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Pleiadian Revolutionary Registered: 03/31/09 Posts: 7,038 Loc: Aether Last seen: 6 years, 8 months |
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And im no talking about weed.
Im talking tobacco, not even normal cigs but electronic cigs. Do you think in the eyes of God it is wrong to smoke e cig? Funny how stupid entities around me dont want me to smoke em, but many intellectuals and mystics and philosophers smoked. Einstein, Mark Twain, Robert Bruce, Robert Anton Wilson... --------------------
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moon person Registered: 01/22/15 Posts: 5,101 Loc: Chinada |
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Ya way back when, when people didn't realize how bad it was for you
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Storage Container Aficionado Registered: 09/18/12 Posts: 849 Loc: Some savage litt Last seen: 6 years, 1 month |
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There are no sins and no such thing as right and wrong. Those are just concepts we humans assign to things in order to allow our minds, which are basically computers, to make decisions. The mind, being a computer and all, needs definitive statements, like right and wrong (sin).
On the other hand the part of us that exists to experience life through our human forms doesn't see specific things as right or wrong. What is more important is the experiential aspect of something and that can vary greatly from person to person and over time. For example, in youth, with friends that party, it might be worthwhile to use drugs. However later in life, with family or other things to think about, the same drugs may seem less meaningful. But then again, maybe in a middle aged life some partying improves your life and helps remind you that life should be fun. It all depends on the situation and the kind of experiences you find meaningful. So is smoking a sin? No because sins don't really exist. It's just something that humans invented. Should you smoke? Your mind craves a black and white answer that it can make decisions around. From your soul side, you have to decide if it adds more experiential value to life. How much do you enjoy it, vs what harm and potential consequences may eventually arise from it. We are all going to die, so even if something kills you life may overall be better with it. It's harder to see with smoking, but with drugs and alcohol it may be best for some people to just embrace the experiences they bring and go with it. Some our best artists and innovators have become what they are because of a certain fearlessness and willingness to go where they are pulled. Smoking might fit right into a just don't give a fuck, I'm living life to the fullest attitude. It works for people who are called to live life with that bit of edginess. On the other hand someone might be called to live peacefully, calmly, and healthily. There is no easy answer for you. -------------------- I only use drugs medicinally. If I don't my knees hurt from kneeling down.
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some kinda love Registered: 01/02/10 Posts: 6,799 |
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no it's just dumb
-------------------- dripping with fantasy
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some kinda love Registered: 01/02/10 Posts: 6,799 |
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well for me anyway.. i mean it can be really gratifying but if i think about it too much it gets tangled into a whole web of death and self destructive thinking patterns.. so for me if i do it i just enjoy it and forget it
-------------------- dripping with fantasy
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newbie Registered: 04/20/03 Posts: 4,497 Last seen: 8 years, 4 months |
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Quote: I think this is a good post but I disagree about one thing. Sin does exist, it is not a human invention it just doesn't exist in the way most people imagine it to. Its not that some actions like smoking are "sins" and others are not, rather if you study the ancient meaning of sin you'll find that is essentially a communication breakdown between our divine selves and our conscious selves or between God and man. The ancient Hebrews defined sin as "missing the mark". Once we have forgotten our divine source, just about everything we do becomes stained by sin, all our actions, even the good actions to a degree, become self-centered.
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Elder Registered: 12/09/99 Posts: 14,279 Loc: South Florida Last seen: 3 years, 2 days |
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There are no sins and no such thing as right and wrong.
