Let's begin here. We can assume Buddha had the best interests of mankind in mind, morally. So, it follows that knowledge of God is harmful. Why else would he remain silent? Can you pick up the thread from there... — TheMadFool

As I attempted to explain, knowledge of God is not harmful, but an empty image of God is. Isn't that also something western religions agree about? No idols, and even the name of God being something that can't even be pronounced. Literally unspeakable without misunderstanding.

Where is the reversing? Isn't it that because mirrors don't reverse things that you think that they do? Because if you were to take obi wan, and turn him around (reverse him) that his sword would be in the other hand? It's not an expectation based on how you think things ought to look if things were ways that they ain't?

Mirrors don't actually reverse anything. You're just imagining that if you were standing over there, and facing the other way, that the reflected hand would be your left raised rather than your right, but you aren't standing over there, it's a reflection. So it's your concepts that reverse things, not the mirror.

I'll also add that I don't believe that the western tradition is as developed. It comes down more to God, and Satan possession. The logos is God possession, in which one's words are selfless, and rise up directly from the source. Satan possession is the opposite, in that one's words are selfish, and come from self-interest. One comes from the source, and uses oneness as the guidepost. The other comes from the ego, and uses only the self as the guidepost.

They all comes out of yogic tradition. It wasn't so much that Buddha eschewed God, as much as that he thought that dogma was counter-productive, and led to pre-conception, and attachment, and got more in the way than helped, in my view.

What is often described as chaos and order, I think is better thought of as undifferentiated oneness, and discernment. Sense and judgment. "God" is this undifferentiated oneness, which is then filtered through conceptual schemes. Da Buddha didn't seem to trust conceptual schemes, and thought that dogmas was counter-productive. Language is limited, and even more than that, pre-conception and attachment to ideas is a source of delusion. Maya being "extraordinary power and wisdom". Having certain maps that are the ultimate truth makes one see things only though these schemes.

I think that all that is really important to note, is that every religious tradition agrees about one thing, and that is that morality is paramount. One isn't going to see undifferentiated oneness while treating themselves and everyone else as fundamentally different. Because "this is me", "this is mine" and such becomes justified with societal strata, economic status, age, creed, intelligence, attractiveness, and any other kind of differentiation that one may come up with. To cling to these, to hold fast to these, and to even speculate on a metaphysical delineation is a great obstacle.

Da Buddha only forwards practical, and moral precepts, that are practicable, things that you do, and not things that you believe.

For this reason, I don't think that Da Buddha has any real difference in end place as many many mystics, and religious traditions, but what differs is his approach on how to get there. What is by far the most important is that everyone gets there, in his view, and not sharing second hand what it's like, as that can never be truly shared in the first place. It just becomes an obstacle for everyone else.

Fourteen ears and seven eyes
Bottle up the midnight skies

Dance amidst ice and fire
String thy soul like a lyre

Close two eyes and open four
Make the rabbit thy mentor

Move to the left, then the right
Climb to the highest height

Speak the cosmos into being
See all the chains as freeing

Sit still and wait no more
Be in awe of what thy bore

Sleep now for all to see
Take refuge in a dying tree

Die for eternal lore
Want for naught and ask no more.

Split and echo a sundered past
See and listen till the last

Brought to surface with a quake
Drown in a mirrored lake

Material fashioned with a voice
Asleep with a corpse to hoist

Chaos and order sing
Emptiness is all you fling

Caught in a well without sight
Waiting for a beam of light

Pace the earth on every path
From each one form a craft

From arms of chairs spit and laugh
Feel no spirit feel no gaffe

Senseless dead epiphany
Cannibalize a crystal sea.

This is you and this is me
And so it will remain for eternity.

I'm not sure about much right now for some reason. I think I'd rather just remain silent for awhile, and do some studying.

Kind of. As Nietzsche pointed out, truth is interpretation, and there could theoretically be an infinite number of them for any given phenomenon, but that doesn't mean that all are equal good, useful, or relevant. Facts give the world form, and are ways of looking at it. Once formed they are for all intents and purposes, observer independent. Like bringing underlying regularities, or general principles to the surface.

Maybe that much greater thing that overtakes you is the real you, and the "seer" is what's unnecessary. Being receptive, engaged, not thinking, that's when the soul emerges, but the greatness, and excitement of it ironically distracts us from it immediately. It's such an amazing thing, that we turn our backs on it the moment it surfaces in order to replay that little tiny piece of it back to ourselves in a million different ways.

