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Colorado may decriminalize psylocibin (mushrooms). (probably not for u to try Patrick, since pot can make u hallucinate).
Hallucinogens tend to evoke intense experiences and thus should not be taken lightly, imo. I believe u can become temporarily psychotic. This could be rather benign and even entertaining for some, especially if they are in a decent mental and emotional condition and have an idea what to expect and someone trustworthy to be with them. But being temporarily psychotic can also be quite problematic.
Having a profound sense, emotionally and mentally of being part of the “Absolute Pure Consciousness” could be a part of a hallucinogenic trip for some. But so could intense anxiety and uncomfortable or distressful hallucinations and/or delusions.
“A pleasant morning. Saw my classmates Gardner, and Wheeler. Wheeler dined, spent the afternoon, and drank Tea with me. Supped at Major Gardiners, and engag'd to keep School at Bristol, provided Worcester People, at their ensuing March meeting, should change this into a moving School, not otherwise. Major Greene this Evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and Satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the Argument he advanced was, 'that a mere creature, or finite Being, could not make Satisfaction to infinite justice, for any Crimes,' and that 'these things are very mysterious.'
(Thus mystery is made a convenient Cover for absurdity.)
Diary entry, February 13 1756, John Adams
Jesus or Ultimate Pure Consciousness, it doesn’t matter, it’s a cover for making an absurd argument.
What you are asking speaks to the nature of Truth. As I say in the article, whatever appears must also one day disappear. The only thing that never appears and disappears has been here forever. You can call it pure existence or God or true self. This is something we can't appreciate with our minds. So whether it is literal or metaphorical is not really the question, we are still using the standards of the mind to establish both. The fact is that the mind and personality don't exist, since they are changeable, and we drop them in between lifetimes. The only thing that really exists has existed always. It has no beginning or ending. I believe it is the deepest part of our nature. That nature is the same for all of us. It is the Oneness. Pure, Free, Forever.
The best way I know of doing that is through meditation. In meditation, you turn your attention inward, away from the forms and phenomena. Yes, of course, this world is a product of the mind's imagination. But it is possible to transcend the mind. The mind does not have an independent reality beyond the consciousness which gives rise to it, in the same way that the wave is not separate from the ocean. That pure ocean of consciousness is all that there is. As I say though, you need to have a direct experience of it. Without that, it is just a concept of the mind.
Apparently the only way to know it is to experience it.