So, you're saying that you are a psychopath? Or a sociopath. They're actually synonymous but the second term is a form of Antisocial Personality Disorder. I like the sound of the word psychopath better, plus it translates directly in 'sick-mind.' Ever see Dr. Michael Stone's scale. He is a reputable source on personality disorders, I read his book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo Your answer is crudely reductionistic. Humans create computing devices, but machines are not sentient or capable of valuation. Human beings are always moral or immoral, never amoral. Lions killing zebras is amoral. Human beings killing other human beings OR animals is moral or immoral depending upon the motive. This is not moral relativity, it is existential responsibility. Killing a baby-killer before he kills the baby may be considered a moral act, whereas killing another person out of greed or anger would no doubt be immoral. There are no machine ethics and human beings are not machines I have to tell you, not even those who respond with damaged emotional lives like severe autistics and schizophrenics. -------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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Elder Registered: 12/09/99 Posts: 14,279 Loc: South Florida Last seen: 3 years, 2 days |
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Nicotine is neurotoxic. It is the basis for many insecticides. In human consumption it affects neurotransmission, is a mood-changing drug, and is highly addictive. Addiction is psychological slavery and all forms of slavery are inimical to human freedom. Spiritual development is characterized in large measure by freedom, freedom to act morally, and 'sinning against the body' is intentionally detracting from its health (read, wholeness and holiness, they're all of the same linguistic and conceptual root). One does not even need to acknowledge a personal God for one to have a spiritual life. Theism is but one concept that, like all God-concepts, 'falls short of the mark.' The word in Greek, hamartia, is an archery metaphor which means that the arrow has literally fallen short of the bullseye on the target. Hamartia translates into the English word 'sin' in the Bible. So sin does not exclusively mean offending a king-like deity. It means intentionally refusing to act according to what one's highest intuitions knows to be proper behavior. It is being untrue to oneself first and foremost. If one has some metaphysical suspicions that our being derives from Being Itself, then one might consider that being untrue, unfaithful to oneself, one's health/wholeness/holiness, is indeed being unfaithful to God. Nihilism, the stance that nothing matters, is one of the two great heresies in Buddhism, (the other being eternalism). For Christianity, such a stance is perhaps best explicated as "despair" by the Danish Christian existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Despair is THE great sin against God. Of course, it's all up to each of us to determine a truly human logic, meaning, a logic tempered by faith in a transcendental possibility that people refer in shorthand to as God.
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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Pleiadian Revolutionary Registered: 03/31/09 Posts: 7,038 Loc: Aether Last seen: 6 years, 8 months |
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"If smoking isnt allowed in Heaven, i'm not coming!"
Guess who said that without using google.
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Bluefoot Bandit Registered: 04/15/10 Posts: 3,693 Loc: Around some corn |
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If you think that your god might torture you for eternity if you smoke.. You might wanna reconsider what god is.
Just a thought. Sounds awful petty for a dude who is supposedly full of forgiveness. -------------------- Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye, And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, For ever flushing round a summer sky. -Castle of Indolence Edited by Toe_Jam (08/27/15 11:42 AM)
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The Sauntering Stranger Registered: 10/19/14 Posts: 414 |
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Hell no. Well it isn't necessarily a wise nor healthy choice but it's not a sin , just a choice.
Edited by caman (08/27/15 02:47 PM)
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Registered: 06/05/13 Posts: 11,059 |
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Quote: why e cigs? i don't get it? troll? why not edit the title to "is smoking e cigs a sin"
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Cosmic Creator Registered: 05/13/15 Posts: 1,206 Last seen: 7 years, 4 months |
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Good and evil, right and wrong...manmade concepts. Just because you rationalize something as evil based on your whole life of brainwashing, does not make you correct. Just because someone holds doctorats and is published on a topic also does not make that person correct. I only feel bad, because I have been brainwashed to think it is bad. Something society forces on us and then tries to call the norm.
-------------------- I am.
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Elder Registered: 12/09/99 Posts: 14,279 Loc: South Florida Last seen: 3 years, 2 days |
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Moral development occurs in invariant stages in over 300 cultures that were investigated. Lawrence Kolhberg's work remains unsurpassed and while his elaboration of the stages of moral development is a human project, moral development itself is not a "manmade concept," it is part of the phenomenology of human development. Moral relativity is another issue altogether. Oh, having a Doctorate DOES make a difference in the probable accuracy of an investigation, if the study is undertaken with integrity, not for fame or fortune (where there is greater likelihood of fudged results). This it true whether the investigation is based on empirical experimentation or on a historical narrative gleaned from phenomenological reports.
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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Pleiadian Revolutionary Registered: 03/31/09 Posts: 7,038 Loc: Aether Last seen: 6 years, 8 months |
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Well Cherubim tell me i shouldn't smoke!
