Pagan morality

[Maia]

Moving swiftly on...

Actually, the most amusing attempt to convert me took place while I was out shopping, earlier this year, when I was approached by a man who asked me if I wanted to talk about Islam. They've opened a mosque, or some sort of meeting place, in one of the shops there. The ensuing debate, if that's the right word for it, was the very opposite of boring, and very public, too.

[Iwannaplato]

Moving swiftly on...

Actually, the most amusing attempt to convert me took place while I was out shopping, earlier this year, when I was approached by a man who asked me if I wanted to talk about Islam. They've opened a mosque, or some sort of meeting place, in one of the shops there. The ensuing debate, if that's the right word for it, was the very opposite of boring, and very public, too.

Paganism is shirk and it is the only sin God will not forgive if you die and having given up that set of beliefs. Mainly, this centers on thinking there are deities and thus associating entities with Allah.

It's interesting that Muslims are expect to treat you with patience and compassion - treat a pagan this way - while Allah will put you in the fire. They must be kinder than their deity.

[Maia]

Moving swiftly on...

Actually, the most amusing attempt to convert me took place while I was out shopping, earlier this year, when I was approached by a man who asked me if I wanted to talk about Islam. They've opened a mosque, or some sort of meeting place, in one of the shops there. The ensuing debate, if that's the right word for it, was the very opposite of boring, and very public, too.

Paganism is shirk and it is the only sin God will not forgive if you die and having given up that set of beliefs. Mainly, this centers on thinking there are deities and thus associating entities with Allah.

It's interesting that Muslims are expect to treat you with patience and compassion - treat a pagan this way - while Allah will put you in the fire. They must be kinder than their deity.

Yes, I suppose I've definitely been shirking my duty to Allah.

[iambiguous]

One thing that many do equate with nothing is death. Nothingness some call it. So, one way or another, we all have that to contend with. However, the problem here is that there are many, many, many spiritual paths one can choose from in order to make that part go away. And "here and now" none have actually been demonstrated to my own satisfaction. And of late I've been particular interested in finding one that does.

Perhaps death is indeed nothingness, but at the very least, we know that upon death, we become part of the earth again, and part of the endless cycle of life. Unless you have your ashes blasted into space, or something, which is a very bad idea, in my opinion.

Yes, some are able to think themselves into taking comfort in believing this. Like those who have children thinking they'll live on through them. Or those who become famous enough to live on through their achievements or accomplishments. Here, for example all of the old philosophers going back thousands of years are "still around" to us.

I'd think like that myself if, well, if only I could figure out a way how to.

Well, here, it would seem to come down to dealing with the hand you've been dealt by nature.

As for spooky, the more some of us stick around, the spookier it all begins to appear. Existence itself has often been a surreal experience for me. Then this part: https://medium.com/@startuplab/the-odds ... 096c84ac2a

"I’ll repeat the title because it really is a staggering statistic! The likelihood of you being born is 1 in 400 trillion.

To put this in perspective, the odds of winning the lottery is 1 in 300 million. So just the odds of you being here is equivalent to winning the lottery not once, not ten times, but over a million times! (1.33 million to be exact). If you’re reading this, you’re already very, very, lucky."

Another assessment:

"To be born, every single person in your ancestral line, from your parents all the way back to the very first humans, would have needed to meet and procreate with each other, meaning every single one of your ancestors, from both your mother's and father's side, would have had to have met and reproduced for you to exist; this includes all the individuals involved in their respective family lines as well."

So, fit being blind or being sighted into that somewhere.

Yes, we are all extremely lucky to be alive. So let's make the most of it, here and now, while we can.

That's one way to think about it. But being lucky to be alive seems always to be intertwined in the part where in regard to circumstances things are going really, really well for you. But if those circumstances start to crumble and your day-to-day life becomes really, really miserable instead...?

For me, I certainly do not want to die "here and now", but I am always grateful that suicide is an option. Imagine being in unbearable agony day after day after day after day and all you can do is endure it? What if we weren't able to end it all? That's why I've always believed the existence of Hell is such a potent incentive.

This just popped into my head: "What about songs that revolve around or include blindness in the lyrics?": https://www.ranker.com/list/best-songs- ... /reference

It's called "90+ Songs About Being Blind, Ranked" but actually sometimes that's the case and sometimes it's not. Or so it seemed to me. Sometimes "being blind" is a metaphor for any number of things.

As you say, most songs that mention blindness are using it as a metaphor. That list you posted mentions Pinball Wizard, which is indeed about a "deaf, dumb and blind kid" though I'm not sure how accurate a representation it is of actual deafblind pinball players. And then there's that Lionel Ritchie song, Hello, which is widely mocked and derided in the blind community.

The lyrics seem innocuous enough, so it must be the video. Which I had never seen. I watched the video. Have you ever played the video with sighted friends?

Or does the blind community's reaction revolve mainly around the ending, where Laura has sculpted a bust of the singer...apparently by touching his face, indicating, what, that they might have already been intimate? How would someone blind from birth paint/sculpt/draw someone other than through touch?

don't think it's too bad though, to be honest, though as far as I can tell, it's not even about blindness at all.

It's about an acting instructor who becomes infatuated with a student who is blind. The student, however, is clearly accomplished and independent.

And of course, very beautiful.

I'm just attempting to wrap my head around something a part of me will almost certainly never actually be able to. I grasp that you are comfortable -- really comfortable -- in your own skin and that you live life largely on your own terms. A fulfilling and satisfying life. An independent life. But there it is: how scary being blind still seems to me. It's just hard for some sighted people to go beyond that. Maybe they pray for you and figure once they get you on the right One True Path -- their own -- not only will you be saved but surely your soul in Heaven will see God in all His glory. Plus, some might suggest, He's there to explain to you why He choose you to be born blind in the first place.

It's not scary to me because I'm used to it. It's just normal. I can certainly understand why people are scared of the idea of losing their sight, though. It must be a very traumatic experience, and one, thankfully, that I'll never have to go through.

I suppose it'll always be hard for some sighted people not to think of all the things that would disturb them in being blind.

Okay, back to "spooky" it is then. Me trying to imagine your world, you trying to imagine mine. And then [of course] the part where people try to pin down how the blind and the sighted ought to think about each other.

I'm not sure saying that people "ought" to think one way or the other is the best way of putting it.

Yes, that's what I think too. Though considerably more ambiguously.

Yes, as I recall, he mentioned entering a room that had become awash in sunlight. This he can, what, sense? But you...nothing?

Yes, that's right. I don't have any light perception.

As I recall, he was born blind as well. Though there may be different medical reasons for that.

Here's the dream video: https://youtu.be/XpUW9pm9wxs?si=I9XxZPcnrAu7TiYB

He tried to sum up his own experiences with dreams this way, "...just like you guys, weird things happen my dreams...;'so, here I am, it's the bottom of the ninth, runners on second and third, two men away...and all of a sudden, it's my seventh birthday party'".

In the video we have sound effects...the sounds of a baseball game and the sounds of a child's birthday party. And, sure, in both cases I can imagine all sorts of cues enabling one who is blind to enjoy baseball or a birthday party. But, again, by far, in my own dreams, it's what I see that allows me to more clearly grasp what is going on. My dreams are something I really look forward to because, well, they are often amazing. The relationships -- intellectual, emotional, social, sexual -- I have in my dreams [often recurring] bring me back to "experiences" that are largely beyond my reach now "in reality".

I think the post important things about dreams are there emotional content, or emotional signature, even. That's why whenever we try and describe them in words, they almost always sound trivial, because we are not describing the most important part about them.

Not really sure what you mean here. I can describe my own dreams in considerable detail. And what's important to me are dreams themselves. Every night I find myself able to do things again "in the dream" that are gone forever in the waking world. And for hours sometimes.

I don't remember, for example, ever having a recurring dream, by which I mean a repeating sequence of specific events, but I've definitely had dreams that have the same emotional signature, as it were, to other dreams, and seem to follow on from them, in some way, with similar settings.

Emotional signature in what sense? The dream "overall" makes you feel one way or another.? And by recurring dreams I mean dreams that are actually different but revolve around specific "themes" -- childhood, work, relationships, sexuality, college, the Army, political activism etc.

I've started to have occasional dreams in which I am interacting with someone who is blind. Sometimes a he, sometimes a she. A couple of night ago a blind man was teaching me braille in a dream. His daughter was blind. And then it's all fuzzy. Though I suspect that this exchange triggered that. Will it become part of another recurring dream sequence?

What I find most peculiar about my own dreams are not the ones I have but the ones I don't have. There are chunks of my life -- important chunks -- that never make it into my dreams. It boggles my mind.

Also, on more than one occasion an event would recur in a dream over and over again. Only later I'd find out what I always thought happened [because of all the dreams] never really happened at all. And that's particularly perturbing because you begin to wonder what else you have dreamed over and again, thought was true, but it wasn't. The human brain!!!

Also, the settings themselves are usually real places, though in the dreams they might be nothing much like the actual real places, but somehow you just know that that's where they're meant to be.

I wonder how much of that might be related to being born blind. And the places in my dreams are almost always real. And i wouldn't have it any other way.

Another take: https://youtu.be/M0CrNZGJqAg?si=Cx3JJI_MOG9bl_rC

This from west Texas A&M:

"While people who have been blind since birth do indeed dream in visual images, they do it less often and less intensely than sighted people. Instead, they dream more often and more intensely in sounds, smells, and touch sensations."

And being slightly claustrophobic, some of my dreams involve odd spaces, enclosed tunnels for example, with steps leading down then suddenly ending in a void. That's one set, anyway, but another set is completely different, involving me travelling a long distance, often, though not always, by walking, searching for something and/or someone. These usually take place in real locations, though in the dreams they are often quite different to real life. I usually wake up before finding whatever it is, though not always. Another set involves school, but I suppose that's pretty standard.

The more I think about dreams the more surreal they come to be. Then the part [for me] that revolves around determinism. If the brain itself can create all of these extraordinary sensual sequences while I'm asleep, maybe the waking brain does too.

Here it probably comes down to what it is that children actually tell their parents...

"Mom and Dad, I'm a Communist."
"Mom and Dad, I'm a Nazi."
"Mom and Dad, I'm a heroin addict."
"Mom and Dad, I'm a serial killer."
"Mom and Dad, I'm a moral nihilist"

Or how about the worst social crime that anyone can commit, Mom and Dad, I'm a normal person.

Of course, by now there must be hundreds and hundreds of conflicting assessments of what that means. A normal Christian? a normal atheist? a normal child? a normal parent? a normal conservative? a normal liberal? a normal blind person? a normal Pagan?

That's the part that will sometimes fascinate me and sometimes exasperate me. On the one hand, it's not like religious/spiritual denominations that demand total obedience in regard to, well, practically every thing they pass judgment on...what you wear, what you drink, what you think and feel, who you sleep with, how you raise your children, etc.

On the other hand, some will note, how seriously can you take a spiritual path that basically leaves these things entirely up to the individual? Here, though, what becomes crucial for me is the part regarding immortality and salvation. Once they become a part of the narrative, there's a tendency to be more exacting in regard to what is permissible and what is not.

That's why I'm always reluctant to describe Paganism as a religion. There are religions within it, but also things that don't really fit that definition very well.

Of course, there's not much that some people do that others don't call a religion. Maybe it's politics, maybe it's music and art, maybe it's atheism, maybe it's a career, maybe it's shopping, maybe it's sports and entertainment.

What's always most important to me here is not what others find fascinating or what they truly do believe in passionately, but the extent to which they can't keep this to themselves. They feel this need to bring others into the flock with them. To, say, save them, or to enlighten them.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever been rejected or shunned or punished within any of these communities because you didn't toe the "party line"?

No, never. I'm still very good friends with the coven members, for example, even though I chose to leave it.

That's good to know. After all, there are other groups out there who don't hesitate to shun and punish and reject those who do refuse to toe the line. Think of the blood in/blood out gangs or those religious fanatics who insist those who are not "one of us" are infidels, or those who will even take their own rabid dogmas all the way to the gas chambers.

"Divination (from Latin divinare 'to foresee, foretell, predict, prophesy, etc.') is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic ritual or practice. Using various methods throughout history, diviners ascertain their interpretations of how a querent should proceed by reading signs, events, or omens, or through alleged contact or interaction with supernatural agencies such as spirits, gods, god-like-beings or the "will of the universe".

