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General Interest > Philosophy, Sociology & Psychology
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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Icelander]
    #6121089 -

Humor often plays tricky games :smile:

The science or spirituality question is not an OR, it can be brought back to an AND.

:heart:


--------------------
Though lovers be lost love shall not  And death shall have no dominion
......................................................
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."Martin Luther King, Jr.
'Acceptance is the absolute key - at that moment you gain freedom and you gain power and you gain courage'

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: BlueCoyote]
    #6121102 -

Each person experiences reality subjectively. That's magical don't you think. We need to acknowledge this and free ourselves to explore, on our own, the nature of our experience. This takes courage and is a rare commodity in our world today. The warriors path is a solitary path. Yet it is a path of heart and filled to the brim. It has room for everything.


--------------------
"Don't believe everything you think". -Anom.

" All that lives was born to die"-Anom.

With much wisdom comes much sorrow,
The more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Icelander]
    #6121118 -

Yes subjectivity is kind of magical and it is hard to look behind the curtain. But that is what can reveal objectivity, what is not to forget there in between. This is that, what makes it true for everyone.
We can explore subjectivity and objectivity which, in an idealistic best case, will give a very good merge.
If not, problems naturally arise...

(I hope this was not too riddled)


--------------------
Though lovers be lost love shall not  And death shall have no dominion
......................................................
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."Martin Luther King, Jr.
'Acceptance is the absolute key - at that moment you gain freedom and you gain power and you gain courage'

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Icelander]
    #6121275 -

Icelander said:
Each person experiences reality subjectively. That's magical don't you think. We need to acknowledge this and free ourselves to explore, on our own, the nature of our experience. This takes courage and is a rare commodity in our world today. The warriors path is a solitary path. Yet it is a path of heart and filled to the brim. It has room for everything.


Thank you don Juan. You are a true man of knowledge.

What have you learned from exploring the nature of your experiences that other people do not learn from simply living them?


--------------------
So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Ravus]
    #6121295 -

If I understand your question I would have to say that there is no way to share that information. One reason being that I don't know what others learn from living. I suspect that has something to do with how much awareness you bring to your experience. Also whatever I say to you means something different to you than what I meant to convey. Maybe it's like dying, you really don't share that experience no matter how many folks are gathered at your bedside.


--------------------
"Don't believe everything you think". -Anom.

" All that lives was born to die"-Anom.

With much wisdom comes much sorrow,
The more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC

Edited by Icelander (10/01/06 01:30 PM)

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Icelander]
    #6121416 -

What I am trying to find out is, what do you try to be aware of in the experience? Surely, awareness is an integral part of consciousness, and like any tool it has many uses to the mind with enough creativity to find them. Consciousness is supposedly awareness of one's awareness, and we can use this to examine our own motives and behavior and, in ideal circumstances, better ourselves. That is my theory as to the reason that consciousness was developed in more complex animals through natural selection.

But as for experience, I take a rather existentialist viewpoint on that that seems to differ from your's. We cannot examine the substance of experience, because substance requires experience. We are thrown into the experience, and whether we just live out our lives or try to become "men of knowledge" and examine the experience, neither path fulfills us through our intentions. It is the consequences from attempted awareness of the experience that creates "men of knowledge"- the energy that allows us to become individuals, the increased perception of our surroundings that allow us to intrepet the world differently from everyone else around us. But experience, acting as the existence of the mind, never changes, and as long as we live, we cannot change it.


--------------------
So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Veritas]
    #6121439 -

Veritas said:
I've played with an idea for translating the scientific method into a method for exploring the existence of a non-physical reality:

Spiritual Method


Hmm.... Have you read anything by Aleister Crowley?

"We place no reliance
On virgin or pigeon;
Our Method is Science,
Our Aim is Religion"

"In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths of Spirits and conjurations of Gods, Spheres, Planes and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophical validity to any of them."

-- Aleister Crowley

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: MushmanTheManic]
    #6121525 -

Yes, I've read several things by Crowley. He seems to have been a very unhappy man, despite having some insight into the value of hedonism and "pushing the envelope" of experiential explorations.

Perhaps he was too concerned with whether his experiences had "objective reality and philosophical validity"? He ended his life broke and drug-addicted, and seems to have struggled much along the way.

