non existence of self

[ramon]

Just wondering what other people think is a good example to show us that the boundary between self and others is false.

ie.

1. Merely by typing this message I have permanently altered peoples Brain chemistry.

In that reading and thinking about this is sure to alter people's neurochemistry.

So how can I be separate to other if I can so easily alter other.

[ 25. February 2004, 00:21: Message edited by: Ramon ]

[Northern Gnome]

Right now I believe that individual self is an illusion created by seeming barriers from one another which makes the appearance of separation where none really exists. An illusion yes, but a real one! Wait.... can that be?

Perspective, localization, separate mind body and will sure makes it seem real to me. But I still believe that much deeper behind this scene of individuality and separation that we aren't really so separate.

Maybe everything is really nothing anyway, when all of the positive and negatives of time and space are added together it's nothing, so perhaps all of this oneness and separateness all adds up to nothing in the end, if there is an end! Ah, there's the rub.

http://www.ubersite.com/m/16208

[ 25. February 2004, 15:02: Message edited by: Salvinorin ]

[Machine Elf]

I think the most basic example is once you get to the molecular level. Remembering that what we perceive is simply a way of ordering the universe, to try and stop and think of that universe in its most pure form (data?) - it is basically a seething mass of molecules which are grouping, interacting and merging continually.

Then perhaps you could even go beyond the molecular level and go to energy as the 'data' comprising the one.

Actually, all this talk of 'data' - and hinting back at your example Ramon - perhaps the universe is a unity which is constructed and morphing within as a consequence of information flow. Cue Terence McKenna talking about tryptamines.

Although I would hesitate to say the boundary was 'false'. There is the 'one and the many' philosophy, where all is one, but can always be divided into component parts. At this stage I'm not sure what defines the 'parts' of a system - perhaps purpose (conscious or not)?

Whatever the answer, I want some of what you've been having this week Ramon.

Belfy

[mr b.caapi]

life is but a dream....within a dream....

[ramon]

Right now I believe that individual self is an illusion created by seeming barriers from one another which makes the appearance of separation where none really exists. An illusion yes, but a real one! Wait.... can that be?

Perspective, localization, separate mind body and will sure makes it seem real to me. But I still believe that much deeper behind this scene of individuality and separation that we aren't really so separate.

No a real illusions can't be.

As you say it seems real to you, but that doesn't make it real

Maybe everything is really nothing anyway, when all of the positive and negatives of time and space are added together it's nothing, so perhaps all of this oneness and separateness all adds up to nothing in the end, if there is an end! Ah, there's the rub.

 

My personal view is that we exist within the parenthesis of the cosmic equation which eventually works out to nothing.

The fortunate thing is that the intial expansion was faster then speed of light so that the news of the destruction of the universe is never able to catch us

[ramon]

Whatever the answer, I want some of what you've been having this week Ramon.

 

Re united with a old friend Mary Jane. She didn't seem as profound last time I visited her but after not seeing her for 5 months or so I think that she has stuff to teach me

[nabraxas]

"Humans are hardwired to feel others' pain

19:00 19 February 04

NewScientist.com news service

Humans are hardwired to feel empathy, suggests a new imaging study showing that certain pain-processing regions of the brain light up when a loved-one is hurt.

But no one actually "feels" the physical pain of the ones they love. The UK researchers suggest that empathy is the result of our brain running a virtual simulation that represents only part of the other person's experience.

"That' s probably why empathy doesn't feel like pain in your hand," says Tania Singer, a neuroscientist at the University College London, who led the study. "It feels like when you anticipate your own pain. Your heart races, your emotions are engaged. It's like a smaller copy of the overall experience."

Previous imaging studies have measured the effect of viewing movies or still pictures portraying emotional actors. But Singer's team was interested in empathy at its most abstract level.

"It's like when you read a book and you cry about a character without ever seeing them," she told New Scientist. "This is a symbolic empathy that as far as we know only humans are capable of."

Stinging jolt

To hunt for this form of empathy, the researchers recruited 16 heterosexual couples who were romantically involved and assumed to be attuned to each others feelings. Each man and woman had electrodes attached to their right hand capable of delivering a mild, ticklish shock or a stinging, short jolt of pain.