Here, again, for those who believe this all I can do is to note the distinction I make between 1] what is mainly believed in the collective minds of the community and 2] what is actually able to be demonstrated as in fact true. Nothing else makes sense to me. And to the extent some reject the part about evidence is the extent to which, in my opinion, they are embracing these Divine rituals and ceremonies because it comforts them and consoles them. After all, the whole point of rituals and ceremonies is to make certain behaviors...sacred? necessary? You wouldn't do the same things over and over and over and over and over and over again if you didn't believe it was required of you. But to the extent particular Pagans embody a kind of "cafeteria faith", sure, I can understand that. I'd do it myself if I was able to.

Human psychology, bursting at the seams with defense mechanisms, can often come up with ways to rationalize -- that's one right there -- almost any behavior.

Pagans do, indeed, seem to love their divination, especially tarot and runes. I never found them either useful or interesting. You can even get Braille tarot, but I was never interested enough to bother.

https://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/braille-spanish/

I did try runes a few times, since they're usually inscribed on pieces of wood or clay, but again, they didn't do anything for me.

Me, I am more than willing to respect those who embrace beliefs and choose behaviors that I either do not understand or believe in myself. All I ask is that they make an attempt to demonstrate to me why what they believe about something "in their head" is reasonable to them. How do they demonstrate it even to themselves.

Ice cream is one thing, some will point out, and blindness another thing altogether. I was discussing this with Rebecca, a virtual friend of mind from way, way back, at another forum. She said what would probably frighten her the most about being blind is that, in the end, as independent as she might make her own life, there's always the part where one way or another her life changes dramatically and things get "beyond her control". That can be hard enough even with all five senses. Then the part where, without vision, in particular contexts, you can never really be sure of how people are reacting to you. On the other hand, out of sight, out of mind?

Can sighted people ever really be sure about how people are reacting to them?

That's true, but I can imagine many sighted people who might find that particularly hard to grasp. Again, especially if, for whatever reason, they did find themselves in an entirely different set of circumstances.

But if that is not something that concerns you given the life you live now, that's still the bottom line, of course. It's basically what you think and feel about the world around you "here and now" that counts.

Thus...

Well, as long as you are comfortable and content with the way things are now in your life -- and your posts pretty much confirm this -- that's pretty much as far as it need go. On the other hand, there's nothing quite like falling in love, being in love, holding the one you love in your arms, falling asleep in their arms and waking up beside them in the morning.

I agree.

Again, however, as I noted before, you are out in the world interacting with different people given different sets of circumstances. And as a result of this, you will either encounter a new experience, a new relationship or access to new information and knowledge that dramatically shifts how you think about yourself out in the world, or you won't. If you do, please keep me posted.

Oh, yeah. But the human condition has always been bursting at the seams with opportunities to be pathetic, right? Or right up there next to it. It's just that we tend to view others as being pathetic for doing things that they might not deem to be pathetic at all. Instead, they are likely see others as the truly pathetic ones.

I suppose I sometimes have a low tolerance for things like that.

Yes, that part too. The part where we come into world hard-wired by nature to embody a "character" that can be more or less introverted, more or less aggressive, more or less temperamental.

Personality traits, in other words, we can only more or less control. And then the subconscious and unconscious "contributions" our brain/mind pitch in with.

Reminds me of a scene from Against All Odds

"Terry: Hey, Jesus, I love you! You've become everything I'm about. Don't you understand that?
Jessie [overwhelmed]: Can't anyone love me without it being life or death to them?
Terry: You know most people are afraid they're never going to be loved like that."

It's one thing to be loved, and another thing altogether to be loved passionately.

I've only been in love passionately once myself. So, I should know, right?

0f course, what heterosexual man isn't going to fall in love with Rachel Ward? I've fallen in love with her myself many, many times. But then what to make of "looks" in romantic relationships.

For example, that scene from Mask where Diana [who is blind] comes to meet [and really like] Rocky. What she can't see, however, is how "deformed" his face is. But her sighted parents see that immediately and suddenly [as I recall] that's the end of that.

And though you can't see how you look yourself, all the sighted men can. And in the sighted world being attractive can sometimes be a blessing and sometimes a curse.

Mostly a blessing though, I suspect.

This reminds me somewhat of something that Julian [who died a few years ago] and Rebecca and I used to do. We would interact in various philosophy and political forums playing what we called "The Magus Game". We'd become different characters and attempt to spin folks around and around in order to make a point that we wanted to make about, well, it could be anything.

One "script" we talked about but never did pursue revolved around "looks" and how sighted men and women are often very much at odds over it. As I recall, the forum was called either ephilosopher or ephilosophy. A tread on gender roles pertaining to love and lust.

We were going to create two different characters...one, a woman who many would deem to be attractive and thin, another, a woman many would deem to be unattractive and obese. We were curious to see how the male philosophers [and back then almost all of them were men] would react to two different women, both philosophically sophisticated, but one pretty and the other not, one thin and the other not.

Since then, I've always been intrigued with how this all plays out among those in philosophy forums. It's what Julian used to call the "Philosophy Chick Syndrome". And, of course, PN is no exception.

[promethean75]

The Magus Game sounds neat if you spend enough time on a computer anyway, and there's some real assholes at the forum you're running it at. But what if there are decent (cool) drama free good-natured philosophy guys at the forum who are being led to believe the person they are talking to in the threads that they've grown attracted to and befriended is a female?

Would the game be considered tasteless and cruel in that case?

I, personally, am a romantic and I get excited at the thought of super smart males and females hooking up through a philosophy board. There's a lot of decent guys and gals around these boards, and they need to holla at each other and stay off the streets where all the dumb people roam. They don't belong there. They'll only be disappointed and isolated. Intellectuals need to stick together, Biggs.

You have to think of a forum as a dating app for intellectuals, man. I mean, didn't you think Harbal and Fairy were a decent item?

[Maia]

+++Yes, some are able to think themselves into taking comfort in believing this. Like those who have children thinking they'll live on through them. Or those who become famous enough to live on through their achievements or accomplishments. Here, for example all of the old philosophers going back thousands of years are "still around" to us.

I'd think like that myself if, well, if only I could figure out a way how to.+++

At the very least, though, it's surely more comforting than not, even if only slightly.

+++That's one way to think about it. But being lucky to be alive seems always to be intertwined in the part where in regard to circumstances things are going really, really well for you. But if those circumstances start to crumble and your day-to-day life becomes really, really miserable instead...?

For me, I certainly do not want to die "here and now", but I am always grateful that suicide is an option. Imagine being in unbearable agony day after day after day after day and all you can do is endure it? What if we weren't able to end it all? That's why I've always believed the existence of Hell is such a potent incentive.+++

Suicide is such a terrible idea. I suppose, on an intellectual level, I can understand why some people might contemplate it, given their circumstances, but even so, I can't actually imagine wanting to end it all.

+++The lyrics seem innocuous enough, so it must be the video. Which I had never seen. I watched the video. Have you ever played the video with sighted friends?

Or does the blind community's reaction revolve mainly around the ending, where Laura has sculpted a bust of the singer...apparently by touching his face, indicating, what, that they might have already been intimate? How would someone blind from birth paint/sculpt/draw someone other than through touch?+++

I've never had it specifically described to me before, but I suspect that last bit is the reason why it's so derided.

+++It's about an acting instructor who becomes infatuated with a student who is blind. The student, however, is clearly accomplished and independent.

And of course, very beautiful.+++

As you'd expect, I suppose.

+++I suppose it'll always be hard for some sighted people not to think of all the things that would disturb them in being blind.+++

Which is very understandable.

+++As I recall, he was born blind as well. Though there may be different medical reasons for that.+++

There are all sorts of medical reasons why someone could be born blind.

+++Not really sure what you mean here. I can describe my own dreams in considerable detail. And what's important to me are dreams themselves. Every night I find myself able to do things again "in the dream" that are gone forever in the waking world. And for hours sometimes.+++

I can describe the events of a dream easily enough, but when it comes to describing the emotional content of a dream, words don't do it justice. Here's an example from August 2021, which had a particularly strong emotional signature. I posted it at ILP, so I'll simply quote that, as it was fresh in my mind then.

I was staying with a friend and unexpectedly received a delivery of a cheque for $100,000 (dollars rather than pounds), supposedly from a long lost relative I’d never heard of. My friend advised me to take it to a bank straight away in case there was some sort of mistake. I took a bus to the city centre and booked into a cheap hotel, for reasons that were not adequately explained, but seemed to make perfect sense in the dream. The place was crowded with people so I went out the back and walked along a path until pretty soon three guys came up to me, laughing, telling me that there was a restaurant up ahead but the spoons in it were dirty. I’m paraphrasing here because the actual conversation was very disjointed. I returned to the hotel and went up to my room, where someone had laid out a dress on the bed for me to change into. At this point I decided to leave, so went back down and asked for my bill, which was extortionately high. I asked them to itemise it for me, only to discover that a large portion had gone on something listed as “mingarians” which turned out to be the three guys I’d met outside, whose job it was to welcome all new guests with a laugh and a joke.

+++Emotional signature in what sense? The dream "overall" makes you feel one way or another.? And by recurring dreams I mean dreams that are actually different but revolve around specific "themes" -- childhood, work, relationships, sexuality, college, the Army, political activism etc.+++

The emotional signature, as I call it, is the underlying feeling of a dream, that imbues it with meaning. Some dreams have a stronger signature than others, and those that do seem more meaningful.

I've also often wondered if some dreams can be genuinely prophetic. The one I mentioned above about the "mingarians" seemed very significant at the time, but needless to say, I never did receive any cheque for $100,000, and who uses cheques any more, anyway? I also looked up "mingarians" and although the word does indeed crop up on Google, I think that's basically just a coincidence. In other words, my subconscious just invented it.

The only dream I've had that I still can't really explain is the one I've mentioned quite a few times before, about coming home from school for the summer holidays when I was 14 and crawling through the rubble of ruined buildings on my hands and knees, cutting my skin open. Shortly after this, after I'd actually come home, a tornado hit my home city, which, as you can imagine, is virtually unheard of in the UK. The damage it did was nothing like the utter devastation in my dream, though, and didn't affect my part of the city, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Birmingham_tornado

+++I've started to have occasional dreams in which I am interacting with someone who is blind. Sometimes a he, sometimes a she. A couple of night ago a blind man was teaching me braille in a dream. His daughter was blind. And then it's all fuzzy. Though I suspect that this exchange triggered that. Will it become part of another recurring dream sequence?+++

When someone starts dreaming about me, that's when I should be worried...

Just kidding.

+++What I find most peculiar about my own dreams are not the ones I have but the ones I don't have. There are chunks of my life -- important chunks -- that never make it into my dreams. It boggles my mind.+++

Your subconscious clearly knows better about what's important, and what isn't.

+++Also, on more than one occasion an event would recur in a dream over and over again. Only later I'd find out what I always thought happened [because of all the dreams] never really happened at all. And that's particularly perturbing because you begin to wonder what else you have dreamed over and again, thought was true, but it wasn't. The human brain!!!+++

I have some memories from when I was little that I'm not sure whether they were dreams or not. Also sometimes, when I'm in the process of waking up, I'm not certain if something I've just been dreaming about is real or not, but that soon passes.

+++I wonder how much of that might be related to being born blind. And the places in my dreams are almost always real. And i wouldn't have it any other way.

Another take: https://youtu.be/M0CrNZGJqAg?si=Cx3JJI_MOG9bl_rC

This from west Texas A&M:

"While people who have been blind since birth do indeed dream in visual images, they do it less often and less intensely than sighted people. Instead, they dream more often and more intensely in sounds, smells, and touch sensations.
Maia wrote: ↑Mon Oct 28, 2024 11:19 am
And being slightly claustrophobic, some of my dreams involve odd spaces, enclosed tunnels for example, with steps leading down then suddenly ending in a void. That's one set, anyway, but another set is completely different, involving me travelling a long distance, often, though not always, by walking, searching for something and/or someone. These usually take place in real locations, though in the dreams they are often quite different to real life. I usually wake up before finding whatever it is, though not always. Another set involves school, but I suppose that's pretty standard.


