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Deviate
newbie
Registered: 04/20/03
Posts: 4,497
Last seen: 8 years, 4 months
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culture, identity and enlightenment
#21897392 - 07/04/15 04:24 PM (8 years, 6 months ago) |
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So I remember as a young child first learning about alcohol and how it could make people enter into a state of intoxication where they would behave a lot differently from normal.
Now, learning this left me absolutely shocked, horrified, terrified and shaken to the very core of my being. Why? Because instantly I realized that if it were possible for a drug to alter someone in this way, there were philosophical implications which if followed to their logical conclusion, would destroy my fragile understanding of the world and what it meant to be a person.
In other words, I realized that if the ego personality identity could be chemically altered and interrupted then I could not be that identity or rather that identity was not a fixed thing, separate from the world but able to interact with it, but rather it was an aggregate of other factors which come together to form an identity.
I was only probably about four years old at the time and of course I was not able to articulate what I was thinking, so I could not talk to my parents or anyone about it. But I remember being aware that somehow this was being missed. My family, everyone I met, our entire society, was set up as though we were individual selves, separate from each other and the world around us. In other words, at that very early age I already realized that our entire culture was built upon a false premise.
I was so terrified and horrified by this realization. It destroyed my feelings of safety and security and created an underlying sense of anxiety and confusion which is still with me to this very day. I simply could not understand how everyone in the world seemed to be walking around going about their lives as though they were somehow a separate entity when experiences clearly showed this was so obviously not the case at all. I lost faith in my parents and authority figures and felt as though nature was the only thing that had any truth in it, nature and philosophy.
Anyway I am wondering as society begins to accept this realization of what has been obvious all along ( that there is no man inside a man) how will culture change? Our culture is still very much based on the idea that there is a little man inside a man making the decisions. But I think the world is waking up now. More and more people are beginning to realize, it's simply not like that.
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circastes
Big Questions Small Head



Registered: 01/14/10
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Loc: straya
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Re: culture, identity and enlightenment [Re: Deviate] 1
#21897828 - 07/04/15 05:46 PM (8 years, 6 months ago) |
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It's really a problem of language. There may be no self in the traditional idea of an entity, but there is 'something' there.
-------------------- My solitude... My shield... My armour... TESTED WITH FULL FORCE
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Deviate
newbie
Registered: 04/20/03
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Last seen: 8 years, 4 months
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Re: culture, identity and enlightenment [Re: circastes]
#21897988 - 07/04/15 06:24 PM (8 years, 6 months ago) |
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I think youre right, we really have no way to clearly speak about these thing. No matter how you try to explain it, you create misconceptions in the listener.
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DividedQuantum
Outer Head


Registered: 12/06/13
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Re: culture, identity and enlightenment [Re: Deviate] 1
#21898066 - 07/04/15 06:48 PM (8 years, 6 months ago) |
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It helps me quite a bit to separate the individual into a "lower" and a "higher" self. This quote from Castaneda (regardless of your opinion of him, he had some interesting things to say) illustrates it a little:
"Every one of us human beings has two minds. One is totally ours, and it is like a faint voice that always brings us order, directness, purpose. The other mind is a foreign installation. It brings us conflict, self-assertion, doubts, hopelessness." --Yaqui Shaman Don Juan/Carlos Castaneda
Physicist-philosopher Amit Goswami also contributes to this idea, and analogizes the ego-self to "classical" (mechanistic) physics, and the "true"-self to quantum (acausal, proto-conscious) mechanics.
An interesting way to look at it, anyway.
-------------------- Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici
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