Should also say, that extracting memories in order to create projections alters the memories. You use a conceptual scaffolding to give form to memories, which are emotionally tagged, and remembered because of their emotional significance, and you may not even have the conceptual tools to bring them into focus. When you can and do, you alter them based on that scaffolding, which is a general form, and recreate the details every time, and store them differently depending on how you feel about them at the time of recollection or when you're done with them.

Thought is made of hope and fear. It directs you towards desirable possibilities that are not ready at hand, and away from possible dangers that are not ready at hand. Representing stuff to yourself is always about one of these two things, and the forms, and modes that they take effect your dispositions towards the ideas, as well as your levels of desire and aversion. They're useful for bringing things up from the past in order to direct the future. They aren't actually necessary to get by, and they can so greatly diverge from reality that they can become entirely wrong about how you reacted and will react, and can even be entirely unpracticable.

When you're thinking, you're ignoring your senses in order to develop these projections. Thought takes the place of sense in every moment that you're thinking.

Think of it more like training, accompanied by pre-existing conditioning. There are only so many ways to see, and interact with the world that actually work. If the representational faculties of the brain are destroyed, your training and instinct will still allow you to interact with the world in a trained, and instinctual way. You can have everything above the brain stem removed, and no one (including yourself) would even notice. The only difference is that you'd loss all inhibition, become super exploratory, and couldn't learn anything new.

Only if you aren't all into procrastinating, or aren't agreeing with yourself about it. Stress is everywhere, gravity itself is stress. I'm not opposed to not being completely productive all the time. You don't want to be a tyrant to yourself. A lot of valuable stuff comes out of procrastination too.

Life's full of stress, and mine is no different. Got mouths to feed and bills to pay, people to deal with. I don't exist in some magical place without stress heartache or trauma, nor am I perfect if you think I'm making claims that I am. If you're looking to point out flaws in me, then it will not be difficult, I'm riddled with them.

Ouch... this cat's got claws. You're right though, I'm more procrastinating than satiating boredom though. I ought to be updating my resume and finding a job now. My sister found a new job, and a decent one, and started today. I plan to have one by the end of the week... but procrastination!

You know that at one time, researchers believed that dogs did not feel pain, and the noises that they made when you tortured them was actually just the sound of a spring somewhere in their physiology they had yet to identify.

My holistic metaphysics is aimed toward oneness, so that really, you're all part of me, so that it's always me that leaves the last post.

:D last post infinity. I claim ye for all eternity!

Is it that you don't believe people can be conditioned to respond in ways that apparently bypass their conscious awarness? — praxis

This is what you said. What does "bypass conscious awareness" mean? I said to call a spade and spade. I said call relaxation relaxation, and assign proper credit where it is due.

So yeah, I agree with the things I said, and don't think they're deceptive. I was disagreeing with what you said.

I know, everyone thinks that bullshit is no big deal... we all say we're about truth, until we decide that there's some personal benefit in bullshitting, and then we're totally for that.

Gear Second is definitely my favorite technique.

Deception is always destructive, autonomy violating, and puppeteering.

That's called being deceived... and although quite shitty, divisive, disorienting, disassociating, and destructive... it's definitely a thing.

Yeah, suicide bombers are frustrated, but not politically, or religiously, the ones that are frustrated in that sense are sending out the suicide bombers. The frustrated bombers are frustrated by a homoromatic polygamist society that turns people into drones -- created by a fucking pedophile that's experiences of God were seizure like, and painful.

I'm not saying lets be violent to them, but also recognize that they kind of suck, and it's because they suck that they're doing that.

I mean, our culture really has better values, and not just our culture, but most. Not blaming the victim, but Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, they all knew that violence doesn't actually work for creating, or negotiating anything -- just give the opposition justification, give them a reason and they'll totally use violence against you. It's difficult to do, and look justified when they're peaceful though. When you maintain non-violent, honest strategies, then they can't kill you without just making you stronger.

When you're violent though, it's easy to justify violence right back at you. They aren't dumb, they're unreasonable, and won't negotiate, nor maintain strategies that do anything other than perpetuate violence.

Since we're so doubly awesome and better, we even want to turn the other cheek. Why is that? Probably because we don't suck nearly as much over here maybe?

What is it besides the relaxation, the change in habit, and trying something new, the breathing, and music that is doing that? What is hypnosis besides that? Besides that, all I see is placebo, or the belief that something has a cause that it doesn't, and feeling ways accordingly.

You say "conscious manipulation" above, but if you're lying to yourself, and it's working, can all of that really be conscious? Don't you actually have to believe some bullshit in order for that manipulation to work? Like the power of suggestion effecting your psychological disposition, and behavior? If you were truly conscious that it was manipulation, would it really work?