The more I think about dreams the more surreal they come to be. Then the part [for me] that revolves around determinism. If the brain itself can create all of these extraordinary sensual sequences while I'm asleep, maybe the waking brain does too.+++

That's interesting because the man in that video describes himself as legally blind, a term that often means that a person has a certain, very limited, amount of sight, and he later goes on to say that he has very blurry vision. So this, then, manifests in his dreams, too.

And on the subject of erotic dreams, which he then goes on to talk about, the answer is yes, of course I've had them, and they manifest to me just like all my dreams do, touch and smell usually being the main components in these instances.

+++Of course, by now there must be hundreds and hundreds of conflicting assessments of what that means. A normal Christian? a normal atheist? a normal child? a normal parent? a normal conservative? a normal liberal? a normal blind person? a normal Pagan?+++

Perhaps normal is overrated.

+++Of course, there's not much that some people do that others don't call a religion. Maybe it's politics, maybe it's music and art, maybe it's atheism, maybe it's a career, maybe it's shopping, maybe it's sports and entertainment.

What's always most important to me here is not what others find fascinating or what they truly do believe in passionately, but the extent to which they can't keep this to themselves. They feel this need to bring others into the flock with them. To, say, save them, or to enlighten them.+++

I've always felt that those who seek to convert others must be a little insecure in their beliefs.

+++That's good to know. After all, there are other groups out there who don't hesitate to shun and punish and reject those who do refuse to toe the line. Think of the blood in/blood out gangs or those religious fanatics who insist those who are not "one of us" are infidels, or those who will even take their own rabid dogmas all the way to the gas chambers.+++

Those sort of religions do nothing for me.

+++Me, I am more than willing to respect those who embrace beliefs and choose behaviors that I either do not understand or believe in myself. All I ask is that they make an attempt to demonstrate to me why what they believe about something "in their head" is reasonable to them. How do they demonstrate it even to themselves.+++

We all have our own path, and I think that it's always important to respect this.

+++That's true, but I can imagine many sighted people who might find that particularly hard to grasp. Again, especially if, for whatever reason, they did find themselves in an entirely different set of circumstances.

But if that is not something that concerns you given the life you live now, that's still the bottom line, of course. It's basically what you think and feel about the world around you "here and now" that counts.+++

Yes, I agree.

+++Again, however, as I noted before, you are out in the world interacting with different people given different sets of circumstances. And as a result of this, you will either encounter a new experience, a new relationship or access to new information and knowledge that dramatically shifts how you think about yourself out in the world, or you won't. If you do, please keep me posted.+++

I will do.

+++Yes, that part too. The part where we come into world hard-wired by nature to embody a "character" that can be more or less introverted, more or less aggressive, more or less temperamental.

Personality traits, in other words, we can only more or less control. And then the subconscious and unconscious "contributions" our brain/mind pitch in with.+++

How boring it would be if everyone had the same personality.

+++This reminds me somewhat of something that Julian [who died a few years ago] and Rebecca and I used to do. We would interact in various philosophy and political forums playing what we called "The Magus Game". We'd become different characters and attempt to spin folks around and around in order to make a point that we wanted to make about, well, it could be anything.

One "script" we talked about but never did pursue revolved around "looks" and how sighted men and women are often very much at odds over it. As I recall, the forum was called either ephilosopher or ephilosophy. A tread on gender roles pertaining to love and lust.

We were going to create two different characters...one, a woman who many would deem to be attractive and thin, another, a woman many would deem to be unattractive and obese. We were curious to see how the male philosophers [and back then almost all of them were men] would react to two different women, both philosophically sophisticated, but one pretty and the other not, one thin and the other not.

Since then, I've always been intrigued with how this all plays out among those in philosophy forums. It's what Julian used to call the "Philosophy Chick Syndrome". And, of course, PN is no exception.+++

I think it's always best to be open and honest about things.

[iambiguous]

The Magus Game sounds neat if you spend enough time on a computer anyway, and there's some real assholes at the forum you're running it at. But what if there are decent (cool) drama free good-natured philosophy guys at the forum who are being led to believe the person they are talking to in the threads that they've grown attracted to and befriended is a female?

It's always going to be a judgment call. And it is often embedded in a frame of mind that can only be explained as a manifestation of dasein. Or as Conchis intimated, of "hazard". The part where over the years we become the person that we think we are without giving much thought at all to how existentially we became that way. And then all of the variables in our life that we neither fully understood or controlled.

Would the game be considered tasteless and cruel in that case?

More to point, tasteless and cruel says who? Given what set of assumptions about a civilized society. Our aim [as with Conchis and the twins in the novel] was to spin the objectivists around and around in order to expose them to entirely different sets of assumptions.

I, personally, am a romantic and I get excited at the thought of super smart males and females hooking up through a philosophy board. There's a lot of decent guys and gals around these boards, and they need to holla at each other and stay off the streets where all the dumb people roam. They don't belong there. They'll only be disappointed and isolated. Intellectuals need to stick together, Biggs.

I hear that. But the trajectories of some I have encountered over the years were little more than flagrant plots aimed at things, uh, other than philosophy?

I have no problem with folks here hooking up with those they have made a connection with "outside" the forum. But, again, some of these exchanges over the years were nothing short of...embarrassing?

The things that philosopher kings will say in order to, well, woo her?

[promethean75]

Well, i could just quote you to yourself to defend people using philosophy forums for the flagrant philosophy-free wooing of forum maidens...

"More to point, flagrant, philosophy-free, and embarrassing says who? Given what set of assumptions about a civilized philosophy forum."

But I won't quote you because frankly, I'm so shocked and impressed by you voicing a strong opinion about what constitutes proper forum use and behavior in a meaningless nonteleological no-god universe that i want to support and praise you for accomplishing such an impossible philosophical feat and taking a stand on some issue, Biggs.

Feels good to not be fractured and fragmented, don't it?

Anyway so what we have is you and a small team of sock-puppeteers pretending to be females on forums to fuck with other members who think they are real because these other people "have flagrant plots aimed at other things" and deserve to be toyed with in such a way.

That's harsh, man. Really harsh.

[iambiguous]

Well, i could just quote you to yourself to defend people using philosophy forums for the flagrant philosophy-free wooing of forum maidens...

"More to point, flagrant, philosophy-free, and embarrassing says who? Given what set of assumptions about a civilized philosophy forum."

But I won't quote you because frankly, I'm so shocked and impressed by you voicing a strong opinion about what constitutes proper forum use and behavior in a meaningless nonteleological no-god universe that i want to support and praise you for accomplishing such an impossible philosophical feat and taking a stand on some issue, Biggs.

Feels good to not be fractured and fragmented, don't it?

Anyway so what we have is you and a small team of sock-puppeteers pretending to be females on forums to fuck with other members who think they are real because these other people "have flagrant plots aimed at other things" and deserve to be toyed with in such a way.

That's harsh, man. Really harsh.

Unless, of course, we're both wrong.

On the other hand, what does it really mean to be right or wrong about something like this?

In other words, given the fact that I have had hundreds and hundreds of personal experiences that neither you nor others here are likely to have had. Pertaining to relationships and most everything else that isn't nailed down by Mother Nature in the either/or world. And, of course, the other way around. In fact, it's probably a fucking miracle that we don't have even more "failures to communicate" at the existential intersection of identity, value judgments, conflicting goods and political economy.

And someone at another forum suggested to me that we can [perhaps] thank the historical advent of capitalism itself for bringing into existence democracy and the rule of law. The objectivists, of course, want absolutely nothing to do with "moderation negotiation and compromise". Including both the God and the No God dogmatists.

I'm really beginning to think more and more that the Benjamin Button Syndrome may well be the "best of all possible" descriptions of the human condition. And how disturbing that can be for the objectivists among us.

And I don't have strong opinions anymore. Well, not counting the times when they just burst up out of me anyway. I only have so much control over that these days.

As for spinning others around in a philosophy forum, sure, we rationalized that. From our frame of mind, however, we were no more doing this for entertainment than Conchis, the twins and their mother were spinning Nicholas around for kicks.

[iambiguous]

Yes, some are able to think themselves into taking comfort in believing this. Like those who have children thinking they'll live on through them. Or those who become famous enough to live on through their achievements or accomplishments. Here, for example all of the old philosophers going back thousands of years are "still around" to us.

I'd think like that myself if, well, if only I could figure out a way how to.

At the very least, though, it's surely more comforting than not, even if only slightly.

If it is something that someone is truly able to believe, and it does make them feel better than if, instead, they believed the opposite, well, more power to them, right? As long as they are not insisting that everyone else should think [and behave] like they do...or else. And I never rule out the possibility I might myself encounter new experiences with new people providing me with new information and knowledge and become more hopeful myself.

That's one way to think about it. But being lucky to be alive seems always to be intertwined in the part where in regard to circumstances things are going really, really well for you. But if those circumstances start to crumble and your day-to-day life becomes really, really miserable instead...?

For me, I certainly do not want to die "here and now", but I am always grateful that suicide is an option. Imagine being in unbearable agony day after day after day after day and all you can do is endure it? What if we weren't able to end it all? That's why I've always believed the existence of Hell is such a potent incentive.

Suicide is such a terrible idea. I suppose, on an intellectual level, I can understand why some people might contemplate it, given their circumstances, but even so, I can't actually imagine wanting to end it all.

I still remember back in college, in Dr. Gordon Pond's philosophy 101 class, when this issue came up. It revolved around the controversy swirling about the issue of assisted suicide. But It was a friend who later connected the dots not between philosophy and suicide but pain and suicide. I suspect everyone of us has their own breaking point. The pain [either mental or physical] becomes so unbearable, you actually beg to die.

The lyrics seem innocuous enough, so it must be the video. Which I had never seen. I watched the video. Have you ever played the video with sighted friends?

Or does the blind community's reaction revolve mainly around the ending, where Laura has sculpted a bust of the singer...apparently by touching his face, indicating, what, that they might have already been intimate? How would someone blind from birth paint/sculpt/draw someone other than through touch?

I've never had it specifically described to me before, but I suspect that last bit is the reason why it's so derided.

The ending seemed reasonable to me because I can't imagine how a blind from birth artist could sclupt a bust without touching the face.

You might find this interesting: https://youtu.be/sL3rOIohbrM?si=4J180elYtq4PeLEz

But here again, there are artists who were blind from birth and artists who lost their sight later in life. He does however deal at length with a couple of artists who were born blind.

It's about an acting instructor who becomes infatuated with a student who is blind. The student, however, is clearly accomplished and independent.

And of course, very beautiful.

As you'd expect, I suppose.

Then the part where discussions here often get around to the nature/nurture conundrum. Are some women naturally beautiful, are some men naturally handsome? Is it more about genes or memes? And yet, for those who were blind from birth, how would sighted people go about discussing that with them?

Is that something you have had experiences with? Have people [friends] ever brought it up in regard to the relationships you have had over the years? Again, given the manner in which "looks" often becomes such a crucial part of modern love among sighted people, I wonder to what extent that might carry over into the blind community.

You might find this interesting: https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte ... ion-reddit

And I suspect there might be any number of men and women who become angry with nature itself because they were not born naturally beautiful or handsome. In the world we live in today, some might see see that as an affliction.
.

As I recall, he was born blind as well. Though there may be different medical reasons for that.

There are all sorts of medical reasons why someone could be born blind.

So, are there situations in which someone is born blind, but with a condition that medical science can reverse?

Not really sure what you mean here. I can describe my own dreams in considerable detail. And what's important to me are dreams themselves. Every night I find myself able to do things again "in the dream" that are gone forever in the waking world. And for hours sometimes.

I can describe the events of a dream easily enough, but when it comes to describing the emotional content of a dream, words don't do it justice. Here's an example from August 2021, which had a particularly strong emotional signature. I posted it at ILP, so I'll simply quote that, as it was fresh in my mind then.

I was staying with a friend and unexpectedly received a delivery of a cheque for $100,000 (dollars rather than pounds), supposedly from a long lost relative I’d never heard of. My friend advised me to take it to a bank straight away in case there was some sort of mistake. I took a bus to the city centre and booked into a cheap hotel, for reasons that were not adequately explained, but seemed to make perfect sense in the dream. The place was crowded with people so I went out the back and walked along a path until pretty soon three guys came up to me, laughing, telling me that there was a restaurant up ahead but the spoons in it were dirty. I’m paraphrasing here because the actual conversation was very disjointed. I returned to the hotel and went up to my room, where someone had laid out a dress on the bed for me to change into. At this point I decided to leave, so went back down and asked for my bill, which was extortionately high. I asked them to itemise it for me, only to discover that a large portion had gone on something listed as “mingarians” which turned out to be the three guys I’d met outside, whose job it was to welcome all new guests with a laugh and a joke.