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Elder Registered: 12/09/99 Posts: 14,279 Loc: South Florida Last seen: 3 years, 2 days |
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Uh-huh. They say anything else?
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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Storage Container Aficionado Registered: 09/18/12 Posts: 849 Loc: Some savage litt Last seen: 6 years, 1 month |
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Quote: Yes, exactly. Sin isn't based around any specific act, it is about doing things that separate us from divinity and the rest of life or pull us further from the paths we are born to walk as the best versions of ourselves. We are on the same page I believe. -------------------- I only use drugs medicinally. If I don't my knees hurt from kneeling down.
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Stranger Registered: 09/15/13 Posts: 437 Last seen: 1 year, 5 days |
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Does your conscience condemn you for it? If not then its not a sin... Unless you have a warped conscience.
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Storage Container Aficionado Registered: 09/18/12 Posts: 849 Loc: Some savage litt Last seen: 6 years, 1 month |
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Quote: Ladies and Gentlemen, witness the computer like human mind at work. Rather than seeing fellow human beings as pieces of the entirety of life it serpates and defines people based upon arbitrarily assigned definitions. If psychopath has been defined as without sense of right and wrong then this person must be a psychopath. Of course that definition of psychopath is completely arbitrary. It is just what human beings have decided it means. But a computer like mind needs these kinds of labels in order to interact with life. It must have each little piece of life sliced up and assigned properties. It builds internal models of the world so as to be able to understand it. This is fine. We need our computer like mind in order to interact with life. But we should also maintain a stable connection to our inner divinity. It is through this connection that true empathy arises. With a solid connection to the rest of life we actually no longer need to obtain moral guidance via human concepts of right and wrong. Instead we actually feel how our actions affect other parts of life and cannot gain personally by adding suffering to life as a whole. So it is entirely possible to have true empathy born out of a connection to the rest of life and not use the human concepts of right and wrong. Of course someone operating from the computer like human mind will be incapable of separating the concepts of right/wrong from empathy despite them being entirely different. Right and wrong are properties assigned by the human mind. Empathy is a felt connection to the rest of life. The use of right and wrong as moral guidance can be problematic. For example when someone is convinced that they are right they can do things like label other human beings that they don't even know as psychopaths. Being themselves nothing more than a collection of ideas, "I am this I believe that," someone stuck within the human mind also has a very hard time separating human beings from the ideas that they carry. For example, note how by I personally, and my ideas where attacked. Someone with a better connection to their inner divinity would have easily understood that we are more than just our ideas and would have been able to discuss and even debate without directing Ill will toward the human being that is only using their ideas and not attached to them. Now it may seem like a minor deal to label someone you don't even know a psychopath. It may not even seem that bad to be unable to comprehend that just because someone has grown beyond right and wrong that they can still have empathy. However these things are indicative of a soul still stuck deep within the human mind. Just because today it was only a minor personal attack does not mean that we should stand idly by. The exact same type of mindset that would see me as a psychopath because I meet some arbitrarily defined collection of properties might also place other people into slots. I am a psychopath, they are a Jew, they are an infidel. That slicing up of people into little groups is only one step away from assigning value to those groups. This group is right, that group is wrong, those people are only.... after that all sorts of nastiness becomes possible as can be seen in human history. Empathy and a true divine connection means that we will see each other as fellow human beings and understand that our ideas and differences are only very minor things and not who we really are. Behind the contents of our mind we are all divine beings, a little peice of the totality of creation. In that regard, in our truest essence we are all the same. Every other part of life should be treated with the same respect owed to ourselves or to our understanding of God. Alas, this is impossible to truly understand from a computer like human mind. Instead it will try to razzle and dazzle with arguments that all look pretty impressive and we'll thought out. But be careful who you listen to folks. Computers can make impressive arguments and have even convinced people that it makes sense put people in prison for having plants and mushrooms, or that killing 6,000,000 Jews is a good idea. All born put of logic and impressive arguments. It is up to us to listen to our our inner guidance and decide what makes sense and what is just a computer like human mind blowing smoke screens. P.S. You don't know me at all and you don't know what I am capable of or understand. You assumed that by my saying that right and wrong are human creations that I have no empathy. That's a pretty big leap, not at all what I said, and still no excuse to try to force me into a little mental slot for your silly human mind to use. People do not fit into mental slots because our innate divinity allows us to interact in ways that are different than our mental programming. You should really try to understand this. You can label someone anything you would like. That doesn't mean you actually understand them. -------------------- I only use drugs medicinally. If I don't my knees hurt from kneeling down.
