Is the mind pictures?

In short, “you are not alive” because you are living in the world of your “mind” (I’m guessing that means what you believe things to be) and not in the present or real world which is empty of our perceptions.

Don’t underestimate your 'gut" that much.

:- )

As for the drugs, haven’t they been part of the human religious experience since like for eeva? ;- )


Xian: “They seem to paint the lens that which we view the world (I’m guessing subjectivity) as dark, flawed, dirty, and some other pretty negative terms. That the things we love and pursue in life are our enemies (regardless if you think otherwise). It just seemed like they were trying to paint your current state of affairs as awful and then offer their service. Sounds like too many religions to me. It was capped off by the fact that any further questions would involve paying for an appointment, or becoming a member.”

At the risk of sounding snarky, from that paragraph sounds to me like you’ve got a pretty decent grip on the scene. How much of that comes from your ‘gut’ level intuition? :big smilie face:

 

Xian: In short,

"“you are not alive” because you are living in the world of your “mind” (I’m guessing that means what you believe things to be*)

and not in the present or real world which is empty of our perceptions."


How can we not live in our mind? It’s what processes all of the input from the objective world you are embedded within.

“real world which is empty of our perceptions.” Define “real” world.

Can one say the real world is empty of our perceptions, though we interact within and upon it, meaning we effect and change things in the objective world.

 

*My “mind” contains many thoughts that I don’t believe in, so I’m thinking your definition is missing something.

I’m happy with the Mind as a processing tool, that helps me survive and thrive.

Psychology Today? Really? My assessment was not based on the gut level of intuition (which studies show isn’t more reliable than normal thinking processes), but from the obvious “you are damned if you don’t listen” style that religion plays to get you to listen.

I am mostly referring to stuff like this:

https://medium.com/dharma-talk/does-the-self-exist-22a2c3c847bb

In the sense that these people claim to have an experience of “no self” or that “you are the universe”. She even linked a book about a woman who claimed she had an “awakening” the showed she had “no self”, then one where “she was everything”. Well they put it first as realizing you are nothing, then that you are everything. The lady who wrote that claims that it is beyond the mind, which is dubious considering religious experience can be replicated in a lab. In my experience my mind ended up imagining such things as solipsism and idealism, and it felt like that was real (of course it was only the appearance that it was so). Still I fear such claims being right and they might uproot everything I know and I am scared of that.

https://www.richardjdavidson.com/

They listed the above as research to support meditation but they neglect to show the studies about people who had increased depression, dissociation, psychosis, and suicide in some.

Xain writes: “Psychology Today? Really? My assessment was not based on the gut level of intuition (which studies show isn’t more reliable than normal thinking processes *), but from the obvious “you are damned if you don’t listen” style that religion plays to get you to listen.”

Well okay seems we’re talking past each other. Okay, religious zealots and mystical gurus are con-artists, and in my younger decades, I was at the receiving end of many lectures from such. Inevitable they’d tell me all about who I “really was” and what my future would look like if I didn’t do such and such. And just as inevitably they were dead wrong as succeeding decades made clear to me. But, in my youth I didn’t have the benefit of hindsight - what I had was an inner solidity and security, that a was conveyed by what? The brain and all I’d learned to that point, but the brain has to deliver its knowledge to my body. You simply dismiss “gut feelings” yet the deeper we learn, seems the more profound and complex our neural network turns out to be.

  • * Oh and which studies, what was the set up, who's interpreting them, and how were they interpreted by the scientists compared to the news reporters writing their stories to sell.
(You shared three links with me, two are big blogs that I don't have the time to peruse, was there anything specific? The third posits "Is the Self Real?" I have as much contempt for that question as I do for anyone musing "Is Time Real?" - those seem to me questions for people who think the surface of a soap bubble is all there is to reality.

"Think Twice: How the Gut’s “Second Brain” Influences Mood and Well-Being

The emerging and surprising view of how the enteric nervous system in our bellies goes far beyond just processing the food we eat"

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/healthy_aging/healthy_body/the-brain-gut-connection

 

Or if you want to play with the big boys’n girls, there seems to be an awful lot on the topic over at Google Scholar

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C6&q=+±+brain+and+gut+neural+connections&btnG=


Allow me to just bring it back this thread back to Advocatus at January 11, 2019 at 10:04 am, since I kinda like the way he summarized it:

He’s certainly not saying that reality isn’t real. He’s just saying that our perception of reality is a model put together in our brains based on the input from your senses. We assume that our perception of reality is accurate, but we can sometimes see (in the case of optical illusions, for example) that it isn’t necessarily. It’s just the best model our brains can come up with. And your own existence as a conscious entity is another model your brain puts together from available data.

The people talking about meditation are saying basically the same thing, that your “mind”, or your perception of reality, is based upon ideas in your head which are in turn based upon the input from your senses. Meditation is way of sitting quietly and sorting through all those conflicting perceptions. Nothing more mysterious than that, really.

That just talks about depression and anxiety not really about the decision making processes that people often try to attribute to the gut. As I said before, that intuition (or gut feeling) is no more reliable than the usual method of logical and drawn out thinking.

 

“what I had was an inner solidity and security, that a was conveyed by what? The brain and all I’d learned to that point, but the brain has to deliver its knowledge to my body.”