Wow. Of course, a sighted person could dream the same thing, but their description is likely to revolve more around the visual components. Or at least mine do. I'm just trying [in vain so far] to understand how events in your dreams would come out in a sequence of sounds, smells, touches and tastes.

Emotional signature in what sense? The dream "overall" makes you feel one way or another.? And by recurring dreams I mean dreams that are actually different but revolve around specific "themes" -- childhood, work, relationships, sexuality, college, the Army, political activism etc.

The emotional signature, as I call it, is the underlying feeling of a dream, that imbues it with meaning. Some dreams have a stronger signature than others, and those that do seem more meaningful.

Maybe the next time you have a particularly memorable dream, you try to explain the emotional signature as it unfolded given the events in the dream itself.

I've also often wondered if some dreams can be genuinely prophetic. The one I mentioned above about the "mingarians" seemed very significant at the time, but needless to say, I never did receive any cheque for $100,000, and who uses cheques any more, anyway? I also looked up "mingarians" and although the word does indeed crop up on Google, I think that's basically just a coincidence. In other words, my subconscious just invented it.

Then the part where the unconscious mind intertwined in the reptilian brain comes into play. And then going all the way back to explaining how the human condition itself fits into the existence of existence itself.

The only dream I've had that I still can't really explain is the one I've mentioned quite a few times before, about coming home from school for the summer holidays when I was 14 and crawling through the rubble of ruined buildings on my hands and knees, cutting my skin open. Shortly after this, after I'd actually come home, a tornado hit my home city, which, as you can imagine, is virtually unheard of in the UK. The damage it did was nothing like the utter devastation in my dream, though, and didn't affect my part of the city, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Birmingham_tornado

Of course, those in Birmingham, along with many of these folks -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... ore_deaths -- are going to wonder "why me?" Some to God, some to fate, some to Mother Nature?

I'm still not sure, however, why this particular dream perplexed you. How Is it different from other dreams that did not perplex you?

I've started to have occasional dreams in which I am interacting with someone who is blind. Sometimes a he, sometimes a she. A couple of night ago a blind man was teaching me braille in a dream. His daughter was blind. And then it's all fuzzy. Though I suspect that this exchange triggered that. Will it become part of another recurring dream sequence?

When someone starts dreaming about me, that's when I should be worried...

Just kidding.

Well, that depends on what the dream about you revolves around. Though, sure, if I suspect a dream that I have is about you, I'll let you know.

What I find most peculiar about my own dreams are not the ones I have but the ones I don't have. There are chunks of my life -- important chunks -- that never make it into my dreams. It boggles my mind.

Your subconscious clearly knows better about what's important, and what isn't.

That's the profound mystery of course. Since we seemingly have nothing to do with being born with the brains we come into the world with, "who" or "what" is this subconscious "entity" that knows better than we do. Of course, being as fractured and fragmented as I am in regard to my own interactions with others in the is/ought world, it's all the more perplexing. Or all the less perplexing?

Also, on more than one occasion an event would recur in a dream over and over again. Only later I'd find out what I always thought happened [because of all the dreams] never really happened at all. And that's particularly perturbing because you begin to wonder what else you have dreamed over and again, thought was true, but it wasn't. The human brain!!!

I have some memories from when I was little that I'm not sure whether they were dreams or not. Also sometimes, when I'm in the process of waking up, I'm not certain if something I've just been dreaming about is real or not, but that soon passes.

I don't think I will ever come to grips with the sheer mystery of dreams. Just so I keep on having them. The more I think about them the more I come to conclude that if the brain can manufacture these extraordinary realities in dreams, why not the realities we experience in the waking world?

I wonder how much of that might be related to being born blind. And the places in my dreams are almost always real. And i wouldn't have it any other way.

Another take: https://youtu.be/M0CrNZGJqAg?si=Cx3JJI_MOG9bl_rC

This from west Texas A&M:

"While people who have been blind since birth do indeed dream in visual images, they do it less often and less intensely than sighted people. Instead, they dream more often and more intensely in sounds, smells, and touch sensations."

And being slightly claustrophobic, some of my dreams involve odd spaces, enclosed tunnels for example, with steps leading down then suddenly ending in a void.

How would you describe being inside a tunnel?

Again, you'll have bear with me here if I ask something foolish. This is the first "in depth" interaction I have had with someone who us blind from birth.

I find myself wondering how being born sighted or being born blind makes all the difference in the world given particular contexts. Or makes little or no difference at all given other contexts.

That's one set, anyway, but another set is completely different, involving me travelling a long distance, often, though not always, by walking, searching for something and/or someone. These usually take place in real locations, though in the dreams they are often quite different to real life. I usually wake up before finding whatever it is, though not always. Another set involves school, but I suppose that's pretty standard.

Perhaps that is because being blind or not we all have many overlapping experiences from the cradle to the grave. Experiencing them blind will be different, but how different? What parts can be communicated easier than others.

That's interesting because the man in that video describes himself as legally blind, a term that often means that a person has a certain, very limited, amount of sight, and he later goes on to say that he has very blurry vision. So this, then, manifests in his dreams, too.

Blurry I can probably understand because so much of the world around me even fully sighted is blurry. But dreaming about traveling with no visual cues? That's very, very strange to me. Though I can't really encompass why it's strange because even if I close my eyes and imagine describing a trip I was on omitting all the visual stuff, it doesn't seem very coherent. There would be all the sounds I heard and the occasional touch and smell and taste, but how would they be put together in such a way that the description was at least in the vicinity of someone sighted describing the trip.

And on the subject of erotic dreams, which he then goes on to talk about, the answer is yes, of course I've had them, and they manifest to me just like all my dreams do, touch and smell usually being the main components in these instances.

I don't know what I would do without my own erotic dreams. Let's just say that "here and now" I treasure them. Though, sure, the more intimate we are with others, the more sound and touch and smell and taste are likely to be enhanced.

Of course, by now there must be hundreds and hundreds of conflicting assessments of what that means. A normal Christian? a normal atheist? a normal child? a normal parent? a normal conservative? a normal liberal? a normal blind person? a normal Pagan?

Perhaps normal is overrated.

On the other hand, normal [whatever we think it is] can be the thing some long for the most. Where the real conflicts accumulate is when, among others, philosophers try to pin down what exactly it means to be normal given that down through time and across the globe normal has been encompassed in very, very different ways.

Of course, there's not much that some people do that others don't call a religion. Maybe it's politics, maybe it's music and art, maybe it's atheism, maybe it's a career, maybe it's shopping, maybe it's sports and entertainment.

What's always most important to me here is not what others find fascinating or what they truly do believe in passionately, but the extent to which they can't keep this to themselves. They feel this need to bring others into the flock with them. To, say, save them, or to enlighten them.

I've always felt that those who seek to convert others must be a little insecure in their beliefs.

Or a lot. Though, sure, there are any number of people who really and sincerely do believe they are on the One True Path. And they are genuinely convinced that there are souls to be saved and minds to be enlightened.

In fact, that's part of the reason I'm here. What if i am able to bump into someone capable of convincing me that their own path is the real deal. A path more optimistic than my own.

That's good to know. After all, there are other groups out there who don't hesitate to shun and punish and reject those who do refuse to toe the line. Think of the blood in/blood out gangs or those religious fanatics who insist those who are not "one of us" are infidels, or those who will even take their own rabid dogmas all the way to the gas chambers.

Those sort of religions do nothing for me.

Well, let's just say that they would mean something to me if I was able to figure out a way to believe them.

When we are able to. On the other hand, in particular societies around the globe, some won't let you. And the way they demonstrate this is by shunning you or imprisoning you or just doing away with you altogether. Fortunately, for you and I, we live in reasonably democratic nations where choosing your own path is not only tolerated but, for some, even encouraged.

That's true, but I can imagine many sighted people who might find that particularly hard to grasp. Again, especially if, for whatever reason, they did find themselves in an entirely different set of circumstances.

But if that is not something that concerns you given the life you live now, that's still the bottom line, of course. It's basically what you think and feel about the world around you "here and now" that counts.

Yes, I agree.

Of course, down the road, important things can change.

Again, however, as I noted before, you are out in the world interacting with different people given different sets of circumstances. And as a result of this, you will either encounter a new experience, a new relationship or access to new information and knowledge that dramatically shifts how you think about yourself out in the world, or you won't. If you do, please keep me posted.

I will do.

There's a part of me, however, that hopes this will never happen to some because I never want them to experience it. But, again, in not being them, what do I -- can I -- really know about how others will react to any experiences like that. Some might fall apart while others become all the stronger.

Yes, that part too. The part where we come into world hard-wired by nature to embody a "character" that can be more or less introverted, more or less aggressive, more or less temperamental.

Personality traits, in other words, we can only more or less control. And then the subconscious and unconscious "contributions" our brain/mind pitch in with.

How boring it would be if everyone had the same personality.

Little doubt about that. Still, I came into this world genetically programmed to be introverted. Really introverted. And that's a part of my personality that in some respects has plagued me all my life. And then those among us who are okay with everyone having the same personality...as long as it's basically a reflection of their own.

This reminds me somewhat of something that Julian [who died a few years ago] and Rebecca and I used to do. We would interact in various philosophy and political forums playing what we called "The Magus Game". We'd become different characters and attempt to spin folks around and around in order to make a point that we wanted to make about, well, it could be anything.

One "script" we talked about but never did pursue revolved around "looks" and how sighted men and women are often very much at odds over it. As I recall, the forum was called either ephilosopher or ephilosophy. A tread on gender roles pertaining to love and lust.

We were going to create two different characters...one, a woman who many would deem to be attractive and thin, another, a woman many would deem to be unattractive and obese. We were curious to see how the male philosophers [and back then almost all of them were men] would react to two different women, both philosophically sophisticated, but one pretty and the other not, one thin and the other not.

Since then, I've always been intrigued with how this all plays out among those in philosophy forums. It's what Julian used to call the "Philosophy Chick Syndrome". And, of course, PN is no exception.

I think it's always best to be open and honest about things.

Well, at least those things we can be open and honest about. We knew we were being deceitful, but we rationalized that by convincing ourselves that our motivations were "pure". But the only way to grasp this, perhaps, is to explore the motivations of Maurice Conchis in The Magus. He [and the twins] weren't twisting Nicholas Urfe around just for their own entertainment. They were providing him with other ways in which to understand the world around him.

[Maia]

+++If it is something that someone is truly able to believe, and it does make them feel better than if, instead, they believed the opposite, well, more power to them, right? As long as they are not insisting that everyone else should think [and behave] like they do...or else. And I never rule out the possibility I might myself encounter new experiences with new people providing me with new information and knowledge and become more hopeful myself.+++

I hope you do, indeed, find that.

+++I still remember back in college, in Dr. Gordon Pond's philosophy 101 class, when this issue came up. It revolved around the controversy swirling about the issue of assisted suicide. But It was a friend who later connected the dots not between philosophy and suicide but pain and suicide. I suspect everyone of us has their own breaking point. The pain [either mental or physical] becomes so unbearable, you actually beg to die.+++

A very controversial subject, as you say. And it happens all the time, too, even though it's illegal in the UK. It's not uncommon for people in pain, on their deathbed, to be offered, and accept, a final, large shot of morphine, knowing full well that it'll kill them. I've been present, on occasion, with clients in hospital, when this has happened.

+++The ending seemed reasonable to me because I can't imagine how a blind from birth artist could sclupt a bust without touching the face.+++

Can you describe the video in more detail? As I said, I don't find the song exceptionally awful.

+++You might find this interesting: https://youtu.be/sL3rOIohbrM?si=4J180elYtq4PeLEz

But here again, there are artists who were blind from birth and artists who lost their sight later in life. He does however deal at length with a couple of artists who were born blind.+++

My own creative juices have always been channelled into writing. I have to pick up on one thing that the narrator of that video said, though, when he said that a person who was born blind would have no sense of perspective. This is not true. Through echolocation, I have a very good sense of the relationships and distances between things.