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Stranger Registered: 03/26/15 Posts: 1,678 Last seen: 7 years, 3 months |
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Quote: Sin means something that causes harm, and cigs does cause harm to the body as pork as well. But pork is only an abomination to ourselves, but not between God and us. And so when you smoke cigs, you are just sinning against yourself. Leviticus 11:7 And the pig, though it has a divided hoof, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you. The laws were made for us to live a very good and healthy life. Deuteronomy 5:33 Walk in obedience to all that the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live and prosper and prolong your days in the land that you will possess. This is the only sin those that were under the law that is unforgiven, Leviticus 24:16 anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. But when God's spirit of grace has came, he reminded them what it says about what is written in the laws, Matthew 12:31 And so I tell you, every kind of sin and slander can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven., But since He has came into the world, that they were forgiven of the offense. And to blaspheme means to go against and which everyone are to honor their parents, and God is the true parent that knows what is good for their children.
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Elder Registered: 12/09/99 Posts: 14,279 Loc: South Florida Last seen: 3 years, 2 days |
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Lots of BS to defend the one statement of your's that I questioned, namely: There are no sins and no such thing as right and wrong. Because this is the baseline assumption of a sociopath, I was asking you for clarification, not pointing a finger. I don't know you and I cannot evaluate a person from a statement, but if there is conviction behind that statement, then in real-time I would endeavor to avoid such an individual. There is a difference between seeking clarification and making an unfounded pronouncement. I do not make diagnoses in a cavalier way, and I do not diagnose on the internet anyway, it's irresponsible, unreliable and frankly, invalid to do so. That's where personal face-to-face interaction is necessary. I see back-peddling and rationalization in your unnecessary argument which deflects the simplicity of your statement onto "human concepts of right and wrong," and relegating "empathy" to "a connection to the rest of life." Well, the artificial wedge that you attempt to insert between empathy and its accurate intellectual "concepts" creates a linguistic disconnect. It is a non sequitur to my mind to connect actual empathy with a statement like yours. Concepts developed from "a connection to the rest of life," "empathy," (as well as "congruence" and "unconditional positive regard," all terms identified by the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers), cannot, without complete confusion, be elaborated as an absence of good and evil in ANY idiom I can think of, psychologically, spiritually, sociologically, anthropologically, etc.
I once had a phone conversation with an actual sociopath, who had, as it turned out, stolen cash money from me. When he was apprehended months later for armed robbery, he and I had a conversation before he had to surrender himself to Rahway State Prison in NJ. He wanted us to go out together to buy some "skinny girls with big tits," and "good champagne" - apparently, with MY money (a sick game all by itself). At the time, I hadn't figured out that this former friend of my brother had burgled my money. During the course of conversation he brought up the idea and insisted that "there is no good or evil." He was following wealthy woman home from the mall to rob them of their diamond rings and jewelry at the point of a Crossman® BB gun (it is still armed robbery). His justification was that he was making money to go to chiropractic school to HELP people! Deluded or just plain lying, he did 10 years at Rahway. Just one example of an individual with conviction behind the same statement where the conviction got him convicted and made him a convict.
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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Humble Student Registered: 11/30/11 Posts: 26,088 Loc: Deep in the syst |
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AGT & Markos - it sounds to me as though you guys are talking about two sides of the same coin. I know my mind often operates on both sides of that coin; I try and reserve the mind as a tool (right & wrong) and connect with my higher self where possible (spiritual/empathy).
