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See, Mannie gets it...Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 8:25 pmhenry quirk wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 7:49 pm how can you know yourself?
Be a good gatekeeper to your head; test and retest every assumption, every belief, regularly; where you find alien roots, excise them.
Is your head yourself? If not, what is yourself and what can know it?Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 8:25 pmhenry quirk wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 7:49 pm how can you know yourself?
Be a good gatekeeper to your head; test and retest every assumption, every belief, regularly; where you find alien roots, excise them.
I think you might misunderstand my intention in quoting Castaneda. It does not matter to me that Castaneda said what he said, and though I know that the scene he managed and directed in LA resulted in the explosion I referred to, I do not suggest being closed to the idea that he presented, and that you also presented since, it seems, you have read Castaneda. I simply point out that he is restating a type of demonology. And if what I say is true, and I think it is, then it points to the fact that certain ideas -- or are they senses or beliefs that operate under ideas? -- constantly occur and recur.henry quirk wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 8:57 pm It was a metaphor for the garbage in a head and how it gets there, guy, not an advertisement for Castaneda.
But here is the curious twist: To see that it was just such a Ponzi scheme, and that it ended quite badly for some (even many) does not mean that there is nothing of value in those books. Isn't that a puzzle? How wisdom and error sometimes intertwine?A Ponzi scheme of the mind.
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
Who's asking?Nick_A wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 9:32 pmIs your head yourself? If not, what is yourself and what can know it?Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 8:25 pmhenry quirk wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 7:49 pm how can you know yourself?
Be a good gatekeeper to your head; test and retest every assumption, every belief, regularly; where you find alien roots, excise them.
Mebbe so. If so, my apologies.Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 9:34 pmI think you might misunderstand my intention in quoting Castaneda.
It could be either you or your personality. They both can ask a questionImmanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 9:41 pmWho's asking?
If there's no "Nick" to ask the question, then I must conclude that the question is not being asked, or at least, not being asked by anyone, so doesn't need to be answered.
No apology needed nor asked for!henry quirk wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 9:45 pmMebbe so. If so, my apologies.Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 9:34 pmI think you might misunderstand my intention in quoting Castaneda.
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo ("Grant eternal rest unto him"). Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"
The observation that every individual consciousness is totally subjective therefore impossible for anyone to know by direct experience what anyone else's conscious experience is seems fundamental to me (though the whole of the psuedo-science of psychology ignores it), and hardly a great insight one is required to poison their brain with chemicals to discover (like Huxley).Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 6:18 pmI lose track of what people are talking about at times if it does not seem pertinent to what interests me or seems important. Though I enjoy RC and admire his forcefulness I find I have little use for his over-all assertions.
However, what DontAskMe asked is a very good question taken in-and-of itself. How can a person know himself? It might not be the topic that fits into this on-going conversation about Christianity, but the question is a very good one. It is possible to be so involved in and invested in oneself (attached to what one imagines oneself to be or stuck in one vision or version of oneself) that one cannot 'get outside of oneself enough' to see oneself. This is a fact.
I think it should be mentioned here that *getting outside of oneself* has been, and still is, one of the techniques of spiritual self-investigation. Take for example the type of human potential movement that A. Huxley got involved with or inspired in California. And we all know how he came to his realizations if anyone had read The Doors of Perception.
There is now developing a whole cultural movement where psychedelic drugs like mushrooms (see the 'trendy new hallucinogenic' -- toad venom).
Now, the interesting thing, from my perspective, is to become aware of 'shattering perspectives'. This would be another aspect or episode in the processes in which *the horizon was erased*. The loss of ground under one's feet. The incapacity to know where one is located. To be adrift in a netherworld between a collapsing metaphysic and the uncertain definition of another metaphysics.
I do not think any of this is a small matter.
Just for the heck of it a quote from Doors of Perception:
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.”
Well, apologies, as I reckon it, are only meaningful when offered without prompt. If you gotta ask for one, what you get probably ain't worth spit. Also: apologies are as much for the giver as for the receiver. It's the recognition of I done wrong. A little honest humble pie fortifies the soul.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 10:00 pmIf there's no "Nick" to ask the question, then I must conclude that the question is not being asked, or at least, not being asked by anyone, so doesn't need to be answered.
But if there is a "Nick," then Nick no longer needs to ask that question: he already knows.
In short, you know very well how you know you're a self. Just get in touch with what you already know.