Talking about writing, you may have noticed on a different thread my mentioning of a novel I recently read called Caedmon's Song. This has had quite a strong, and indeed, unexpected, effect on me. I really wish I could write something as genuinely moving as that, by turns both beautiful and heart-breaking.

+++Then the part where discussions here often get around to the nature/nurture conundrum. Are some women naturally beautiful, are some men naturally handsome? Is it more about genes or memes? And yet, for those who were blind from birth, how would sighted people go about discussing that with them?

Is that something you have had experiences with? Have people [friends] ever brought it up in regard to the relationships you have had over the years? Again, given the manner in which "looks" often becomes such a crucial part of modern love among sighted people, I wonder to what extent that might carry over into the blind community.+++

Not in any major, or serious way. I've had a few comments from sighted friends such as, oh he's cute, and things like that, but it's not something I've ever really bothered about. If I find someone attractive, on my own terms, that's what matters.

+++You might find this interesting: https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte ... ion-reddit

And I suspect there might be any number of men and women who become angry with nature itself because they were not born naturally beautiful or handsome. In the world we live in today, some might see see that as an affliction.+++

Or a disability, perhaps? That's not a word I use lightly, incidentally, and is not a word tend to use about myself, either.

+++So, are there situations in which someone is born blind, but with a condition that medical science can reverse?+++

Depending on the cause, cataracts, for example, an operation can help.

+++Wow. Of course, a sighted person could dream the same thing, but their description is likely to revolve more around the visual components. Or at least mine do. I'm just trying [in vain so far] to understand how events in your dreams would come out in a sequence of sounds, smells, touches and tastes.+++

I suppose all I can do is describe it, in as much detail as I can.

+++Maybe the next time you have a particularly memorable dream, you try to explain the emotional signature as it unfolded given the events in the dream itself.+++

I will do.

+++Of course, those in Birmingham, along with many of these folks -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... ore_deaths -- are going to wonder "why me?" Some to God, some to fate, some to Mother Nature?+++

On that particular occasion, thankfully, no one died. I certainly understand your point, though.

+++I'm still not sure, however, why this particular dream perplexed you. How Is it different from other dreams that did not perplex you?+++

Because I had it before the tornado hit. The dream was very vivid, and I particularly remember cutting open my skin as I crawled through the rubble. I can still feel it now, in fact, thinking about it.

Some people might call this a nightmare, but I hardly ever have what I would call nightmares, by which I mean dreams that actually scare me. I've had dreams with negative emotional signatures, of course, but very rarely wholly so.

+++Well, that depends on what the dream about you revolves around. Though, sure, if I suspect a dream that I have is about you, I'll let you know.+++

Good!

+++I don't think I will ever come to grips with the sheer mystery of dreams. Just so I keep on having them. The more I think about them the more I come to conclude that if the brain can manufacture these extraordinary realities in dreams, why not the realities we experience in the waking world?+++

The waking world is different to dreams. In particular, its emotional signatures are different. If dreams didn't have these various different qualities, we wouldn't be able to tell them from reality, or at least, we wouldn't be absolutely sure.

+++How would you describe being inside a tunnel?

Again, you'll have bear with me here if I ask something foolish. This is the first "in depth" interaction I have had with someone who us blind from birth.

I find myself wondering how being born sighted or being born blind makes all the difference in the world given particular contexts. Or makes little or no difference at all given other contexts.+++

I have a very good sense of the size and shape of a space I'm in, such as a room, for example, through echolocation. I don't much like confined spaces, which I presume is why I sometimes dream about crawling through tunnels, especially ones with strange angles and configurations. I'm also pretty bad company on long car journeys, for similar reasons.

+++Perhaps that is because being blind or not we all have many overlapping experiences from the cradle to the grave. Experiencing them blind will be different, but how different? What parts can be communicated easier than others.+++

I don't know, to be honest. It's something I've spent my whole life wondering.

+++Blurry, I can probably understand because so much of the world around me even fully sighted is blurry. But dreaming about traveling with no visual cues? That's very, very strange to me. Though I can't really encompass why it's strange because even if I close my eyes and imagine describing a trip I was on omitting all the visual stuff, it doesn't seem very coherent. There would be all the sounds I heard and the occasional touch and smell and taste, but how would they be put together in such a way that the description was at least in the vicinity of someone sighted describing the trip.+++

How did my travelogues come across, to you? Did they seem incoherent?

+++I don't know what I would do without my own erotic dreams. Let's just say that "here and now" I treasure them. Though, sure, the more intimate we are with others, the more sound and touch and smell and taste are likely to be enhanced.+++

Absolutely.

+++On the other hand, normal [whatever we think it is] can be the thing some long for the most. Where the real conflicts accumulate is when, among others, philosophers try to pin down what exactly it means to be normal given that down through time and across the globe normal has been encompassed in very, very different ways.+++

I like to think I'm a pretty normal sort of person. Others, of course, might disagree.

+++Or a lot. Though, sure, there are any number of people who really and sincerely do believe they are on the One True Path. And they are genuinely convinced that there are souls to be saved and minds to be enlightened.

In fact, that's part of the reason I'm here. What if i am able to bump into someone capable of convincing me that their own path is the real deal. A path more optimistic than my own.+++

Good luck with that, then.

+++Well, let's just say that they would mean something to me if I was able to figure out a way to believe them.

When we are able to. On the other hand, in particular societies around the globe, some won't let you. And the way they demonstrate this is by shunning you or imprisoning you or just doing away with you altogether. Fortunately, for you and I, we live in reasonably democratic nations where choosing your own path is not even tolerated but, for some, even encouraged.+++

Yes, we're very lucky.

+++There's a part of me, however, that hopes this will never happen to some because I never want them to experience it. But, again, in not being them, what do I -- can I -- really know about how others will react to any experiences like that. Some might fall apart while others become all the stronger.+++

I think I'm pretty strong and resilient. I hope so, anyway.

+++Little doubt about that. Still, I came into this world genetically programmed to be introverted. Really introverted. And that's a part of my personality that in some respects has plagued me all my life. And then those among us who are okay with everyone having the same personality...as long as it's basically a reflection of their own.+++

I like being around people, but I also value my own space. Depends on my mood, I suppose.

+++Well, at least those things we can be open and honest about. We knew we were being deceitful, but we rationalized that by convincing ourselves that our motivations were "pure". But the only way to grasp this, perhaps, is to explore the motivations of Maurice Conchis in The Magus. He [and the twins] weren't twisting Nicholas Urfe around just for their own entertainment. They were providing him with other ways in which to understand the world around him.+++

Each to their own, of course.

[iambiguous]

If it is something that someone is truly able to believe, and it does make them feel better than if, instead, they believed the opposite, well, more power to them, right? As long as they are not insisting that everyone else should think [and behave] like they do...or else. And I never rule out the possibility I might myself encounter new experiences with new people providing me with new information and knowledge and become more hopeful myself.

I hope you do, indeed, find that.

I hope I do too. I'll let you know, of course, but I suspect that my own description of feeling hopeful might actually appall any number of others. That's the way things are though. People feeling hopeful about things that others are actually fearful of.

I still remember back in college, in Dr. Gordon Pond's philosophy 101 class, when this issue came up. It revolved around the controversy swirling about the issue of assisted suicide. But It was a friend who later connected the dots not between philosophy and suicide but pain and suicide. I suspect everyone of us has their own breaking point. The pain [either mental or physical] becomes so unbearable, you actually beg to die.

A very controversial subject, as you say. And it happens all the time, too, even though it's illegal in the UK. It's not uncommon for people in pain, on their deathbed, to be offered, and accept, a final, large shot of morphine, knowing full well that it'll kill them. I've been present, on occasion, with clients in hospital, when this has happened.

Controversial I suppose because, as with many other conflicting moral conflagrations that beset us, those on both sides of the issue are able to make reasonable arguments simply by starting out with their own set of assumptions about the human condition itself. No one, however, is able to pin down the most rational or ethical prescriptions other than by insisting they are their own. And the rest, as they say, is history. Then the part where God and religion sometimes enter into it.

The ending seemed reasonable to me because I can't imagine how a blind from birth artist could sclupt a bust without touching the face.

Can you describe the video in more detail? As I said, I don't find the song exceptionally awful.

The melody is beautiful. But few things are more subjective than our reactions to music.

In the "Hello" video [at least the one I saw] Lionel Ritchie is an acting instructor and the song is just his way of telling us about this relationship. Laura is depicted as a talented actor, a musician, a dancer and a sculptress. The camera follows her though the day as the teacher hovers in the background singing the song. At this point, though, I assumed that he was just infatuated with one of his students. That's why the ending puzzled me. It seemed to indicate an intimate relationship had already begun.

As the video comes to an end, the instructor is with Laura in the art studio. She tells him that the clay bust she has been working on is finished and shows it to him.

"This is how I see you", she says and then follows the contours of his face with her fingers. On the other hand, if they were already lovers, wouldn't that make it appropriate. Lovers caress each other's faces all the time. I'm sure there were times when you have had your own face lovingly caressed. So, it would seem, it's not about blindness so much as the embodiment of love and affection and tenderness. And, sure, arousal.

Anyway, the melody itself often gives me goosebumps. Not unlike other pop songs...Mandy by Barry Manilo or Superstar by the Carpenters.

You might find this interesting: https://youtu.be/sL3rOIohbrM?si=4J180elYtq4PeLEz

But here again, there are artists who were blind from birth and artists who lost their sight later in life. He does however deal at length with a couple of artists who were born blind.

My own creative juices have always been channelled into writing. I have to pick up on one thing that the narrator of that video said, though, when he said that a person who was born blind would have no sense of perspective. This is not true. Through echolocation, I have a very good sense of the relationships and distances between things.

Any creative passion is better than none at all. And echolocation is something that most of us are familiar with in regard to bats and dolphins.

This from web.md:

Surprisingly, echolocation can be learned as a skill. Experts have found that the human brain has areas that are dedicated to processing echoes. They also estimate that about 20 to 30 percent of blind people learn how to echolocate at some point in their lives.

Here's a video of a man using it: https://youtu.be/A8lztr1tu4o?si=M1ogoDuzPRg-BUCx

He and the narrator attempt to explain it.

Talking about writing, you may have noticed on a different thread my mentioning of a novel I recently read called Caedmon's Song. This has had quite a strong, and indeed, unexpected, effect on me. I really wish I could write something as genuinely moving as that, by turns both beautiful and heart-breaking.

All you can do is to make that attempt yourself. Write about something that genuinely moves you, send it out to publishers, and see what happens. I did that myself twice. A whole bunch of rejections slips later I had to accept that I would never be on any best sellers list. But you can't know that until you try to write something you want to convey to others because you are passionaite about it. And maybe they should be too.

Then the part where discussions here often get around to the nature/nurture conundrum. Are some women naturally beautiful, are some men naturally handsome? Is it more about genes or memes? And yet, for those who were blind from birth, how would sighted people go about discussing that with them?

Is that something you have had experiences with? Have people [friends] ever brought it up in regard to the relationships you have had over the years? Again, given the manner in which "looks" often becomes such a crucial part of modern love among sighted people, I wonder to what extent that might carry over into the blind community.

Not in any major, or serious way. I've had a few comments from sighted friends such as, oh he's cute, and things like that, but it's not something I've ever really bothered about. If I find someone attractive, on my own terms, that's what matters.

That is basically all that matters. But for many, I suspect, looks are more important than they will admit. I struggled with it myself for years and years. All one need do here in America is go to the movies or watch TV for a while. While there are exceptions, of course, the preponderance of actors are, if not drop dead gorgorous, then really, really easy on the eyes. You can even turn on the local news. Most of the female anchors and almost all of the female reporters are exceptionally attractive. Though, again, genes more or less than memes?

And then of course the "beauty industrial complex". Billions and billions of dollars are at stake convincing both men and women that they can always be considerably more attractive. But again, this is something that is either more or less a part of your own perspective. It would seem to depend on what is communicated to you about "looks" from the sighted community.

You might find this interesting: https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte ... ion-reddit

And I suspect there might be any number of men and women who become angry with nature itself because they were not born naturally beautiful or handsome. In the world we live in today, some might see see that as an affliction.

Or a disability, perhaps? That's not a word I use lightly, incidentally, and is not a word tend to use about myself, either.

