Christianity

[Alexis Jacobi]

To me, at least, it's common sense. No amount of profundity is required to figure that out. What is pseudo through and through is the dumb mystical claptrap people never cease to believe in giving all the pathetic boobs out there some value added consolation of identifiable intent which all the weak-spirited and weak-minded are so desperate for. There's not enough mental muscle to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as it really exists, so let's create vast regions of absurdity to lessen the impact. Nothing is ever absurd if enough people believe and accept it without any afterthought whether these belief leprechauns possess any validity. If life is a tale told by an idiot it's only because the idiots keep telling it and proving it.

So no toad-poison hallucinogens for you I take it.

[Dubious]

To me, at least, it's common sense. No amount of profundity is required to figure that out. What is pseudo through and through is the dumb mystical claptrap people never cease to believe in giving all the pathetic boobs out there some value added consolation of identifiable intent which all the weak-spirited and weak-minded are so desperate for. There's not enough mental muscle to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as it really exists, so let's create vast regions of absurdity to lessen the impact. Nothing is ever absurd if enough people believe and accept it without any afterthought whether these belief leprechauns possess any validity. If life is a tale told by an idiot it's only because the idiots keep telling it and proving it.

So no toad-poison hallucinogens for you I take it.

...or any other kind!

[Nick_A]

The inner man is what a person is born with.

Then you know what a "self" is. You have a "Nick." He may get older and smarter, and he may not: either way, he's still Nick, not Marcy or Rufus or Mo or Ravinder.

That's a "self."

A person has no inner unity. A person is a plurality composed of many small i's. Man has no I AM. What self do you refer to? Which desires activate which self. For Man as he is, Man's name is legion. I Am is man's potential which the Christ makes possible through the Holy Spirit. All this can be verified through conscious self observation. But who wants to learn that I Am Not? Only those with the need for truth and the experience of meaning

[Nick_A]

The inner man is what a person is born with.

Then you know what a "self" is. You have a "Nick." He may get older and smarter, and he may not: either way, he's still Nick, not Marcy or Rufus or Mo or Ravinder.

That's a "self."

A person has no inner unity. A person is a plurality composed of many small i's. Man has no I AM. What self do you refer to? Which desires activate which self. For Man as he is, Man's name is legion. I Am is man's potential which the Christ makes possible through the Holy Spirit. All this can be verified through conscious self observation. But who wants to learn that I Am Not? Only those with the need for truth and the experience of meaning

[Immanuel Can]

The inner man is what a person is born with.

Then you know what a "self" is. You have a "Nick." He may get older and smarter, and he may not: either way, he's still Nick, not Marcy or Rufus or Mo or Ravinder.

That's a "self."

A person has no inner unity.

I do. I have no idea who you're talking about.

But since there's no "Nick," according to you, then I guess I'm talking to nobody -- and that ain't a sane thing to do, so I should stop.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Hold on. Nick makes sense. It’s just that it’s late and I don’t have energy to explain. The spirit is willing but the flesh must sleep.

[popeye1945]

What passes for self is a history of the experience of the world, it is a highly functional illusion, it is identity, the more well adapted to the world context the more positive the experience of that identity, and for most, it passes for essence.

[Dontaskme]

I'm talking to nobody -- and that ain't a sane thing to do, so I should stop.

'' There is no self-portrait of me. '' Gustav Klimt

Human existence is nothing more than a combination of 5 impermanent components.. sky, air, fire, water and earth are the prime purpose of human existence. Our constitutional and fundamental powers are based on these five basic elements.

Panchamahabhutas
Earth, water, fire, air and vacuum (or ether). Ayurveda calls these elements as 'Pancha Maha Bhuta'. Ayurveda medical science also believes that the whole human body and it's composition are also made up of these 5 basic elements of nature.

The only permanent SELF is imperMANence.

[Dontaskme]

But since there's no "Nick," according to you, then I guess I'm talking to nobody -- and that ain't a sane thing to do, so I should stop.

See how language traps you into the world of belief.

Words are crap...I'm talking to no body...I'm talking to a body....can a body be aware it and other bodies exist? the answer is obviously NO

When you look at your hand, is your hand looking back at you? hmm, see the absurdity of words, that are constructed of pure make-belief with no actual substance being that they are in fact empty to the core.


'' There is no self-portrait of me. '' Gustav Klimt

Seeing can only identify with it's mirror image...aka a mirage.

[Dubious]

The inner man is what a person is born with.

Then you know what a "self" is. You have a "Nick." He may get older and smarter, and he may not: either way, he's still Nick, not Marcy or Rufus or Mo or Ravinder.