Each woman then had her brain scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging, while being able to view only the right hand of her beau sitting beside her. Unable to see her loved one's face, her only clue to his state was conveyed symbolically by a set of lights indicating whether he was receiving a mild shock or a stinging jolt.

When the women were subjected to a strong shock, a whole series of brain regions lit up including those on the brain's left side that physically mapped the pain to their hand. The regions of the brain - the anterior insula (AI) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) - involved in the emotional response to pain and other situations, also lit up.

But when their partners were zapped, regions physically mapping the pain were quiet while the AI and ACC and a few other regions lit up in the women's brains. And the signals from those two areas were stronger in women who reported a greater degree of empathy, suggesting these regions mediate empathy.

Singer suspects that our brain's ability to intuit the emotional response of others could have been strongly selected during evolution. "If I do something, it tells me will it make you smash me, will you kill me or will you like it? Being able to predict how others feel might have been necessary for human survival," she says.

Journal reference: Science (vol 303, p 1157)

Philip Cohen"

[narayan]

i tend to think of the universe as a seething mass of energy which in some parts namley our cosmos some of the energy has broken down into "mass" and can be un-broken by combining the various particles and anti-particles to which it has broken down to together, ie when matter meets anti matter it creates energy.

That experiment you mentioned nabraxas reminds me of the tests that the nazi doctors did in WW2 on twins to see if they could feel each others pain, I wonder what the results of that experiment where and if they where similiar to the results in that london experiment you mentioned?

[liquid wolf]

The nature of the percieved self is in the mind. The mind creates the world that we find our selves in and also the body. Without the mind we are our true selves. We are not the body, not the mind, not the thoughts, feelings, ideas, desires or memories that the mind uses to give identity to it's self. We are the back drop to all that happens, the silence that is behind the fact "I AM" Not i am this or that, just i am. It is the mind that creates the this or that. All is one and we cannot be seperate from anything as we are everything. All paths lead to this fact wether it be science or religion if you want to know the truth bad enough then you will find it it is inevitable.

[Rune]

I think the boundary between self and others is NOT false, and that is why there is so much 'selfishness' in the world today. The moment it BECOMES false, we will all know each other as brothers and sisters.

[ramon]

I think the boundary between self and others is NOT false, and that is why there is so much 'selfishness' in the world today. The moment it BECOMES false, we will all know each other as brothers and sisters.

That is the tricky thing.

Yes there is alot of selfishness , sometimes to the degree that it is evil

BUT at the same time there is people who live as if everybody is their brothers and sisters almost to the degree of manifesting pure love

[nabraxas]

liquid wolf has said it best.

selfishness is the result ov believing in the perceptions ov the mind.

The moment we recognise falsity, we will know each other as brothers and sisters

[liquid wolf]

I have a little theory on reincarnation, it goes somthing like this:

Time is a creation of the mind that occurs through the use of memories to create a past. In actual fact there is no past there is no future there is only now, there has only ever been now! The experiances of the "past" are like orders at the fish and chip shop skewed onto one of those upright sticks (the stick representing vertical time/the now) we can look at the experiances /happenings with memory, because they are no longer there we tend to place them in the "past" somthing that has gone by. This means that the past is but memory of right now and is there for not only not unreal but irrelevant, the only thing that can be real is right now. (i could give more examples as to how this works but will cut to the chase) Time being false we can observe that there are seemingly seperate beings present around us, these beings are not seperate at all but "ourselves" in another incarnation of counciousness, that is where i 4 an i tooth 4 a tooth comes into it. It's not that if you do somthing to some one - one day it will come back to you, but when you do it you are really doing it to yourself in that other incarnation. So treat others not like a brother or sister but like yourself because they are. It's just the mind that tell's you you are different. The world is our mutual organic body, When you clear the mind what is left is pure being and that is universal.

[nabraxas]

wolfy--interesting concept.

there is only the now.

once heard a rational ov "deja vu" which would fit your idea.

allegedly there can sometimes be a delay in the processing ov images seen by one eye over the other, by less than a second--but allegedly the effect one gets is the "deja vu" feeling.

[Rune]

I really like the 'only now' idea, and past and future being unreal. That's unreal!

 

quote:

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So treat others not like a brother or sister but like yourself because they are

---

This may be the END TRUTH, but it's nice to know that until we REALLY learn this we can offer and receive comfort, for example, in the form of a HUG!