As with most things of this nature, each of us as individuals will have a different reaction. And, from my own frame of mind, there does not appear to be a way in which to pin down the optimal reaction. It's mostly derived from our own persoanl experiences out in a particukar world understood in a particular way.
.

Wow. Of course, a sighted person could dream the same thing, but their description is likely to revolve more around the visual components. Or at least mine do. I'm just trying [in vain so far] to understand how events in your dreams would come out in a sequence of sounds, smells, touches and tastes.

I suppose all I can do is describe it, in as much detail as I can.

That's basically what we all do here. We describe ourselves out in the particular world around us and note how in some ways others describe themselves the same way and others do not. Then the part where one way or another in any given community rewards or punishments are meted out for particular kinds of behaviors depending on who is in power.

Maybe the next time you have a particularly memorable dream, you try to explain the emotional signature as it unfolded given the events in the dream itself.

I will do.

Thank you.

Of course, those in Birmingham, along with many of these folks -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... ore_deaths -- are going to wonder "why me?" Some to God, some to fate, some to Mother Nature?

On that particular occasion, thankfully, no one died. I certainly understand your point, though.

That's always been a tricky thing for me. On the one hand, there is all of the beauty, and all of the bounty we receive from nature. But then in any number of devastating ways, nature can take that bounty away. It can reconfigure our very existence into a Hell on Earth. So, as one might suspect, I am no less fractured and fragmented here as well.

I'm still not sure, however, why this particular dream perplexed you. How Is it different from other dreams that did not perplex you?

Because I had it before the tornado hit. The dream was very vivid, and I particularly remember cutting open my skin as I crawled through the rubble. I can still feel it now, in fact, thinking about it.

So, the dream was...prophetic in some ways? As though in anticiapation of something you had no way of knowing about? Does a vivid dream amount to something akin to an avalanche of sounds and smells and things you touch and taste? And its "reality" then embedded in how you interpret them given the context of the dream?

Much like me, only I have visual cues as well.

Some people might call this a nightmare, but I hardly ever have what I would call nightmares, by which I mean dreams that actually scare me. I've had dreams with negative emotional signatures, of course, but very rarely wholly so.

Same with me. Not only do I rarely have nightmares, I almost never have surreal dreams either...dreams that are not immediately understood by me. Those "themes" that I suspect we all have.

Well, that depends on what the dream about you revolves around. Though, sure, if I suspect a dream that I have is about you, I'll let you know.

Good!

Maybe between the two of us we can get closer to grasping whatever those like Freud and Jung were suggesting about dreams.

Or, perhaps, even rebut them?

don't think I will ever come to grips with the sheer mystery of dreams. Just so I keep on having them. The more I think about them the more I come to conclude that if the brain can manufacture these extraordinary realities in dreams, why not the realities we experience in the waking world?

The waking world is different to dreams. In particular, its emotional signatures are different. If dreams didn't have these various different qualities, we wouldn't be able to tell them from reality, or at least, we wouldn't be absolutely sure.

Again, maybe I am just someone who dreams in reality instead. Almost all of my dreams are rooted in actual experiences that I have had. A couple of nights ago, for example, I was back in Miners Mills. I was with Sharon, my first love, and we were at Harvey's Lake. The dream was not really all that different from the reality all those years ago. And how wonderful to "be" with her again. I still recall vividly walking out of the water together and going over to a photo booth. A picture for her, a picture for me. Almost exacly as it did unfold all those years ago!

How would you describe being inside a tunnel?

Again, you'll have bear with me here if I ask something foolish. This is the first "in depth" interaction I have had with someone who us blind from birth.

I find myself wondering how being born sighted or being born blind makes all the difference in the world given particular contexts. Or makes little or no difference at all given other contexts.

I have a very good sense of the size and shape of a space I'm in, such as a room, for example, through echolocation.

Do you mean those times when you are in a new room or in a new space...a place you have never had any expereince with?

Now, if I were to describe being in a pitch black tunnel where even sighted people could not see their hand in front of their face, all I would have at my disposal are the interpretations of the sounds I hear and the things I smell and the things I touch. But all the while, I could turn on a flashlight and see things too. I just find it hard to fathom how a blind person forms a description of a tunnel without actually seeing it.

I don't much like confined spaces, which I presume is why I sometimes dream about crawling through tunnels, especially ones with strange angles and configurations. I'm also pretty bad company on long car journeys, for similar reasons.

Actually, the more confined the spaces are the better for me. Why? Damned if I know. It's just how I have come to react to them. Perhaps for the same or similar reasons that Temple Grandin invented her "hug machine". It's wide open spaces that most perturb me.

Perhaps that is because being blind or not we all have many overlapping experiences from the cradle to the grave. Experiencing them blind will be different, but how different? What parts can be communicated easier than others.

I don't know, to be honest. It's something I've spent my whole life wondering.

One way or another, perhaps, we may well all have aspects of our lives that we embody day in and day out yet find it difficult to communicate them to others. It can be physical or mental. It can revolve around how we dress, or what we eat or who we sleep with. Here we exchange philosophies. There are things almost all of us can agree on and things that spark ferocious debates.

Blurry, I can probably understand because so much of the world around me even fully sighted is blurry. But dreaming about traveling with no visual cues? That's very, very strange to me. Though I can't really encompass why it's strange because even if I close my eyes and imagine describing a trip I was on omitting all the visual stuff, it doesn't seem very coherent. There would be all the sounds I heard and the occasional touch and smell and taste, but how would they be put together in such a way that the description was at least in the vicinity of someone sighted describing the trip.

How did my travelogues come across, to you? Did they seem incoherent?

In some respects -- many respects? most respects? -- others might read these accounts and never really know that you were blind. When they find out they may have entirely different reactions. And, I suspect, particular sighted people no doubt would be grappling to imagine themselves taking a camping trip alone. Then the part where you shared these experience with sighted people and the discussions you had. They perhaps describing what they saw, you perhaps augmenting their undersanding of the sounds and the smells and the textures. But what might be going through the mind of someone at Stonehenge given the fact that they were born blind and could see none of it.

In other words, as difficult as this is for me to convey, how do blind from birth men and women translate their own experiences into descriptions that are understood by others without any visual components.

I don't know what I would do without my own erotic dreams. Let's just say that "here and now" I treasure them. Though, sure, the more intimate we are with others, the more sound and touch and smell and taste are likely to be enhanced.

Absolutely.

So, intimacy between lovers who are both blind and intimacy between lovers in which one is born blind and the other is sighted. Some things the same, other things different. Then attempts to close any communication gaps by talking about it openly and honestly.

On the other hand, normal [whatever we think it is] can be the thing some long for the most. Where the real conflicts accumulate is when, among others, philosophers try to pin down what exactly it means to be normal given that down through time and across the globe normal has been encompassed in very, very different ways.

I like to think I'm a pretty normal sort of person. Others, of course, might disagree.

Well, I actually like to think of myself as...an aberration? On the other hand, I do lots and lots of things that others do. I'm completely normal in regard to many, many things. I have just come to think about moral and political conflicts differently from most others. From my frame of mind, normal can be a blessing for some and a curse for others. What's always most important to me here is that in our interactions with others we come up with ways to take into account the fact that for different folks there really are what can be very different strokes.

Or a lot. Though, sure, there are any number of people who really and sincerely do believe they are on the One True Path. And they are genuinely convinced that there are souls to be saved and minds to be enlightened.

In fact, that's part of the reason I'm here. What if I am able to bump into someone capable of convincing me that their own path is the real deal. A path more optimistic than my own.

Good luck with that, then.

Alas, however, and as often as not, I bump into those here [and there] who are truly perturbed by my own philosophical conclusions. In fact, I'm no less perturbed by them myself. So, all I really can do is hear others out and respect the differences between us as long as neither one of us set out to "preach the 'my way or the highway' gospel."

There's a part of me, however, that hopes this will never happen to some because I never want them to experience it. But, again, in not being them, what do I -- can I -- really know about how others will react to any experiences like that. Some might fall apart while others become all the stronger.

I think I'm pretty strong and resilient. I hope so, anyway.

Then it's just a matter of sustaining that all the way to the grave.

Little doubt about that. Still, I came into this world genetically programmed to be introverted. Really introverted. And that's a part of my personality that in some respects has plagued me all my life. And then those among us who are okay with everyone having the same personality...as long as it's basically a reflection of their own.

I like being around people, but I also value my own space. Depends on my mood, I suppose.

I like being around people too...virtually. In fact, all my life I've been surrounded by people...a big family, tons of relatives, friends, fellow workers and school mates, fellow political activists, lovers, Army buddies. Now, however, I am most content being alone. If for no other reason that, when you are alone, the things you choose to do you do without having to take into account the things that others want to do instead. Giving you many more options. Though, of course, there's the downside of living like that.

Well, at least those things we can be open and honest about. We knew we were being deceitful, but we rationalized that by convincing ourselves that our motivations were "pure". But the only way to grasp this, perhaps, is to explore the motivations of Maurice Conchis in The Magus. He [and the twins] weren't twisting Nicholas Urfe around just for their own entertainment. They were providing him with other ways in which to understand the world around him.

Each to their own, of course.

Ar least until "our own" starts in on challenging others who insist that, on the contrary, it's "their own" that others must accept.

The part where some are said to be blind not because they can't see but because they refuse to think about something like everyone else does. The are blind to The truth.

[Maia]

+++I hope I do too. I'll let you know, of course, but I suspect that my own description of feeling hopeful might actually appall any number of others. That's the way things are though. People feeling hopeful about things that others are actually fearful of.+++

And vice versa.

+++Controversial I suppose because, as with many other conflicting moral conflagrations that beset us, those on both sides of the issue are able to make reasonable arguments simply by starting out with their own set of assumptions about the human condition itself. No one, however, is able to pin down the most rational or ethical prescriptions other than by insisting they are their own. And the rest, as they say, is history. Then the part where God and religion sometimes enter into it.+++

Perhaps there are some issues that will never be resolved.

+++The melody is beautiful. But few things are more subjective than our reactions to music.

In the "Hello" video [at least the one I saw] Lionel Ritchie is an acting instructor and the song is just his way of telling us about this relationship. Laura is depicted as a talented actor, a musician, a dancer and a sculptress. The camera follows her though the day as the teacher hovers in the background singing the song. At this point, though, I assumed that he was just infatuated with one of his students. That's why the ending puzzled me. It seemed to indicate an intimate relationship had already begun.

As the video comes to an end, the instructor is with Laura in the art studio. She tells him that the clay bust she has been working on is finished and shows it to him.

"This is how I see you", she says and then follows the contours of his face with her fingers. On the other hand, if they were already lovers, wouldn't that make it appropriate. Lovers caress each other's faces all the time. I'm sure there were times when you have had your own face lovingly caressed. So, it would seem, it's not about blindness so much as the embodiment of love and affection and tenderness. And, sure, arousal.

Anyway, the melody itself often gives me goosebumps. Not unlike other pop songs...Mandy by Barry Manilo or Superstar by the Carpenters.+++

Aren't teacher-student relationships frowned on? Depends on the ages of those involved, I suppose. I know the song primarily because of its reputation in the blind community, members of which have been known, on occasion, to break out into deeply un-heartfelt renditions of "Hello, is it me you're looking for?" at the most inopportune of moments.

I do, indeed, like Mandy by Barry Manilow, and definitely Superstar by the Carpenters. Karen Carpenter's voice is beautiful.

+++Any creative passion is better than none at all. And echolocation is something that most of us are familiar with in regard to bats and dolphins.

This from web.md:

Surprisingly, echolocation can be learned as a skill. Experts have found that the human brain has areas that are dedicated to processing echoes. They also estimate that about 20 to 30 percent of blind people learn how to echolocate at some point in their lives.

Here's a video of a man using it: https://youtu.be/A8lztr1tu4o?si=M1ogoDuzPRg-BUCx

He and the narrator attempt to explain it.+++

A very interesting video, and I can certainly relate to the guy talking in it. Having no eyes, blind since birth (though it wasn't cancer in my case), doing echolocation completely automatically without ever being taught it, without even thinking about it. It's not a skill that can easily be learnt by an adult, though. Perhaps to a limited extent, in some cases. To me, it's really easy. I just click my tongue.