-------------------- Let it be seen that you are nothing. And in knowing that you are nothing... there is nothing to lose, there is nothing to gain. What can happen to you? Something can happen to the body, but it will either heal or it won't. What's the big deal? Let life knock you to bits. Let life take you apart. Let life destroy you. It will only destroy what you are not. --Jac O'keeffe
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Elder Registered: 12/09/99 Posts: 14,279 Loc: South Florida Last seen: 3 years, 2 days |
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Empathy, like Congruence and Unconditional Positive Regard are the hallmarks of a normal, healthy-functioning person according to Carl Rogers. Lawrence Kohlberg's research into moral development illustrated invariant features of development across some 300 different cultures. Kohlberg added a 7th stage of Post-Conventional moral development which was based on a transcendental or cosmic consciousness motive, but the psychological community never accepted it. I do of course, or I wouldn't have struggled with ethical vegetarianism and veganism for so many years of my life. That struggle began the evening after m first trip - Heavenly Blue Morning Glory seeds - when my mom put a hamburger in front of me and I hallucinated it breathing. I realized that brown, broiled meat-puck had been a living, breathing, mooing cow that was cruelly killed after a life of concentration-camp-like agri-farmed existence. Most people who remain omnivores refuse to acknowledge these truths or they would have to live up to their expanded awareness of horror and suffering, and that means they would have to resist eating animal flesh, resist their programming, their habits, and most of all their sensory pleasure which remains over their conscience.
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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Storage Container Aficionado Registered: 09/18/12 Posts: 849 Loc: Some savage litt Last seen: 6 years, 1 month |
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Quote: First off I would like to apologize. I responded too harshly to you. What you may realize is that my mind does not work like most people's minds work. In fact I have always been different. Not different like in a non normal category of psychology, but different as in not at all like the way anybody else seems to think and maybe even different than anything that most experts have even had a chance to study and include in their paradigms. This might become more obvious if we continue to interact. What you might not realize is that because of this, for pretty much my entire life I have to deal with people trying to label me as mentally ill. People always seem to want to judge me or categorize me as abnormal. It has been very hard for me to deal with this sort of thing and it has hurt me badly at times. I've spent a great to deal of time and effort cleaning up the psychological damage I have taken because of people trying to say that I was crazy or even pressuring me to think in more normal ways. At the same time I just keep right on living and getting by, working, interacting with others and so on. In fact many people I know appreciate the unique ideas that I have and the way that I always seem to have a different take on a situation. The way I see it, I am valuable as I am for the unique perspective that I offer life. Life needs people like me to find new ways of doing things. I should not be labeled as "in need of repair" or pressured back towards normalcy, I should be allowed to be myself. Yet that is not at all what I have encountered in far too many cases, and even from the people that are closest to me. My life has been a constant battle just to be allowed to show even a little bit of what I feel I can offer. So your post struck a cord and stirred up all the psychological damage I had taken from well meaning but I'll informed amateur psychologists over the years. A barrage of diagnosis from ignorant people who know nothing of me nor have the right to diagnose anyone. Of course you cannot know what I've been through which is why I must apologize. I sometimes find myself doing this, pushing back against any attempts to place myself or anyone else into mental slots. This sort of thing has caused me enough trouble already. Plus I care quite deeply for life and feel that people like me do play a valuable role. I must protect the uniqueness and diversity of the life of which I am a part. So I try to nip that sort of thing in the bud in order to protect myself and also life as a whole Best to make it quite clear from the start that I will never settle quietly into somebody else's expectations. You see I do believe that most human beings have a habit of slotting people, of trying to place them into mental categories and then using that to determine how to relate to them. I prefer to try to communicate as fellow human beings, soul to soul if you will, and not as ego to ego. We are so much more than the mental models we use to define ourselves and each other, so I try to reach beyond those kinds of things when I can. Again I am truly sorry for responding so harshly. I felt threaten and concerned that once again I would have to defend myself against those that wish to label me without really understanding me. I guess if you must sort me in your mind understand that I am at my essence an agent of change and therefore inherently unpredicable. Whatever is expected, I will do something else. Perhaps that is why I find labels so offensive. If someone assumes something about me I almost have to do something that will challenge that assumption. Anyway, if we can get beyond this, perhaps there are some things that we can learn by our interactions. For example I still don't understand why it seems so difficult to consider that right and wrong (or sin) do not exist in any universal or how shall we say, extra human way. There is no God that will judge us and we do not incur karma based upon any specific action. We can kill or save and the results of those things depend much more upon our intentions that the actual act itself. So we cannot say that either killing or smoking is a sin or wrong in an extra human sense, in the eyes of God or universe or whatever. It all depends upon why someone killed or smoked. Did