I am mainly concerned with my experience of life, with eliminating self-limiting irrationalities, and with developing the ability to maintain my equilibrium under any circumstances. The objective (if humans can experience such a thing) view of reality has little meaning to me, beyond curiosity as to whether human perception is capable of objectivity.

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Huehuecoyotl]
    #6121530 -

Huehuecoyotl said:
Being spiritual does not have anything to do with an afterlife. Being spiritual has nothing to do with accepting primitive mythologies. You seem to think that these low grade ideas are the sum total of being "spiritual". This is why I made the statement. Of course I know many Christian fundamentalists who claim to be open minded...lol. You are just another sort of fundamentalist.


Spiritual, by definition, deals with the nature of the spirit. What is the spirit then?

The vast majority of forms of spirituality are mythology, drug-induced hallucinations, dreams that would change the person- when the dreams come from the person's own mind.

But what do you think spirituality is then? You call me a fundamentalist, but that is only because I stand in opposition to one of humanity's general accepted viewpoints. Humanity has, for millenia, misinterpeted the connection between the mind and the universe, and I think this is one of the greatest tragedies to have befallen us when we have so much potential! If humans think that they will go to Paradise for all eternity, where we are surrounded by beautiful virgins who never age and where we are able to drink wine for nights on end without growing weary or getting alcohol poisoning, then what is to stop us from killing ourselves and each other?

Nietzsche once said that the eruption of madness and nihilism is the greatest threat that faces humanity, but I disagree. I believe that, in humanity's dogmatic interpretations of the nature of their mind, they have already created madness and nihilism all across the planet. When suicide bombers will kill themselves to blow up buildings, when the most powerful man in the world thinks he's on a divine mission from God, when a global institution allows pedophilia and rape of children to occur on a massive scale, when people burn each other alive and bomb their own brothers and sisters over nothing- that is the true madness and true nihilism of the human spirit.

I would say that I am also a Nihilist, but that is only as a transition to escape the notions of the "spirit". The true nihilists in the world are too far gone to even consider their misinterpretions wrong, to realize that they devote all their energy to moving mountains that don't exist, and their desperation is so powerful that it actually converts other people to follow in their war-strewn footsteps. You could say that this is simple religion, but religion is based on spirituality- religion cannot survive if we humans do not accept the lies about the "spirit"! As soon as humanity sees all of our acquired knowledge refutes the spirit, and that there is nothing else coming to help restore it, then we can move on to a new era.

But as for your accusations, I think you decry me as fundamentalist because of our individual subjective understandings of spirituality. Like I said, I think of spirituality as the belief in the spirit, which has caused more damage to our world than any other single belief. All religions who have killed, who kill at this very moment, have killed and continue to kill for precisely this belief and the conclusions following it.

If you actually knew some of my beliefs, I would probably agree with you on some of the concepts you group together with spirituality, such as transcendence, the transcending of our old mindsets to create a new individual, and such as connecting, our connections with the laws that unify what we think as our identity with the rest of the universe. In all truth, I realize that human beings are not separate from anything else- we're not even different. The laws that allow us to be aware, to have consciousness, to take LSD and see the world as a giant rippling, waving, bowing mass where all our senses finally blend in and start to reveal the truth are the same as the laws that sprang all energy from a giant explosion 13 billion years ago, that form galaxies and expand the universe today and will still unify all of existence trillions of years after even our sun has faded into a short memory. If humanity can open its eyes, maybe then we can realize that sort of blooming "spirituality", maybe we can realize that the same energy that vibrates inside us- that is us- this connection of quantum particles and all sorts of flowing atoms, is pure existence, just as all other existence is our existence. But that is not the sort of spirituality I am talking about, and the only issues I am "fundamentalist" on are those that do nothing but waste humanity's potential and, inevitability, assure its fatal destruction.

Sorry for the length Hue, but you brought up a lot of issues in my own mind I wanted to address.


--------------------
So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Veritas]
    #6121550 -

Veritas said:
Yes, I've read several things by Crowley. He seems to have been a very unhappy man, despite having some insight into the value of hedonism and "pushing the envelope" of experiential explorations.

Perhaps he was too concerned with whether his experiences had "objective reality and philosophical validity"? He ended his life broke and drug-addicted, and seems to have struggled much along the way.