My brother used to call me Batty, when I was little, as a nickname. As in, blind as a bat. Also because bats do echolocation, and "batty" means a bit loopy or mad. No matter how many times I pointed out to him that bats aren't actually blind, he still did it.

+++All you can do is to make that attempt yourself. Write about something that genuinely moves you, send it out to publishers, and see what happens. I did that myself twice. A whole bunch of rejections slips later I had to accept that I would never be on any best sellers list. But you can't know that until you try to write something you want to convey to others because you are passionaite about it. And maybe they should be too.+++

I have lots of different ideas, but I always think that my writing comes across as a bit dry, lacking in feeling. The beauty of the book I recently read, Caedmon's Song, is that it was able to transport the reader to a different time and place, and to get inside the mind of the protagonist, Kirsten, and her truly heart-breaking story. I would very much recommend it, in fact, if you're looking for something new and different, and maybe we can share our thoughts, afterwards. But reading it brought home to me just how much my own writing skills pale in comparison. One idea I've been thinking about quite seriously is a young adult fantasy about some teenagers who meet an elf girl lost in the woods one day. The elves live underground, and for them, times goes much slower than for us on the surface, and although she says she's 17, she's actually thousands of years old. The teenagers have to help her find her way home, while being chased by the bad guys who want to capture her for scientific research, and in the process one of the teenagers falls in love with her. I have all the plot elements mapped out, but I'm not sure my writing skills are up to a novel-length story, or even a novella. I'm also a bit unsure how to handle visual description, whether to ignore it completely, which would detract quite considerably from the novel, or fake it. Certainly, when I read novels, I love all the visual descriptions in them.

+++That is basically all that matters. But for many, I suspect, looks are more important than they will admit. I struggled with it myself for years and years. All one need do here in America is go to the movies or watch TV for a while. While there are exceptions, of course, the preponderance of actors are, if not drop dead gorgorous, then really, really easy on the eyes. You can even turn on the local news. Most of the female anchors and almost all of the female reporters are exceptionally attractive. Though, again, genes more or less than memes?

And then of course the "beauty industrial complex". Billions and billions of dollars are at stake convincing both men and women that they can always be considerably more attractive. But again, this is something that is either more or less a part of your own perspective. It would seem to depend on what is communicated to you about "looks" from the sighted community.+++

I suppose it's the same when I say that physical attraction, touch, smell and so on, is important to me, and risk being accused of being shallow.

+++That's basically what we all do here. We describe ourselves out in the particular world around us and note how in some ways others describe themselves the same way and others do not. Then the part where one way or another in any given community rewards or punishments are meted out for particular kinds of behaviors depending on who is in power.+++

That is, indeed, all we can really do.

+++That's always been a tricky thing for me. On the one hand, there is all of the beauty, and all of the bounty we receive from nature. But then in any number of devastating ways, nature can take that bounty away. It can reconfigure our very existence into a Hell on Earth. So, as one might suspect, I am no less fractured and fragmented here as well.+++

The awesome power of nature is truly humbling.

+++So, the dream was...prophetic in some ways? As though in anticiapation of something you had no way of knowing about? Does a vivid dream amount to something akin to an avalanche of sounds and smells and things you touch and taste? And its "reality" then embedded in how you interpret them given the context of the dream?

Much like me, only I have visual cues as well.+++

Yes, it seems like it was prophetic. Or just a very strange coincidence. The vividness mainly consisted of the emotional intensity, which imbued it with meaning, though the sensations in it were very strong too, in this case, touch, as I was crawling over the rubble of ruined buildings, bricks, broken glass, bits of wood sticking up, and so on, on the bare skin of my hands and knees.

+++Same with me. Not only do I rarely have nightmares, I almost never have surreal dreams either...dreams that are not immediately understood by me. Those "themes" that I suspect we all have.+++

I quite often have surreal dreams. The ones involving tunnels, for example.

+++Maybe between the two of us we can get closer to grasping whatever those like Freud and Jung were suggesting about dreams.

Or, perhaps, even rebut them?+++

I'm not even sure, except perhaps in the very broadest sense, what Freud and Jung said about dreams. Though I suspect a bit of psychobabble might have been involved.

+++Again, maybe I am just someone who dreams in reality instead. Almost all of my dreams are rooted in actual experiences that I have had. A couple of nights ago, for example, I was back in Miners Mills. I was with Sharon, my first love, and we were at Harvey's Lake. The dream was not really all that different from the reality all those years ago. And how wonderful to "be" with her again. I still recall vividly walking out of the water together and going over to a photo booth. A picture for her, a picture for me. Almost exacly as it did unfold all those years ago!+++

Some of my dreams are like that, that is, relating to actual incidents, but only a small minority, I think, and even those don't follow the events exactly. It's more the feeling about them that ties them to the actual event.

+++Do you mean those times when you are in a new room or in a new space...a place you have never had any expereince with?+++

Yes, echolocation works in new places, just as much as in familiar ones. Indeed, I rely on it in exactly those situations.

+++Now, if I were to describe being in a pitch black tunnel where even sighted people could not see their hand in front of their face, all I would have at my disposal are the interpretations of the sounds I hear and the things I smell and the things I touch. But all the while, I could turn on a flashlight and see things too. I just find it hard to fathom how a blind person forms a description of a tunnel without actually seeing it.+++

As with all spaces I'm in, by echolocation. It's probably hard to convey just how much I use it, how vital it is in forming my mental map of the world around me. And why, for example, having a cold, which thankfully I very rarely do, can really mess me up, since it prevents me echolocating properly, being all bunged up.

+++Actually, the more confined the spaces are the better for me. Why? Damned if I know. It's just how I have come to react to them. Perhaps for the same or similar reasons that Temple Grandin invented her "hug machine". It's wide open spaces that most perturb me.+++

I love wide open spaces, the great outdoors and all.

+++In some respects -- many respects? most respects? -- others might read these accounts and never really know that you were blind. When they find out they may have entirely different reactions. And, I suspect, particular sighted people no doubt would be grappling to imagine themselves taking a camping trip alone. Then the part where you shared these experience with sighted people and the discussions you had. They perhaps describing what they saw, you perhaps augmenting their undersanding of the sounds and the smells and the textures. But what might be going through the mind of someone at Stonehenge given the fact that they were born blind and could see none of it.

In other words, as difficult as this is for me to convey, how do blind from birth men and women translate their own experiences into descriptions that are understood by others without any visual components.+++

I'm glad, at least, that they didn't come across as incoherent. I've had a number of camping trips alone, the one I described being the first. I thought they'd probably get a bit repetitive after that. It's important to me to be able to do things like that, to be independent, in other words. As for Stonehenge, it's a truly amazing place, marred only by the fact that it was crawling with people at the time.

+++So, intimacy between lovers who are both blind and intimacy between lovers in which one is born blind and the other is sighted. Some things the same, other things different. Then attempts to close any communication gaps by talking about it openly and honestly.+++

I've only ever had such experiences with sighted partners, so can't really comment on anything else.

+++Well, I actually like to think of myself as...an aberration? On the other hand, I do lots and lots of things that others do. I'm completely normal in regard to many, many things. I have just come to think about moral and political conflicts differently from most others. From my frame of mind, normal can be a blessing for some and a curse for others. What's always most important to me here is that in our interactions with others we come up with ways to take into account the fact that for different folks there really are what can be very different strokes.+++

I spent a long time trying to be as normal as possible, to fit in, but I'm far less bothered about it these days.

+++Alas, however, and as often as not, I bump into those here [and there] who are truly perturbed by my own philosophical conclusions. In fact, I'm no less perturbed by them myself. So, all I really can do is hear others out and respect the differences between us as long as neither one of us set out to "preach the 'my way or the highway' gospel."+++

Yes, that's the key. Not preaching, but rather, listening and communicating.

+++Then it's just a matter of sustaining that all the way to the grave.+++

It's just a question of attitude, I think.

+++I like being around people too...virtually. In fact, all my life I've been surrounded by people...a big family, tons of relatives, friends, fellow workers and school mates, fellow political activists, lovers, Army buddies. Now, however, I am most content being alone. If for no other reason that, when you are alone, the things you choose to do you do without having to take into account the things that others want to do instead. Giving you many more options. Though, of course, there's the downside of living like that.+++

I really like having my own space, my own flat, living on my own, and being free do do my own thing. I wasn't sure if I would, at first, but I soon found that it was exactly what I wanted. And I also really like having guests, cooking for them, for example, and enjoying their company. I think this is very much the best of both worlds.

+++Ar least until "our own" starts in on challenging others who insist that, on the contrary, it's "their own" that others must accept.

The part where some are said to be blind not because they can't see but because they refuse to think about something like everyone else does. The are blind to The truth.+++

When the blind are leading the blind, the one-eyed man is king, or something...

[promethean75]

"We, many or few, who once more dare to live in a world purged of morality, we pagans in faith, we are probably also the first who understand what a pagan faith is: to be obliged to imagine higher creatures than man, but to imagine them beyond good and evil; to be compelled to value all higher existence as immoral existence. We believe in Olympus, and not in the "man on the cross." - FN

He probably would have rather said amoral existence instead of immoral existence.

[iambiguous]

I hope I do too. I'll let you know, of course, but I suspect that my own description of feeling hopeful might actually appall any number of others. That's the way things are though. People feeling hopeful about things that others are actually fearful of.

And vice versa.

Yep, we can almost always count on that. In fact, that may well be why what is most important to me here is the extent to which a community practices one or another combination of might makes right, right makes might or democracy and the rule of law. In other words, it's one thing for someone to tell you what to do and you have to do it or else be punished. Or doing what everyone else does because they claim to have fornd the One True Path. You become either "one of us" or you deal with the consequences of being an outlier..."one of them". With democracy, however, you might not get everything you want in regard to any particular issue, but then most do get something instead of nothing.

Controversial I suppose because, as with many other conflicting moral conflagrations that beset us, those on both sides of the issue are able to make reasonable arguments simply by starting out with their own set of assumptions about the human condition itself. No one, however, is able to pin down the most rational or ethical prescriptions other than by insisting they are their own. And the rest, as they say, is history. Then the part where God and religion sometimes enter into it.

Perhaps there are some issues that will never be resolved.

Or perhaps there are no issues that can be resolved. Short of, say, the second coming of Christ? Or, even more miraculously, [perhaps], a brand-new deontological assessment that puts Kant's own to shame?

The melody is beautiful. But few things are more subjective than our reactions to music.

In the "Hello" video [at least the one I saw] Lionel Ritchie is an acting instructor and the song is just his way of telling us about this relationship. Laura is depicted as a talented actor, a musician, a dancer and a sculptress. The camera follows her though the day as the teacher hovers in the background singing the song. At this point, though, I assumed that he was just infatuated with one of his students. That's why the ending puzzled me. It seemed to indicate an intimate relationship had already begun.

As the video comes to an end, the instructor is with Laura in the art studio. She tells him that the clay bust she has been working on is finished and shows it to him.

"This is how I see you", she says and then follows the contours of his face with her fingers. On the other hand, if they were already lovers, wouldn't that make it appropriate. Lovers caress each other's faces all the time. I'm sure there were times when you have had your own face lovingly caressed. So, it would seem, it's not about blindness so much as the embodiment of love and affection and tenderness. And, sure, arousal.

Anyway, the melody itself often gives me goosebumps. Not unlike other pop songs...Mandy by Barry Manilo or Superstar by the Carpenters.

Aren't teacher-student relationships frowned on? Depends on the ages of those involved, I suppose.

Yes, but this isn't like the cases where the teacher becomes involved with a child. The students in the class were all adults. Young adults perhaps but not children.

I know the song primarily because of its reputation in the blind community, members of which have been known, on occasion, to break out into deeply un-heartfelt renditions of "Hello, is it me you're looking for?" at the most inopportune of moments.

Is that fair? Maybe. There really isn't all that much I'm familiar with in regard to the song. If you Google "lionel richie hello song and blind community" nothing pops up. Or nothing I could find to connect the dots.

One take on it:

The song "Hello" by Lionel Richie, released in 1984, is often interpreted as a romantic ballad about longing and communication. The music video features Richie as he attempts to connect with a woman through a series of emotional scenes. While some viewers might interpret the video as having elements of obsession or stalking, it is generally viewed in the context of its time as a heartfelt expression of love and yearning.