That's a "self."

A person has no inner unity. A person is a plurality composed of many small i's. Man has no I AM. What self do you refer to? Which desires activate which self. For Man as he is, Man's name is legion. I Am is man's potential which the Christ makes possible through the Holy Spirit. All this can be verified through conscious self observation. But who wants to learn that I Am Not? Only those with the need for truth and the experience of meaning

So what is your endless repetition of "knowing thyself" all about if one is not? How does that combine? Knowing thyself - as you especially would know - was already affirmed by Socrates, who lived 400 years before Jesus. If the "I Am" is made possible through Christ's holy spirit, where was the possibility of knowing oneself then when that "holy spirit" didn't yet exist?

I expect the best explanation you could give for said discrepancy, is that the holy spirit always existed but became incarnate when Christ was born!

The only unconditional meaning there is, is that there is no meaning which means you're subject to providing your own. Nearly every post you and so many others have written proves precisely that. Where some desired commodity is not available in nature, one is forced to design one's own. The desperation to fill the gap and create values was never so obvious.

[Dontaskme]

In short, you know very well how you know you're a self. Just get in touch with what you already know.

All that is known is the concept of self, which is an illusion...the self is a mentally constructed artificially placed projection onto what is otherwise a blank, void, unknown non-conceptualised reality.

To mistake the conceptually known images on the screen of awareness for actual reality, is in essence a fake, fictional reality, much like the reality that is a Bugs Bunny cartoon character.

There is no thing in touch with itself, as if there is a separation there, there simply is no gap, or middle man called IC...except in this conception...aka the ( Storybook)

To understand the meaning of the word illusory....is to understand that WORDS can only point to the illusory nature of their existence...illusory means non-existence is existence...because how could 'existence' ever not be...it cannot not be and be known to not be except as a concept known NOW, and is why there is no such thing as non-existence...and yet, here's the twist, existence cannot be known without the comparison...and here's the double twist..the comparison is the same one reality appearing as multiplicity.

knowledge can only point to the illusory nature of reality..not that reality does not exist, but that it does not exist as it is conceptually concieved to exist.



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[RCSaunders]

I've read a good deal of Huxley and I have a great appreciation for him.

I don't doubt it.

So I regard his ideas about our solitude and subjectivity as just one element in his ideas that have value.

Valuable for what? You seem to have missed the most important point. Your conscious mind is your own and no one else can do your thinking for you--tell you what to think, believe, choose to do or what the right way to live your life is, and you alone are responsible for that life. You cannot discover how you should live your life by studying what others say and letting other's ideas and thinking determine yours. That's living second hand.

Of course you can learn from others. Most of what any of us know we learned from others, but if all one does is adopt other's ideas, it is not learning, it is credulity. One can only learn from others in the same way they learn anything else, by doing the excruciatingly hard work of thinking and rigorous examination of every idea, never allowing a contradiction and assuring everything one chooses to believe is based on sound evidence and reasoning they understand themselves. It is better to remain ignorant than to fill a gap in one's knowledge with what is not true.

Proper Studies had a certain effect on me. I thought Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited were highly worthy.

I think a, "proper study," would convince anyone both are more sensationalism, like, A Clockwork Orange, or, Lord of the Flies, than the production of a literary mind like, 1984.

How do you know if a psychedelic entheogen is a poison? I am curious on what you base the assertion. Have you ingested any such substance and suffered a consequence? How do you know?

People do this all the time. They ask a question that would require a small treatise to properly answer expecting me to answer in 20 words or less.

Nevertheless, I can say this much. A poison is anything that causes some organ or biological process to function incorrectly. When a substance causes the brain to produce experiences, like hallucinations or illusions, that seem like actual perceptions but are not, like those produced by Lewy bodies in Lewy body dementia, or psycho-active drugs like LSD, the brain is not functioning correctly, because it has been poisoned.

[RCSaunders]

I think it should be mentioned here that *getting outside of oneself* has been, and still is, one of the techniques of spiritual self-investigation. Take for example the type of human potential movement that A. Huxley got involved with or inspired in California. And we all know how he came to his realizations if anyone had read The Doors of Perception.

There is now developing a whole cultural movement where psychedelic drugs like mushrooms (see the 'trendy new hallucinogenic' -- toad venom).

Now, the interesting thing, from my perspective, is to become aware of 'shattering perspectives'. This would be another aspect or episode in the processes in which *the horizon was erased*. The loss of ground under one's feet. The incapacity to know where one is located. To be adrift in a netherworld between a collapsing metaphysic and the uncertain definition of another metaphysics.