they kill because they genuinely felt that it would result in less suffering or did they kill because of some self serving interest? Did someone smoke out of compulsion or did they smoke because they felt that it is just life and we need not take it so seriously, or that their particular path called them to ride the ragged edge of life? And while our intentions are important to ourselves and may affect our paths through life, I still don't see a cosmic score keeper that keeps track of such things. You can kill for selfish reasons if you'd like. Acting so selfishly will incur karmic debt by driving a person deeper into perspectives that cause them to be isolated from other parts of life. However even then there is no judgment passed by anything other that fellow human beings. It isn't wrong in the eyes of divinty or anything akin to God to kill for selfish reasons. It is merely born out of a failure to see the interconnectedness of life and therefore it makes it more difficult for a person to reach for less selfish states of mind in the future. Basically I still proport that outside of human perspectives the concepts of right and wrong and therefore of sin does not exist. They aren't used by God or the universe or anything. They are concepts that human beings use to allow them to more easily relate to life. If this then that, do right, don't do wrong. They are a crutch for those that cannot feel for other parts of life and therefore have to interact using rules based morality. Of course these concepts do exist in human intellectual paradigms. Obviously the concepts are used by many if not most people. However just because most people use them, I do not think that they need to be used or that in absence of them a person must become a danger to others. Some people may need the concepts in order to function and may loose a sense of moral guidance without them. However this is not always be the case. There are people who function perfectly well after growing beyond logical morality. For example we can replace the concept of right and wrong entirely with empathy and still interact normally (or even better than normally perhaps). Rather than saying, "It is wrong to kill except in cases where further life is saved," we can say, "I cannot add suffering to life and I strive to lessen it." This still affords moral guidance and even allows someone to kill if necessary. It is just that rather than basing these decisions on human concepts of right and wrong we base them on a sense of how our actions affect other parts of life. I believe that this subtle difference in perspective can be immensely important because the concepts of right and wrong are extremely fallible and prone to being twisted. For example there are people that kill for their religion on the basis of them being right and others being wrong. We also put people in prison for using mostly harmless substances because it is the right thing to do and will make things "better". In their mind politicians and business leaders justify many of their actions by assuring themselves that it is right to do so. They make a logical rationalizations that explain why it is acceptable to lie to the people that they serve or to destroy our environment for profit. In fact you yourself gave a perfect example of a case in which right and wrong can be used to justify armed robbery. Had that person felt the way their actions affected the person the victimized it would have been impossible to do what they did. Right and wrong are arbitrary and either self or socially defined. That guy thought he was right, as do religious warriors. The concepts didn't help them one bit. Yet when we place empathy, or a feeling of connection or concern for the rest of life above the concepts of right and wrong these kind of problems disappear. It makes it impossible to rationalize an increase in suffering when the impact that we have on other parts of life is felt within ourselves. I mean I don't know what the technical definition of empathy is, but to me it means quite literally experiencing the impact that our actions have on other parts of life. If we cause suffering, we ourselves suffer. So maybe empathy isn't the correct term, but that is what I am talking about, a true feeling of connection to the rest of life that cannot be a rationalized away with the human concepts of right and wrong. If we truly feel the impact that our actions have on life we most certainly do not need concepts like right and wrong. To me this sort of shared emotion is a very real thing that arises as a part of spiritual growth. At some point along the way it.seems absurd to navigate life by such crude and arbitrary methods as right and wrong. To me the concepts of right and wrong are just crude tools that are only necessary if we have lose our connection to our inner divinity and through it all of life. Anyway, you seem to know quite a bit about conventional human psychological paradigms. What I wonder is why you hang around a spiritual subforum? No offense meant, but your ideas for far seem better suited for more traditional approaches to self understanding. So why hang around here at all? Surely there must be more to you ideas and your understanding of life than what you have shown here. I feel as if I don't know the real you. I see a lot of other people's ideas that you present, but I would like to understand how you see life. I know that there is more to you than other people's thoughts and things that we can learn from books. Show us yourself, the thoughts that make you unique. Tell us your ideas, what you find interesting about spirituality. Give us some real gifts, ideas that we cannot find anywhere else. Do you think that we are more than just the workings of the human mind? If not then what do you think we really are? If we are more than just our minds, is that something that is unimportant to our daily life, our soul just rides with us until after death? Or is this an important part of the way that we relate to life? Do you believe that we can know ourselves, our soul intimately, or is this stuff all just mostly theory? What of God or the creative source? What do you know or how do you feel about such things? Come on man, enough with the psychology. Let's talk spirituality. -------------------- I only use drugs medicinally. If I don't my knees hurt from kneeling down.