And, basically, that's how I reacted to it as well. Whatever the difference in their ages, they seemed genuinely to love each other. But then when you are dealing with music videos it's not all that unusual for things not to be as they seem.

Any creative passion is better than none at all. And echolocation is something that most of us are familiar with in regard to bats and dolphins.

This from web.md:

Surprisingly, echolocation can be learned as a skill. Experts have found that the human brain has areas that are dedicated to processing echoes. They also estimate that about 20 to 30 percent of blind people learn how to echolocate at some point in their lives.

Here's a video of a man using it: https://youtu.be/A8lztr1tu4o?si=M1ogoDuzPRg-BUCx

He and the narrator attempt to explain it.

A very interesting video, and I can certainly relate to the guy talking in it. Having no eyes, blind since birth (though it wasn't cancer in my case), doing echolocation completely automatically without ever being taught it, without even thinking about it. It's not a skill that can easily be learnt by an adult, though. Perhaps to a limited extent, in some cases. To me, it's really easy. I just click my tongue.

As with most things of this nature, many refuse to believe it's a "real thing" because they have absolutely no experience with it. It's for bats and dolphins. Most sighted people will click their tongues, and think, "no way!"

My brother used to call me Batty, when I was little, as a nickname. As in, blind as a bat. Also because bats do echolocation, and "batty" means a bit loopy or mad. No matter how many times I pointed out to him that bats aren't actually blind, he still did it.

Well, so far, to the best of my knowledge, no one calls you Batty here. On the other hand, given just how astonishing the behaviors of bats can be in [at times] a pitch-black world, I suspect some blind people might consider it...a compliment?

This from WebMD:

"How Does Echolocation Work on Humans?

Surprisingly, echolocation can be learned as a skill. Experts have found that the human brain has areas that are dedicated to processing echoes. They also estimate that about 20 to 30 percent of blind people learn how to echolocate at some point in their lives.

While animals like bats and dolphins have specific sounds that they use for echolocating, humans can pick whatever sound they want to use as their sonar emission. Finger snaps, mouth clicks, and humming are some of the most common echolocating noises. Blind people also often use short and quick cane taps to echolocate.

Studies show that echolocation in humans can be so precise that they can distinguish textures such as metal through sound. Similarly, experts at echolocating can precisely identify minimal gaps between objects placed more than a meter away."

Here's another video that attempts to explain it: https://youtu.be/2IKT2akh0Ng?si=z_gNDUvG3OutJX0u

All you can do is to make that attempt yourself. Write about something that genuinely moves you, send it out to publishers, and see what happens. I did that myself twice. A whole bunch of rejections slips later I had to accept that I would never be on any best sellers list. But you can't know that until you try to write something you want to convey to others because you are passionate about it. And maybe they should be too.

I have lots of different ideas, but I always think that my writing comes across as a bit dry, lacking in feeling. The beauty of the book I recently read, Caedmon's Song, is that it was able to transport the reader to a different time and place, and to get inside the mind of the protagonist, Kirsten, and her truly heart-breaking story. I would very much recommend it, in fact, if you're looking for something new and different, and maybe we can share our thoughts, afterwards. But reading it brought home to me just how much my own writing skills pale in comparison.

There are actually two books with that title. Peter Robinson's psychological thriller and then this one: https://youtu.be/HAwPFHusEEQ?si=EgO7MIjevLVwIp9Y

In fact, when I first Googled it I got the Ruth Ashby book. I couldn't figure out what it had to do with your description. I firgured there must be another book with the same title. Bingo.

Ironically, back when I was a budding novelist, I was rather adept with the parts that revolved around dialogue...characters interacting philosophically, intellectually, emotionally, psychologically. What I was terrible at was everything else. In particular attempts to describe the world they lived in when they weren't interacting. The visual parts in other words!

I bought the book from Amazon. I've always enjoyed psychological thrillers because the focus is always on the extraordinary complexity of human psychology itself.

One idea I've been thinking about quite seriously is a young adult fantasy about some teenagers who meet an elf girl lost in the woods one day. The elves live underground, and for them, times goes much slower than for us on the surface, and although she says she's 17, she's actually thousands of years old. The teenagers have to help her find her way home, while being chased by the bad guys who want to capture her for scientific research, and in the process one of the teenagers falls in love with her. I have all the plot elements mapped out, but I'm not sure my writing skills are up to a novel-length story, or even a novella. I'm also a bit unsure how to handle visual description, whether to ignore it completely, which would detract quite considerably from the novel, or fake it. Certainly, when I read novels, I love all the visual descriptions in them.

How about this. You focus in on one particular aspect of the story and create a short story out of it. Then take this to those you value the opinions of and see how they react.

That is basically all that matters. But for many, I suspect, looks are more important than they will admit. I struggled with it myself for years and years. All one need do here in America is go to the movies or watch TV for a while. While there are exceptions, of course, the preponderance of actors are, if not drop dead gorgorous, then really, really easy on the eyes. You can even turn on the local news. Most of the female anchors and almost all of the female reporters are exceptionally attractive. Though, again, genes more or less than memes?

And then of course the "beauty industrial complex". Billions and billions of dollars are at stake convincing both men and women that they can always be considerably more attractive. But again, this is something that is either more or less a part of your own perspective. It would seem to depend on what is communicated to you about "looks" from the sighted community.

suppose it's the same when I say that physical attraction, touch, smell and so on, is important to me, and risk being accused of being shallow.

Not sure if I understand you. If you are born blind and wish to pursue sexual relationships with others, what else is there physically but touch and smell and taste and sound? How could they not understand how important they are to you? In fact, because sighted people are likely to put most of the emphasis on the visual, they become that much less adept at appreciating the sexual depth of the other senses.

From Abilities Magazine: "It is a common misconception that blind people do not experience sexual attraction because of their inability to see, but this could not be further from the truth. In reality, blind people have happy and successful sexual relationships just like everyone else,"

It's just that they will be reacting to it given their own individual frame of mind. One that does not involve sight. Besides, orgasms will no doubt feel just as good to blind men and women.

That's always been a tricky thing for me. On the one hand, there is all of the beauty, and all of the bounty we receive from nature. But then in any number of devastating ways, nature can take that bounty away. It can reconfigure our very existence into a Hell on Earth. So, as one might suspect, I am no less fractured and fragmented here as well.

The awesome power of nature is truly humbling.

And, of course, you can't help but wonder what to make of this. With God and other religions, many are able to accept nature [even at its most ferocious] because they are able to believe as well in immortality and salvation. Also, given the assumption that God is able to make sense of it all -- explain it all -- given His mysterious ways.

Just out of curiosity, when you are out among other Pagans, are attempts made to convince you that there is an afterlife. Yes, it is nothing short of natural that we die. And some are able to accept that. I'm just not one of them. Yet.

So, the dream was...prophetic in some ways? As though in anticiapation of something you had no way of knowing about? Does a vivid dream amount to something akin to an avalanche of sounds and smells and things you touch and taste? And its "reality" then embedded in how you interpret them given the context of the dream?

Much like me, only I have visual cues as well.

Yes, it seems like it was prophetic. Or just a very strange coincidence. The vividness mainly consisted of the emotional intensity, which imbued it with meaning, though the sensations in it were very strong too, in this case, touch, as I was crawling over the rubble of ruined buildings, bricks, broken glass, bits of wood sticking up, and so on, on the bare skin of my hands and knees.

Yes, that brings me closer to understanding. You don't have to see "bricks, broken glass, bits of wood sticking up" to experience what they can do to you in the rubble of ruined buildings.

Same with me. Not only do I rarely have nightmares, I almost never have surreal dreams either...dreams that are not immediately understood by me. Those "themes" that I suspect we all have.

I quite often have surreal dreams. The ones involving tunnels, for example.

Yes, most people I've spoken to about dreams marvel at just how surreal they can sometimes become. Why don't mine? Again: damned if I know.

Again, maybe I am just someone who dreams in reality instead. Almost all of my dreams are rooted in actual experiences that I have had. A couple of nights ago, for example, I was back in Miners Mills. I was with Sharon, my first love, and we were at Harvey's Lake. The dream was not really all that different from the reality all those years ago. And how wonderful to "be" with her again. I still recall vividly walking out of the water together and going over to a photo booth. A picture for her, a picture for me. Almost exacly as it did unfold all those years ago!

Some of my dreams are like that, that is, relating to actual incidents, but only a small minority, I think, and even those don't follow the events exactly. It's more the feeling about them that ties them to the actual event.

Well, we only have so much control over what we dream. I think I am rather lucky though because in my dreams I get to interact with people I once knew and loved. In my dreams, I'm back with my sister and friends and relatives and lovers and people I worked with, went to school with, grew up with, etc..

Hell, if I could figure out a way to dream 24/7, I might actually do it.

Do you mean those times when you are in a new room or in a new space...a place you have never had any expereince with?

Yes, echolocation works in new places, just as much as in familiar ones. Indeed, I rely on it in exactly those situations.

Again, back to the pods. You're in one, I'm in the other. I experience your dreams, you experience mine. In the interim though we can only do our best to understand things that we experience differently. Or, perhaps, that's the way it seems to me here and now because I know so little about blindness.

In some respects -- many respects? most respects? -- others might read these accounts and never really know that you were blind. When they find out they may have entirely different reactions. And, I suspect, particular sighted people no doubt would be grappling to imagine themselves taking a camping trip alone. Then the part where you shared these experience with sighted people and the discussions you had. They perhaps describing what they saw, you perhaps augmenting their undersanding of the sounds and the smells and the textures. But what might be going through the mind of someone at Stonehenge given the fact that they were born blind and could see none of it.

In other words, as difficult as this is for me to convey, how do blind from birth men and women translate their own experiences into descriptions that are understood by others without any visual components.

I'm glad, at least, that they didn't come across as incoherent. I've had a number of camping trips alone, the one I described being the first. I thought they'd probably get a bit repetitive after that. It's important to me to be able to do things like that, to be independent, in other words. As for Stonehenge, it's a truly amazing place, marred only by the fact that it was crawling with people at the time.

That's the thing though. In reading the accounts of your travels the descriptions don't seem all that different from something that a sighted person might encompass. Unless, again, I'm in way over my head "here and now" in understanding these things.

So, intimacy between lovers who are both blind and intimacy between lovers in which one is born blind and the other is sighted. Some things the same, other things different. Then attempts to close any communication gaps by talking about it openly and honestly.

I've only ever had such experiences with sighted partners, so can't really comment on anything else.

Just out of curiosity, how do you react to this: https://wheresyourdog.com/2016/03/25/yo ... n-because/

These are things that popped into my head, as well. Though, as I believe I noted before, I'm just one of those people who has always embraced the the view that opposites do not attract.

On the other hand, I do lots and lots of things that others do. I'm completely normal in regard to many, many things. I have just come to think about moral and political conflicts differently from most others. From my frame of mind, normal can be a blessing for some and a curse for others. What's always most important to me here is that in our interactions with others we come up with ways to take into account the fact that for different folks there really are what can be very different strokes.

I spent a long time trying to be as normal as possible, to fit in, but I'm far less bothered about it these days.

I think that's a good thing. On the other hand, it's not like I go out of my way trying not to be normal. Instead, all I can do is to accept that in many respects my own life has been lived off the beaten path.

I like being around people too...virtually. In fact, all my life I've been surrounded by people...a big family, tons of relatives, friends, fellow workers and school mates, fellow political activists, lovers, Army buddies. Now, however, I am most content being alone. If for no other reason that, when you are alone, the things you choose to do you do without having to take into account the things that others want to do instead. Giving you many more options. Though, of course, there's the downside of living like that.

I really like having my own space, my own flat, living on my own, and being free do do my own thing. I wasn't sure if I would, at first, but I soon found that it was exactly what I wanted. And I also really like having guests, cooking for them, for example, and enjoying their company. I think this is very much the best of both worlds.

And that's always what counts in the end. I live my life from day to day to day basically on my own terms. But not in a selfish sense. Hard to explain.

At least until "our own" starts in on challenging others who insist that, on the contrary, it's "their own" that others must accept.

The part where some are said to be blind not because they can't see but because they refuse to think about something like everyone else does. The are blind to The truth.

When the blind are leading the blind, the one-eyed man is king, or something...

Now, if only we could pin down what it means to be blind morally, politically and...philosophically?