The inner man is what a person is born with. During life they acquire a personality which they call themselves. The human condition asserts that the conditioned self does not express the essence or the inner man. Not even Solomon had a personality which cold express the inner man. Yet the essence of the lily is manifested in the lilies of the field.Matthew 6:
25 Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment? 26 Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value than they? 27 And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto [a]the measure of his life? 28 And why are ye anxious concerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: 29 yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these..............
There is a funny story but I do not know if it is true. The musician Captain Beefheart when struggling for money sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door in LA. He happened to knock on the door of Aldous Huxley who, as it happened, answered his own door. (I know a pun applies here but I will omit it). You may or may not know that in the later part of his life Huxley lived in California. If I remember correctly I think Beefheart was so overawed he did not know what to say. And Huxley was not in the market for a new vacuum. As often happens one thinks of what to say or what should have been said well after the fact.RCSaunders wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 10:41 pmThe observation that every individual consciousness is totally subjective therefore impossible for anyone to know by direct experience what anyone else's conscious experience is seems fundamental to me (though the whole of the pseudo-science of psychology ignores it), and hardly a great insight one is required to poison their brain with chemicals to discover (like Huxley).
The only conscious experience you can know is your own, and no one else can know what your conscious experience is. You can tell each other what you experience, but each will only be able interpret the others' experience in terms of their own. You can tell someone else, "this tastes like cinnamon to me," but he can have no idea what that means unless he has tasted cinnamon and then can only know what it tastes like to him, but never what it tastes like to you.
I've read a good deal of Huxley and I have a great appreciation for him. So I regard his ideas about our solitude and subjectivity as just one element in his ideas that have value. Proper Studies had a certain effect on me. I thought Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited were highly worthy.Does that seem profound to you?
To me, at least, it's common sense. No amount of profundity is required to figure that out. What is pseudo through and through is the dumb mystical claptrap people never cease to believe in giving all the pathetic boobs out there some value added consolation of identifiable intent which all the weak-spirited and weak-minded are so desperate for. There's not enough mental muscle to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as it really exists, so let's create vast regions of absurdity to lessen the impact. Nothing is ever absurd if enough people believe and accept it without any afterthought whether these belief leprechauns possess any validity. If life is a tale told by an idiot it's only because the idiots keep telling it and proving it.RCSaunders wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 10:41 pmThe observation that every individual consciousness is totally subjective therefore impossible for anyone to know by direct experience what anyone else's conscious experience is seems fundamental to me (though the whole of the psuedo-science of psychology ignores it), and hardly a great insight one is required to poison their brain with chemicals to discover (like Huxley).Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 6:18 pmI lose track of what people are talking about at times if it does not seem pertinent to what interests me or seems important. Though I enjoy RC and admire his forcefulness I find I have little use for his over-all assertions.
However, what DontAskMe asked is a very good question taken in-and-of itself. How can a person know himself? It might not be the topic that fits into this on-going conversation about Christianity, but the question is a very good one. It is possible to be so involved in and invested in oneself (attached to what one imagines oneself to be or stuck in one vision or version of oneself) that one cannot 'get outside of oneself enough' to see oneself. This is a fact.
I think it should be mentioned here that *getting outside of oneself* has been, and still is, one of the techniques of spiritual self-investigation. Take for example the type of human potential movement that A. Huxley got involved with or inspired in California. And we all know how he came to his realizations if anyone had read The Doors of Perception.
There is now developing a whole cultural movement where psychedelic drugs like mushrooms (see the 'trendy new hallucinogenic' -- toad venom).
Now, the interesting thing, from my perspective, is to become aware of 'shattering perspectives'. This would be another aspect or episode in the processes in which *the horizon was erased*. The loss of ground under one's feet. The incapacity to know where one is located. To be adrift in a netherworld between a collapsing metaphysic and the uncertain definition of another metaphysics.
I do not think any of this is a small matter.
Just for the heck of it a quote from Doors of Perception:
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.”
The only conscious experience you can know is your own, and no one else can know what your conscious experience is. You can tell each other what you experience, but each will only be able interpret the others' experience in terms of their own. You can tell someone else, "this tastes like cinnamon to me," but he can have no idea what that means unless he has tasted cinnamon and then can only know what it tastes like to him, but never what it tastes like to you.
Does that seem profound to you?
Yep. Gotta watch out for worms. Like I say: they get into your head and reorganize.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Apr 03, 2022 1:22 amThen you know what a "self" is. You have a "Nick." He may get older and smarter, and he may not: either way, he's still Nick, not Marcy or Rufus or Mo or Ravinder.
That's a "self."
