Tag: Mind

Taking The Reins

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On November 14, 2021

In Philosphing

Meaning.

What does that mean? What makes a thing meaningful or meaningless? It is a perceived quality of a thing. Is it objective or subjective? Is it something we apply to a thing or is it something resident to a thing that we react to?

Which is better? A meaningful existence or a meaningless one?

Meaningful of course. Nobody ever committed suicide because their lives just seemed so meaningful.

So this is important. It’s something we should be in control of. And we are.

There is nothing wrong with talking to yourself. It’s listening to yourself that gets you into trouble. We are creating ourselves with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. If we don’t do it consciously, we let a mental autopilot take over. As in a a self-driving vehicle, the autopilot does an adequate job under calm, controlled conditions. But when the weather turns bad or an unexpected situation presents itself, the autopilot will lose control (often by overcorrecting) and the actual pilot must assume control.

Letting your mental autopilot (your inner dialogue) run out of control is the source of most psychological problems.

We re-assert control of our lives by taking control of the narrative. We are the authors of, not the characters in our stories. You are where you are because you put yourself there. Or you let your autopilot take you there.

The only thing that stands between you and who you want to be is you.

Your life has as much or as little meaning as you want it to.

Stop listening to yourself.

Start telling yourself.

Return to Eden

By

On August 8, 2021

In Philosphing

I’m going to tell you how to simulate a certain type of brain damage.

Interested?

Okay then, let’s get rid of that troublesome neocortex!

“Logos” and “Rhema” both mean “The Word of God”. Logos is used to mean the written word and Rhema is when God speaks directly in your heart. Those in the Abrahamic world generally understand this in a similar way. The first is whatever is contained in their sanctioned holy books. The second denotes what in Christianity is referred to as the Holy Spirit.

This is all wrong, of course.

The Word is just simply that. A label we stick on things. What we name something. This is a useful mental tool. The distillation of what was there before we replaced it with a symbol. But like many other tools, it can be dangerous if improperly used.

Labels are blindfolds.

Does the world around you seem broken up and difficult to make sense of? Why might that be? The world seems crazy and incomplete because we can’t see it anymore. All we see are the labels and most of those don’t make a lot of sense. When we go out into nature, (by which we mean away from the influence of humans) we find peace. Why? Do the wild animals and plants seem to be struggling to understand the world? Are they confused? No. Because they are experiencing only the Rhema. A little of that rubs off on us when we are around them. Domestic animals are more troubled and can even go mad but that is because a little of us rubs off on them.

So you go into the woods and encounter something and immediately say to yourself, “deer!” or, “fish!” or whatever.

And that’s it. You just ruined the experience. You killed a part of God so you could nail It’s skeleton on your wall. I’m speaking metaphorically here. See if you can rise above my words.

The next part is a discipline. It is best to start as far away from other people as you can. Better yet, take some camping gear and go out alone into the wilderness for a few days. Take a phone in case of an emergency but leave it turned off.

Then…

Shut the hell up!

As quickly as you can, start ripping labels off. When you see something, only see it. When you hear something, only hear it. Don’t name anything. Keep at it. You will fail at first but you will gradually get better at it. Try to experience the world the way a baby does. What does a deer look like if you don’t know it is a “deer”?

Once you achieve this, you will become connected to the world directly. Once that happens, once you stop defining everything, the world will have the capacity (with your permission) to offer you new things. If so, most likely, you will do what you have been trained all your life to do. You’ll say to yourself, “hallucination!”

And in a way, it is. You will see that the world is really like God’s dream. Anything is possible here. Careful though, if you have fear in your heart, it may manifest. You may come across something monstrous. If you do, rip that label off and try to truly see it.

You may fail and find yourself getting your ass kicked by some hellish beast, but you may also gain some insight on how it is you who shapes reality.

Good Fences

By

On February 7, 2021

In Philosphing

Some (possibly crazy) people believe in telepathy. Indeed many other (possibly crazy) people report that aliens communicate telepathically almost exclusively. This is theoretically possible either through technical enhancement or perhaps spiritual mastery via the concept that the many are also the One.

Let’s indulge in a little fantasy. What if humans could somehow develop a strong, universal ability to read each other’s thoughts? How would your life change if everyone you know suddenly knew what you really thought of them? How would society change if we were automatically open and honest with each other about every little thing? How important is privacy? Is it more valuable to those who are dishonest? Or perhaps to those who are hiding from others who mean them harm?

Siddhis or Powers can be attained during the run up to Enlightenment or as a spontaneous result afterward. The mastery of these abilities only arises in conjunction with the understanding of why they cannot be used casually.

Upon meeting a complete stranger, we tend to be wary. We don’t know anything about them. Perhaps they are mean. Perhaps they are stupid or just plain weird. But to maintain decorum, we might offer a greeting. If they respond in a friendly manner, we might tell them our name and offer some small talk. If given the time and the inclination, we pass from being strangers to being acquaintances. The more we open up to each other, the more we share our thoughts and our feelings, the more friendly we may become. As the friendship grows, we may develop trust and empathy. If we spend time together and begin to share in each other’s lives, we may develop a deep and abiding love for each other.

Building a relationship takes time because of the relatively small bandwidth of human communication. How long would it take if we knew everything about each other instantaneously? Would we even remain separate beings?

What would it be like if we were all instantly in love with and cared deeply for everyone we met?