They say that placebos even work when you're told that they're placebos, but I don't think that's the whole story. Either there is a paranoid response in which you don't fully believe that, or you're only told it's a placebo after being told that it is something else.

No, consciously doing it would be finding the real cause of things, and then changing the world, or changing your routines in such a way that they have an effect. The act of meditating, or relaxation, or listening to calming music may have an effect, that you then attribute to "hypnosis"... but what does that even mean? How exactly is hypnosis doing that?

All da possibilities hit you no matter where you go, but particularly frequented environments your instantly get hit with the activity associations of that environment. Even drug tolerance is environment specific, as in, when people overdose by mistake, they don't do it by taking more drugs than they're used to, they do it by taking them in a different environment than they're used to, and expecting their tolerance to be the same.

Yeah, we're (usually) a collection of activities that we habituate, and settle into. This is the whole Aristotelian idea of cultivating good habits, which isn't a question of willpower, as much as it is putting yourself in the proper environments, and having the proper associations, and recognizing and creating the proper opportunities in order to facilitate the cultivation of good habits.


Don't see what any of that has to do with hypnosis though and if you think that your effecting your habits, or associations through hypnosis, you aren't. You're just being mislead about the real cause of it, as I said.

I qualified that i thought that, implying less than certainty... ass was covered there. :D

I actually wasnt aware of the theory that linked them, muahahaha. I just knew that both events took place around the same time, so it wasnt much of a hope skip and a jump.

Lol, me too man. Me too.

Which coincided with the last time that massive volcano under yellowstone (which at the time was more under Russia, I believe) went off. The volcano is so fucking huge, that when it goes, it will be like setting off 200,000 nuclear weapons all at once. You'll hear it go off everywhere on earth, for a week.

And I addressed that, but I'll go even further. Do you start cheering the bully on when it looks like your kid is about to lose? Do you give up the moment the chips are down, and the odds look stacked against you? Isn't that precisely the time to have the most faith, or youll second guess yourself, hesitate, and fail?

You're just repeating stuff about "evidence", and "proof" because you're brainwashed bro... if you think about how you actually live, and the kinds of values that bring success, and the kinds that bring failure, you'll see that expecting evidence and proof and all is fine in some cases, but ridiculously stagnating, and crippling in others.

Well, the contradiction (above) is real. What do you think of it? Am I being stupid or have I made a clever observation? — TheMadFool

I didn't say you were stupid, I said that you were interpreting it as stupidly as possible, which makes you self-aggrandizing, thinking that what you're reading is that stupid.

Is Einstein's thought experiment obviously wrong because trains can't travel the speed of light?

I should point out as well, that conceptualizations bring form to experience, which is why Schizophrenics hallucinate. Because their empathetic systems are damaged, or screwed up in some way. Precepts without concepts are blind.

This is also how mass sightings of aliens ghosts, and sea monsters work, as well as hearing messages in songs played backwards. When something is unclear, or non-obvious (or your conceptualizations are brought into enough doubt) then your precepts become malleable.

Don't underestimate the power that he was in possession of. Don't think for a second that he couldn't have mind fucked everyone, and made them see whatever the fuck he wanted.

I would and did. Doctors themselves will tell you that it's up to the person more than anything if they survive traumatic injury, they have to fight to stay alive. It's up to patients whether or not therapy will work, the most important step being reaching out, admitting that they have a problem, and trying to find a solution.

It isn't really an opposition. Hiding in a cave from a tornado is no different than seeking medical help for cancer in my view. One of Satan's temptations was for Jesus to test his faith, by doing something moronic like jumping off of a cliff...

There's also that great joke about the guy on the top of his roof after a flood, and he prays for God to save him, so a boat shows up, but he waves them away because he has faith that God will save him. Then an empty raft that he ignores, and then finally a helicopter... but he rejects them all waiting for God to save him, and then drowns like a moron.

The Gods help those that help themselves, as Aesop put it.

You don't want to try to interpret things as stupidly as possible.

Do you require certainty of success before you'll attempt something? You probably won't get around to much if that's the case. I think that we ought to have faith in ourselves, and faith in others -- because most of the things we attempt, there is no guarantee of success, or positive outcome. There is just the hope of it.

Personally, if success is a certainty, then that sounds pretty boring to me.

Marketers will try fucking anything that can be remotely construed as legal... I think that their best technique has always been, and will always be the tried and true telling you that you're flawed/lacking, and they have the solution.

Like I said though, everyone seems to acknowledge that we're talking about the power of suggestion, which is what the placebo effect is, but yet everyone still treats them like they're super different things, and there is some kind of air of mystery, and mysticism around hypnosis that there isn't around the placebo effect...