The above statement is what they mean about the false mind, what they refer to. That this is not reality, just one’s experience of it and what they judge about it. Advocatus’s summary is incorrect since that is not what mediation is and it wasn’t what they were referring to (refer to my correction of his assessment). Their argument is that there is no solid self, no unchanging core to you that exists moment to moment. When I spoke to someone at the meditation place she just said stuff as though it was the truth. Like how you really are the universe and not the body (didn’t really prove that, but from what I read meditation can make it appear that way and some drugs too), or how the universe is eternal (it’s not), or that universe is righteous (it isn’t), even the sign up front talks about becoming “complete”, whatever that means. It just seems to me like she said a bunch of stuff as though it were true, but not how it is true. It’s kind of like people with the Bible.

Additionally I don’t know what to make of the descriptions of the personal experiences that some of the people describe (like in the Medium article). To me it seems like proof.

Also in regards to the “you are the universe”, the answer given to me was that before you there was the universe. Since they believe there is no death but just the passing of form, my guess is that the parts that make you up (molecules and atoms) don’t actually die, so therefor you don’t truly die. The pieces that make up your body go forth and bind with other pieces to make something else. At least that’s what I think they mean, they never actually use that part. From where I stand and see I am this body, which is MADE of the same stuff as other things in the universe, but eventually dies and breaks down when that happens. So when this body is no more I am no more, but the parts are still there. I am not the parts, I was the whole that those parts made.

It’s confusing me.

Why is it not you?

 

I don’t understand what you mean.

It was just a riff off “You (Probably) Don’t Exist”

I tried watching that video twice, watched a bunch, found it quite silly, never could finish.

If one controls and limits the parameters of one’s argument, one can say whatever one wants.

But, the actual world and life and who you are is bigger. Can’t be so easily compartmentalized.

 

Still, I’m into hearing what you yourself got to share. Even if I don’t know what you are driving at, at this point.

 

cheers,

“You (Probably) Don’t Exist” – I didn’t watch the whole thing either, but it looks like the same old “there is no free will” argument. The maker of the video defines “you” pretty much as the homunculus inside your brain which is completely independent of all physical structures and instinctive reactions, and then goes on to prove that this homunculus doesn’t exist. Just another way of saying that self-awareness is an illusion (although a highly useful illusion).

I’m most bothers by the OP. The way they define the mind. They claim that it takes pictures (metaphorically) of reality based on experience and senses but goes on to claim that said things are the false mind and must be cleansed. In a sense it sounds like nihilism and might be true since nothing in existence is inherently this or that, but that just means we are free to feel however about it.

 

They claim the normal lens that we view the world (pictures) is dirty and must be cleansed through “subtraction meditation”. When you have the true mind then x,y, and z will come true and you will be happy. Any questions require an appointment.

i tried telling them meditation had the opposite effect on me but they say this meditation is different (and for 200 a month I can see how).

My primary reaction was how fishy it sounded. It had the marks of religion, make you think your normal life sucks and tell you how to fix it. Nothing they said was my enemy was my enemy.

But I can’t shake this obsession that they have some secret and mystic truth and I’m living a lie.

That’s their hook.

You are talking about predators, they are smart, they pay attention, and they tell you exactly what it takes.

Good luck.

 

Got anything more interesting you want to discuss?

The problem is that on some level I wonder if it is right. They say some dumb things like if Alzheimer’s patients are most present (which is idiotic, having no memeory isn’t a good thing it’s awful). Or how in the case of Amnesia where the self is forgotten and how without your memories there is no you. That you is just a story you carry but not a permanent core. I know people change though.

I think it’s also the argument that people are born blank slates, even though they aren’t. But they think that by cleaning our preferences, likes, dislikes, etc (which they judge to be false because they are conditioned) you see the truth. Which explained the contrasting pictures on their posters of colored pictures followed by empty sketches (like a blank coloring book).

I don’t like to think that my while life, my desires, likes, dislikes, etc are false and have to be purged. But part of me doesn’t want to be wrong either and even though it hurts and leaves me hollow I have unwillingly be doing so just to be “right”.

Or to put it one way, since it was “learned” it’s not “who you really are” it would be a lie. If that was “who you really are” then you would be so always.

Something about not being inherent that makes it false. Even though you don’t get to choose what you like.

What is this “wrong” you don’t want to be?

Why should your past and your tendencies be disappeared?

Why not just settle for wrestling with them?

 

Your apparent struggle doesn’t make any sense to me. Are you relatively healthy? Are you part of a family and/or community? What is it you think you should be ashamed of? Being less than perfect? Repeating the same mistakes? Not having a strong facade? Or strong foundation for that matter? What does life mean to you? Why are contrived pitches from salespeople and predators better than what you already have? What are you trying to achieve?

 

I don’t think you read what I wrote.

Im getting that I’m terrified that the whole life I built and considered to be the real “me” is just fabricated and illusory. That my likes and dislikes are not unique or real but just a result of programming and conditioning. That “i” am just an illusion. A construct and not inherent. That the real “me” according to them is empty.

Like I said, I don’t think you read or understood it.

But I do know I tend to believe new information to be true no matter how shocking. Like this:

Like how you don’t really like what you like or you don’t really like your “interests”, you are just conditioned to. Your interests aren’t inherent otherwise they would not be dependent on where or when you were born. It’s like the idea of a “me” that I believed I was (with likes, dislikes, and interests) is a fabrication and not the truth of what you are for real (empty)

Believe it or not most people have this little quirk in their personality which makes them wonder if they are somehow missing out on something. This is the reason that thousands of people are drawn to religions or to cults.

Part of what they’re saying is right. Your mind does build up an image of reality based upon ideas (or memes) which may or may not be true. To take one example, depressed people have a false image of themselves because they put too much emotional stock in negative things that happen to them, and not enough in the positive things that happen. So a depressed person would benefit from “cleansing” that negative image a little bit, wouldn’t he? That’s not to say that EVERYTHING in your head is false.