[nabraxas]

BIG HUGS BACK TO YA

RUNE GEEZER

LOVE AND PEACE

[liquid wolf]

A hug makes you feel good cause you temporarly become one. Hugs are nice.

[Thelema]

Conversely, maybe there is no 'now', it only exists as a fiction. Our personality is the bridge between the past and the future.

[Rune]

Personality - that's a good point to bring up at this stage... maybe as an END TRUTH, this will be something that we no longer need, but I know that for now it is something that I really appreciate. And FEEL, too: when somebody you really like crosses into your 'personal space', you really enjoy the buzz of melding with that person's distinct 'aura'. I won't tire of this recognition for a long time. When I talk about no longer needing personality - I like to think that will happen a long, LONG way down the track. (A LONG way). (Long!). (No, I mean really, really long!).

[liquid wolf]

Ok, Firstly Thelma- Where are you while you read this post? Have you ever been any where else? Thinking of the past or future perhaps? You were doing it in the now weren't you? That is why right now has a quality about it that past (memories) and future (desires or fears) do not have, the REAL feel.

Rune - What happens when you go into deep sleep? You cease to be a be a person, you are simply there. With no body and no mind in deep sleep you just are, are you afraid to go to sleep at night because you might lose who you are as a personality? This state of pure being is what the sages and self realised people reside in, that does not mean that life stops happening to you while in your waking state but that YOU are no longer a participant in the "play" that is percieved life YOU just watch the mind working. When you accept that pain and unplesantness are the enevitable out come of pleasure and happiness then you will stop avoiding it and will stop searching for pleasure. When you just take what comes and love it for what it is (life) you are free. That is the ying and yang of existance. The mind that has accumulated memories and ideas that are false because they are not now and therefor not trust-worthy creates personality for you. That is how you view the world, not as it is but as the mind sees it in comparison to past and soon coming future which is never as you envision it. Where as the world simply exists, not as good or bad, as this or that it just is, your mind makes up the rest. Don't use your mind to percieve but instead watch the mind doing it's thing (all the thoughts and ideas telling you what or who you are) and see what happens. You won't be the mind anymore but the viewer of the mind - the watcher, the "thing that is when you are in deep sleep. That is the intensly appealing thing about the substances that people use, they alter the waking state and you are intently watching what is happening- what the new state is. When this happens it is really meditation - watching the mind.

[Rune]

my cat's name is 'mittens' !

[ 07. March 2004, 14:04: Message edited by: Rune ]

[Salviador]

IMHO

With regards to personality and individuality and empathy. Evolutionarily some of the success of mammals can be attributed by their tendency to stick in groups, hence strength in numbers. The pain we feel when we see another of our kind suffering, or when we are lonely are products of natural selection, our ancestors who preferred to be by themselves would be less likely to a) find a mate raise and protect offspring C) defend themselves from predators.

Therefore, it seems that we would all have the same basic needs desires and fears, ie to be loved/needed/respected/helped and not to be ostracized as these are hardwired into us. The only thing that really makes us different are the way we have learnt/been conditioned to express and achieve these needs, for example various pursuits that are rewarded with respect and the such, ie lots of people wants to be famous.

I'd say that we are all individual in the physical sense, but we are all more or less the same products of circumstance.

In this way, imagining how you would react in a certain situation and then changing that with how you might deal with such a reaction if you held the beliefs of another is a powerful way to predict behaviour and reduce the whole individuality/ and inability to relate / loss of connection with others that is all to rampant in our individualistic society.

[Rune]

quote:

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ie lots of people wants to be famous.

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...hence 'reality tv'. this is just another avenue people (who I feel sorry for) are exploring to find happiness. It's a craze (a stupid one), and it will pass - probably only to be replaced by an even more stupid craze. This will keep happening until people get tired of going around in circles, and start looking within for happiness. People (like us) have gotten off this merry-go-round, and more people are getting off all the time. Some need to stay on it longer, until they realise it is only making them sicker... (barf) some people NEED to learn the hard way. I did.

[Rune]

I will reply to your last post liquid wolf - I need some time to take it all in and mull it over...

[nabraxas]

i agree w/what you say wolfie, but i think thelema's aiming at something more metaphysical.

the "now" which you just read is gone so how do we define "now" except by personality/perception,

as you say, certain dissacociative drugs seem to either stretch or shrink the "now", according to perception.