I am mainly concerned with my experience of life, with eliminating self-limiting irrationalities, and with developing the ability to maintain my equilibrium under any circumstances. The objective (if humans can experience such a thing) view of reality has little meaning to me, beyond curiosity as to whether human perception is capable of objectivity.


You are already on your way to a greater sense of empowerment. Your last paragraph sounds like the same thoughts I think to myself every day, and if any of us can attain them, perhaps we can truly catch a glimpse of what humans will be like if we can ever grow enough on this planet to start moving to a new stage of growth and escape our old pitfalls that do nothing but ensure stagnation and decay.

As for your comments on Crowley, I agree that he's not for everyone, but I think you put too much emphasis on aspects of Crowley's life that don't matter. Is the point of living and gaining knowledge to be a zombie who knows nothing but happiness? Why does it matter how he died? In all truth, I would not trust a man who is too happy with giving me useful knowledge; otherwise I would never have grown by the suffering given to me by those who have suffered even greater trials themselves. I recommend doing a bit more research on Crowley before you completely blow him off- he might've known more than you think.


--------------------
So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Ravus]
    #6121590 -

Every believe is spiritual.
It is no need to wipe out spirit in general. It may be the need to wipe out the tainted spirits and that is not by wiping out spirits, that is by bettering the conditions of the people.


--------------------
Though lovers be lost love shall not  And death shall have no dominion
......................................................
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."Martin Luther King, Jr.
'Acceptance is the absolute key - at that moment you gain freedom and you gain power and you gain courage'

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Re: Wishful thinking [Re: BlueCoyote]
    #6121634 -

Is my belief that life is meaningless spiritual? How does that concern the human spirit?

And, more importantly to your statement, how has the idea of a spirit helped humanity? You say we do not need to wipe out the old degenerate idea of a spirit, but I ask you:

Why not?


--------------------
So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Veritas]
    #6121669 -

I don't think Aleister Crowley's life, and especially not his amount of happiness, can be a valid basis to criticize his ideas on. Unfortunately, although I plan on it, I have never read any of his books - only books about him. From what I can tell, Aleister Crowley's school of thought can aid a person in developing his/her potential along with heightening their self-awareness. That is why he seems important. Whether or not he was happy, or rich, or drug addicted doesn't concern me.

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Ravus]
    #6121680 -

Ravus said:
Spiritual, by definition, deals with the nature of the spirit. What is the spirit then?


The spirit is experience, state of being, the nature of being conscious.

Quote:
The vast majority of forms of spirituality are mythology, drug-induced hallucinations, dreams that would change the person- when the dreams come from the person's own mind.


It is the state of experiencing reality, and I guess those are aspects of that, but spirituality is not defined by them. True spirituality is directly applicable to the living of one's life, in this moment.

Quote:
You could say that this is simple religion, but religion is based on spirituality


More that it is based upon misconceptions of spirituality. :grin: Spirituality does not require religion, religion is often an ineffective substitute for spirituality.

:earth: :sun: :headbang: :levitate:
Peace. :mushroom2:


--------------------
:redpanda:
If I should die this very moment
I wouldn't fear
For I've never known completeness
Like being here
Wrapped in the warmth of you
Loving every breath of you
:heartpump: :bunnyhug: :yinyang:

:yinyang: :levitate: :earth: :levitate: :yinyang:

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Ravus]
    #6121702 -

that is us- this connection of quantum particles and all sorts of flowing atoms, is pure existence, just as all other existence is our existence.

:thumbup: Spirit.


--------------------
"Don't believe everything you think". -Anom.

" All that lives was born to die"-Anom.

With much wisdom comes much sorrow,
The more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Icelander]
    #6121722 -

I think it's perfectly possible for an agnostic or atheist to be spiritual. Whenever I watch that Carl Sagan series, "Cosmos," I get the feeling that the universe holds a spiritual significance for him, even if he doesn't think there's any higher power behind it.


--------------------

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Silversoul]
    #6121758 -

Precisely. Spirituality could definitely be defined as one's sense of being aware and being alive. It is truly amazing to contemplate what we already know about the universe and reality, and all that they encompass. The trees outside of my window look beautiful, especially with the light the sun is offering us in this moment. I'm looking forward to vacationing in Wisconsin at the end of this week, and no doubt nature will be in full glory there (streams and rivers, huge hills covered in trees with leaves changing colors, my parent's log home...).