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Humble Student Registered: 11/30/11 Posts: 26,088 Loc: Deep in the syst |
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Quote: Great post AGT. I have felt very deeply what I quoted above for many years. -------------------- Let it be seen that you are nothing. And in knowing that you are nothing... there is nothing to lose, there is nothing to gain. What can happen to you? Something can happen to the body, but it will either heal or it won't. What's the big deal? Let life knock you to bits. Let life take you apart. Let life destroy you. It will only destroy what you are not. --Jac O'keeffe
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Pleiadian Revolutionary Registered: 03/31/09 Posts: 7,038 Loc: Aether Last seen: 6 years, 8 months |
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--------------------
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Elder Registered: 12/09/99 Posts: 14,279 Loc: South Florida Last seen: 3 years, 2 days |
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No apology is necessary since you have not attacked of offended me, but I appreciate your self-reflection and consideration that you might have.
Inasmuch as psychology is the study of the psyche, and psyche is Greek for soul, psychology is no less spiritual than what often passes for spirituality but which is in reality intellectualism. In post-modern times, the word mind has come to the fore, and unfortunately for people like myself who embrace transcendental aspects of mind, the word has been reduced by the majority of psychological practitioners to a mere biological computer process with rudimentary materialistic assumptions. Behaviorism was the philosophical counterpoint to Psychoanalysis in the 1950s, and Behaviorists denied the very existence of mind, while Freudians attempted to reduce the mystery of mind to thermodynamic laws and the materialistic philosophy of science according to Hermann von Helmholtz. My own understanding of human consciousness embraces contradictory models. I am sympathetic to Western Platonism and Neoplatonism, but conversely, I can understand Buddhist Abhidharma philosophy/psychology also. Buddhism doesn't concern itself with cosmology, but I am concerned about cosmology because along with the evolution of physics and corespoding physical laws, I can entertain the possibility that Psyche was also evolved along with Physis (nature), and that we, along with the rest of the fabric of space-time are composed of consciousness as well as matter. Clearly, consciousness exists for all manner of creatures (even insects), but I have considered the consciousness of plants, and even of seemingly inanimate water, which is a basis for life on Earth. So along with such theorists as Masaru Emoto, Rupert Sheldrake, David Bohm, C.G. Jung (along with Neils Bohr), and certain alchemists and Hermetic philosophers, I hold some very non-conventional ideas about the nature of Reality. Empathy derives from the Greek empatheia (from em- ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’). It is a corollary to compassion, but more profoundly feeling-toned than compassion. Compassion is often defined to be synonymous with pity in dictionaries, but pity is more like sympathy, which is yet farther removed from either compassion or empathy. As to ethics, while I am not prepared to discuss the various bases, like Utilitarianism, an ethic based on compassion judges good and evil on the basis of whether suffering is increased or decreased. Not to kill the baby-killer is to kill the innocent baby. Since there is no justification for anyone to murder a baby, the compassionate call would be to kill the killer. Empathy would cause the killer of the baby-killer to experience the pain and anguish of being killed, so empathy alone might prevent one from killing the baby-killer. Compassion is sometimes the sphere that sits between Mercy and Judgement (or Severity) on the Kabbalistic Tree. It is usually called Tiphereth (Harmony), but sometimes it is called Rahamin (Compassion), but it is the point of balance or harmony with Judgement is required for Mercy to triumph. Spiritually, one need aspire to identify with Tiphereth, the Lesser Countenance, The Sun, The Son, in order to live mercifully and judiciously because that is the sphere which draws down transpersonal insight from the Supernal spheres above. This is an idiom clearly, and one that I ascribe to. It provides a common language with which to discuss spiritual matters without creating confusion from people's idiosyncratic ideas. -------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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Storage Container Aficionado Registered: 09/18/12 Posts: 849 Loc: Some savage litt Last seen: 6 years, 1 month |
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I must be honest. I am not familiar with the intricacies of many of those ways of looking at things. Me being me and having to do things my way I never spent much time looking at ideas like that. I just kind of invented my own ways of seeing and doing things. For example I managed to distill my entire spiritual paradigm into a fairly simple and straightforward outlook.