I do not think any of this is a small matter.

Just for the heck of it a quote from Doors of Perception:

The observation that every individual consciousness is totally subjective therefore impossible for anyone to know by direct experience what anyone else's conscious experience is seems fundamental to me (though the whole of the psuedo-science of psychology ignores it), and hardly a great insight one is required to poison their brain with chemicals to discover (like Huxley).

The only conscious experience you can know is your own, and no one else can know what your conscious experience is. You can tell each other what you experience, but each will only be able interpret the others' experience in terms of their own. You can tell someone else, "this tastes like cinnamon to me," but he can have no idea what that means unless he has tasted cinnamon and then can only know what it tastes like to him, but never what it tastes like to you.

Does that seem profound to you?

To me, at least, it's common sense. No amount of profundity is required to figure that out. What is pseudo through and through is the dumb mystical claptrap people never cease to believe in giving all the pathetic boobs out there some value added consolation of identifiable intent which all the weak-spirited and weak-minded are so desperate for. There's not enough mental muscle to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as it really exists, so let's create vast regions of absurdity to lessen the impact. Nothing is ever absurd if enough people believe and accept it without any afterthought whether these belief leprechauns possess any validity. If life is a tale told by an idiot it's only because the idiots keep telling it and proving it.

Yes, exactly, and the world is filled with idiots who believe whatever tales they are told by their academic authorities, even when they are speaking from their own drug induced psychoses.

[Nick_A]

Then you know what a "self" is. You have a "Nick." He may get older and smarter, and he may not: either way, he's still Nick, not Marcy or Rufus or Mo or Ravinder.

That's a "self."

A person has no inner unity.

I do. I have no idea who you're talking about.

But since there's no "Nick," according to you, then I guess I'm talking to nobody -- and that ain't a sane thing to do, so I should stop.

Quite true. You do not differentiate between your essence and your self. Christianity refers to your essence while the many paths of Christendom refer to your personality.

Jacob Needleman in his book "Lost Christianity" describes the dangers of our collective lack of understanding in his explanation of Acornology.

Acornology

I began my lecture that morning from just this point. There is an innate element in human nature, I argued that can grow and develop only through impressions of truth received in the organism like a special nourishing energy. To this innate element I gave a name - perhaps not a very good name - the "higher unconscious." My aim was to draw an extremely sharp distinction between the unconscious that Freud had identified and the unconscious referred to (though not by that name) in the Christian tradition.

Imagine, I said, that you are a scientist and you have before you the object known as the acorn. Let us further imagine that you have never before seen such an object and that you certainly do not know that it can grow into an oak. You carefully observe these acorns day after day and soon you notice that after a while they crack open and die. Pity! How to improve the acorn? So that it will live longer. You make careful, exquisitely precise chemical analyses of the material inside the acorn and, after much effort, you succeed in isolating the substance that controls the condition of the shell. Lo and behold, you are now in the position to produce acorns which will last far longer than the others, acorns whose shells will perhaps never crack. Beautiful!

The question before us, therefore, is whether or not modern psychology is only a version of acornology.

You have no idea of the tripartite soul or the essence of Man much less any awareness of how its imbalance creates the corrupt personality and the human condition which tortures the world. Yet you want to speak of Christianity? A complete lack of humility and any awareness of your nothingness.

We have no inner unity. The personality is the sum of all the roles we play in life. We are different at every moment. We are one way with some people and entirely different with others. All these different roles create what we call ourselves and the illusion of inner unity.

Albert Einstein — 'The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.'

Freedom from the self is a conscious action but since we are creatures of reaction we react in roles

[RCSaunders]

The inner man is what a person is born with.

Then you know what a "self" is. You have a "Nick." He may get older and smarter, and he may not: either way, he's still Nick, not Marcy or Rufus or Mo or Ravinder.

That's a "self."

A person has no inner unity. A person is a plurality composed of many small i's. Man has no I AM. What self do you refer to? Which desires activate which self. For Man as he is, Man's name is legion. I Am is man's potential which the Christ makes possible through the Holy Spirit. All this can be verified through conscious self observation. But who wants to learn that I Am Not? Only those with the need for truth and the experience of meaning

It's a mistake to describe others in terms of one's own disintegrated personality. There's a name for what you are describing as your view of consciousness, which one must assume is yours. It's called schizophrenia, and those suffering from it often mistakenly believe everyone suffers from the same problem they do. They don't, but the schizophrenic's destroyed mind makes it impossible for them to understand that.

Your problem cannot be cured, but at least can be managed however.