Would that be wonderful?

For how long?

Glitch Cat

By

On November 8, 2020

In Scraps

I had a very interesting experience at work the other night. A resident of the adult foster-care group-home in which I work the overnight shift came to me excitedly telling me about seeing a smallish mountain lion in the front yard at the end of the fence line. This resident is a man I’ll call “Randy”. He told me that while he was having a smoke on the porch, he had heard a skittering sound in the snow. When he looked to see what it was, he saw an animal running along beside the fence. When it stopped moving at the end, he saw that it had a long tail and he was certain that it was a mountain lion. He did not see any more because he got scared and ran back into the house.

Now, we jokingly like to say that Randy is “like the atoms in the universe” in that he makes up everything. So, although this house is remote and surrounded by woodlands where these animals certainly exist, I assumed this was another of Randy’s confabulations and refrained from running outside to see it for myself.

So, several hours later at around 4:30 a.m., I am going out the front door carrying a bag of garbage bound for a dumpster that sits across the driveway. It is dark. The house is silent and all the residents are asleep.

As I step off the porch I hear a sound like an animal skittering across the snow. I look toward the sound and see a creature the size of a large dog running along the fence line. I cannot make it out clearly because it is behind a tree when it gets to the end of the fence where it stops. I shift my position in order to see it better. That’s when I clearly see that it possesses a long rope-like tail. It could not be a lynx or a bobcat. It could not be a dog. It could only be a smallish mountain lion. I did not see any more because I got scared and ran back inside the house.

What is so striking to me about the experience is how precisely it duplicated the story told to me by Randy several hours before. Hearing something running on the snow; seeing the animal stop at the end of the fence; realizing what it was upon seeing it’s tail. What are the odds? A more likely explanation would be that Randy’s story had planted a suggestion in my mind and that led to me somehow hallucinating the same exact thing later that night.

Except that I have never hallucinated anything in my entire life. Sure, it was dark out and the creature moved fast so I could almost allow that I might have imagined it.

Almost.

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

Robertson Davies

Imagine Nation

By

On August 3, 2019

In Philosphing

This is a post that I keep on avoiding due to the fact that the subject is so difficult to communicate (or comprehend). I ask the reader to ignore my words and attempt to just see what they are pointing at.

Okay. Off to cloud cuckoo-land…

Everything in this reality is not the real thing. Everything you experience (see; hear; feel) is a symbol for something else. There is a higher, truer “realer” reality above the one we seem to be living in. Most people are somewhat aware of this and give voice to this intuition through art and religion.

Just as <insert your name> is not the real you, so the (apparent) world you see around you is not the true world. Your mind is aware of this beyond-world but cannot perceive it directly. It therefore places a symbolic “thing” in it’s place in an effort to make sense of it. A placeholder of sorts. As an example, we may use a sound as a symbol for something else as in the sound “dog”. We call this a “word”. The sound itself is not the animal referenced. We might also use a drawing or an image of this thing.

Woof!

Like the word, the image is not the actual dog. Now what I am saying is that the sight, sound, and feel of the dog are also not the dog itself. The true dog lies hidden from you and is unknowable. Even if you could pierce the veil and join the dog, you would only experience the combination of yourself and the dog. The you+dog is also not the actual dog.

Think about how dimensions work. The one dimensional line; the two dimensional plane; the three dimensional cube; the four dimensional hyper-cube. We can keep this going mathematically but our minds are incapable of following experientially.

The idea that there exist places (and inhabitants) in dimensions we cannot see is unsettling for people who have enough problems dealing with just the basic three-plus-time. As a result of our being so embedded in what we think is reality, when we encounter something from outside of it, our mind slaps a more believable symbol over it. This is why so many reports of the paranormal include elements of the absurd. We are puzzled by the “high strangeness” elements because they seem so silly and contrived.

This is because they are.

By us.

Psyche’s Shadow

By

On March 30, 2019

In Philosphing

How can you tell when a person is afraid?

When they make a point of telling you that they are not afraid.

So many people have this idea that their day-to-day waking consciousness is superior to, and can override their own subconscious. But they are their subconscious every bit as much as they are their normal consciousness.

(We are referring to the puppet-thing here. The truest Self Knows that it is neither.)

However, it is the subconscious or dream-world that wields the power to override the conscious ego. For example, staying awake for days at a time will bring on hallucinations that you will not be able to tell apart from reality.

Your subconscious mind can have a different agenda than your conscious one. Ask anyone who suffers from an addiction.

The distinction between conscious and subconscious seems somewhat arbitrary. This is because you are playing both “characters”. Not because you must but because you want to.

When you fall “asleep”, you do not lose consciousness. You do however lose your memory of that moment. In truth, your attention becomes fixed on the reality or story-telling that plays continually beneath your regular “awake” experience. You are just as conscious when you sleep as you are when you are not. Try staying awake as you drift off. It is very instructive to pass from your regular reality into a lucid dream directly.

Freedom and slavery create each other. The more oppressed you tell yourself that you are, the more your yearning to escape will squeeze up from your “subconscious”.

The more sensitive you are to your environment (both inner and outer), the more pain you will feel. This type of suffering is the very font of creativity. Note how often an artist’s creations reflect just the opposite of what they try to express.

Just as an aside – If someone tells you they are a very stable genius, you might not want them to be in control of anything important.

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