Basically everything that exists is born of a creative source for the purpose providing meaningful experience. The universe and everything in it, including us exists so that it can be experienced. We are the experiencers, others and the universe the experiencees, but all of it existing for the purpose of being witnessed in meaningful ways. So you basically have creative potential and solidified creative potential or "stuff". These two aspects exist in varying degrees throughout everything. Things that are mostly stuff, with little creative potential tend to behave according to their nature by fixed rules and mechanisms. Stuff interacts with other stuff but it doesn't do much creatively. On the other hand things like human beings have at least a little bit of free, or unsolidified creative potential. So human being have two parts. One part is a machine with a very computer like brain at its helm. The computer like mind builds internal models of things and uses them to analyze and predict situations. It also holds a self model, a big long list of what it is and what it wants from life. Everything that is believed and valued, liked and disliked all stored in a big database like self model, or Ego. It uses this self model to make decisions. By it's internal modelling it knows what situation it is an and what kind of things may be possible and likely. It cross references the database of what it wants. It makes descisions that are likely to take it where it thinks it wants to go. This computer mind would be pretty predictable expect for the free creative potential present in a human. This allows us to do things that are beyond what the computer like mind would have done. It basically adds that extra element that makes us more than just machines, unpredictable, creative, innovative. So to me spirituality is about coming to recognize, accept, and nurture this side of ourselves. As we do we some things become apparent. One is that we are all from the same place and part of one large tapestry of life. We only appear to be different because our computer like minds hold different models for ourselves and other parts of life. "I am this, they are that." These models are necessary for predictive calculations, but life is not really divided up in the way that our perspective makes it seem. Another thing that becomes obvious is that experiential value matter more than material. How things affect the experience of life is more important than things that have been declared by humans to be valuable. For example, we could steal from each other, but in most cases small amounts of money will have little impact on our experience of life. It might improve it briefly but not significantly or in any lasting way. On the other hand this would impact the way in which someone else experiences life. It would hurt them. Because of the understanding that we are all connected we would never want to adversely impact someone else, especially if it doesn't add to our life experience in any significant way. "I gain mostly worthless sand dollars. Not inherently valuable. Only valuable at all because they allow us to buy things which change our life experience. But in order to do so I have to interfere with someone else's experience of life. That doesn't make any sense at all." "I could gain more dollars and buy a nicer car to take me all the same places that I go now, so experientially it wouldn't even change my life that much. To do so would require my company to damage the environment that we all must live in. That obviously doesn't make sense." An understanding of the ways in which the creative source gives rise to all existence. A perception of the ways in which all life is interconnected and separated only by human mental structures. A placing of experiential value over material. These are the kinds of things that we gain by the pursuit of spirituality, and this is the way that I see things. Some of these ideas have been arrived at by other people in other places, but I myself have also reached the same conclusions and observations. I had to. I was incapable of believing or putting much stock in the ideas of other. I had to devise my own ways of seeing life, even if it meant rebuilding the wheel at times. But that is me and how I think. I invent my own ways of doing things. In doing so I occasionally actually come up things that are useful. That is my gift to life and the reason that I feel I'm here. To add new ideas and approaches to life that if found useful can be adopted by others in order to improve their experience of life. -------------------- I only use drugs medicinally. If I don't my knees hurt from kneeling down.
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Registered: 07/31/14 Posts: 124 Last seen: 7 years, 4 months |
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Lol no, but not caring for the health of your body or what you put in your body may be...
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Uh-huh. They say anything else?
Deluded or just plain lying, he did 10 years at Rahway. Just one example of an individual with conviction behind the same statement where the conviction got him convicted and made him a convict.