Ever take a deep breath? Its wonderful. I truly enjoy the nature of the world we live in, ourselves, our technology, our understanding, and our interaction.... I really don't sense a need to ask "why, or how could this even be?" It cannot be understood, as we are encapsulated within it, as an aspect of it. :smirk:

:earth: :sun: :headbang: :levitate:
Peace. :mushroom2:


--------------------
:redpanda:
If I should die this very moment
I wouldn't fear
For I've never known completeness
Like being here
Wrapped in the warmth of you
Loving every breath of you
:heartpump: :bunnyhug: :yinyang:

:yinyang: :levitate: :earth: :levitate: :yinyang:

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Ravus]
    #6121889 -

Quote:
As for your comments on Crowley, I agree that he's not for everyone, but I think you put too much emphasis on aspects of Crowley's life that don't matter.


If there is nothing beyond this life, this particular experience of being alive, then what else matters beyond the quality of our individual experience?  If Crowley seems to have had a poor-quality experience, this alerts me that the quality of his life-philosophy may not be adequate for me in whole.  I can still take bits and pieces, try them out, and see how they work for me.

Quote:
Is the point of living and gaining knowledge to be a zombie who knows nothing but happiness? Why does it matter how he died? In all truth, I would not trust a man who is too happy with giving me useful knowledge; otherwise I would never have grown by the suffering given to me by those who have suffered even greater trials themselves.


IMO, the sole benefit of suffering is that it may motivate us to move away from/alter that which is causing the suffering, namely our irrational thoughts.  The constant rejection of reality, sometimes seen as full-blown neurosis, sometimes as "automatic pilot" living (aka being a zombie), leads to more suffering.  True, deeply-felt happiness does not look like a pasted-on game show host grin.

Quote:
I recommend doing a bit more research on Crowley before you completely blow him off- he might've known more than you think.


I've read quite a bit of Crowley's work, and many articles about him, and have taken that which seems valuable to me.  I rarely completely blow off ideas--you never know when a diamond might be hidden beneath the steaming pile of shit.  :wink:

Edited by Veritas (10/01/06 05:45 PM)

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: fireworks_god]
    #6121922 -

fireworks_god said:
The spirit is experience, state of being, the nature of being conscious.

More that it is based upon misconceptions of spirituality. :grin: Spirituality does not require religion, religion is often an ineffective substitute for spirituality.



Experience, state of being and the nature of being conscious do not communicate the other commonly implied aspects of a human spirit or soul- an afterlife, a maker, an ethereal substance behind the physical one. You can change the definition of spirit quite easily as it is not traditionally based in anything concrete, but that is not the usage I use to communicate my viewpoint on the definition of "spirit" that is actually harming our world. It's like comparing heroin addiction to an epiphany-producing LSD trip.

Whether you like it or not, and I'm sure you do not, religion has its roots in spirituality, its logic in spirituality and its future is invested in spirituality. The notions of the spirit created not only by religion but by many individuals is what is harming our planet, so it is not only religion- religion is simply the last clear second before the nuclear explosion.

Icelander said:
that is us- this connection of quantum particles and all sorts of flowing atoms, is pure existence, just as all other existence is our existence.

:thumbup: Spirit.


Indeed, spirit can either be a rigid affirmation of dogma for which to die for, as I most commonly see it, or an empty vessel one can fill with any abstract concept. But in my experience, Icelander, the vast majority of the people who favor the latter usage are people like you, who already know and can actually take these quaint misused words and concepts and twist them into something actually logical and relevant to our modern existence.


--------------------
So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.

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Re: Wishful thinking [Re: Veritas]
    #6121956 -

I have the impression that Crowley had a lust for life and experience. He was an accomplished mountain climber, a chess champion, a novelist, a poet, and a master magician. he was very accomplished in many things. He had a wonderful sense of humor...his claims of being the antichrist, to the press, were examples of this. He was a true trickster. He also wrote a book on drug abuse that is hailed as the master work for drug treatment. His later years were marred by addiction, but all in all I think that he lived a long full life and was basically happy.
Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley


--------------------
"A warrior is a hunter. He calculates everything. That's control. Once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets go. That's abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. No one can push him; no one can make him do things against himself or against his better judgment. A warrior is tuned to survive, and he survives in the best of all possible fashions." ― Carlos Castaneda

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