This thread may be unpopular; so be it. If I reach a single person, that is enough.
Seven years ago, I discovered my life's purpose -- but didn't realize it at the time. I had discovered Buddhism, and this notion that one could attain perfect happiness without a single material possession instantly lifted up my spirit from the depths it had remained in since childhood, since I had learned of death, and had heard those stories of children who become orphans from a plane crash, knowing that the only thing separating us from them is a stroke of luck. And that chasing any happiness in this world is to embrace a dice roll with a good probability of immense suffering. You can call it silly, but to single-digit-age me, consigning yourself to fate like this was more or less insane, and that was only confirmed by the large quantity of childhood suffering outside of my control. So from there I ducked out of (most) socializing to learn everything I could, unconsciously in response to this issue.
When I discovered Buddhism, I was truly elated for the first time in years, to this doctrine promising everything that I had desired. But as I dug deeper, I encountered problems with this scripture, and meditation and so on that could only build to one conclusion: Enlightenment is not real. The pieces building up to this conclusion are too numerous to list, but essentially there is little evidence to believe in a state of enlightenment qua profound transformation of your moment-to-moment experience where the problem of change is solved. What does happen though is a non-dualist revelation analogous to the mystic experiences of all religions. In fact, for the Hindus and Jains it was this experience that led to liberation in the next life. Nothing came afterward. Now consider that yoga and meditation were practiced in India for a solid millennium before Buddhism, and if such a state existed the Hindus and Jains would have surely noted it. So this revelation is quite achievable, but it is functionally the end of the mystic path. There is almost no evidence to suggest otherwise.
Now, why am I writing this post...? Because I can't accept that outcome. I refuse to believe it simply ends there, and we have a healthy amount of evidence that is largely ignored which gives us reason to be skeptics. Here's a brief list:
- Meditative jhanas exist, and they are (allegedly) the most pleasant sensation a human can experience, they can be sustained for hours, and demand very little energy. These show up on brain scans.
- You can take drugs in a lucid dream, and this produces the effects of the drug (for the majority). What's more, if you imagine a drug you've never tried, it will match whatever you expect to occur.
- The human body functions remarkably well on drugs, or in other altered states of consciousness.
- LSD has been observed to produce virtually any symptoms imaginable, or even no symptoms at all.
- LSD-like effects may be obtained easily through hyperventilation, at no cost to oneself (save a little energy).
- I have myself replicated some effects of alcohol and cough syrup through meditation.
- Predictive processing is a fact at this point; we humans play an active role in constructing our perceptions.
- Meditation has effects on the parasympathetic nervous system we did not know were possible until recently. Wim Hoff and Tummo do as well.
Hence the following conclusion:
- There is little reason to believe in the "No free lunch" theory of human happiness, that is to say, that our good must be obtained at some expense.
You can take a very, very tentative stance that our body's homeostasis lends itself to survival by default, but that perhaps by some mysterious process this homeostasis may be changed, and so effects that are normally won through bitter exertion are now had easily.
I am aware this is fringe -- probably too fringe for here, honestly. But be aware you are my best shot. The Buddhists are too dogmatic, the dreamers are too "spiritual". There is clearly something worth investigating here, but apparently nobody is doing so. My tag is crashestoearth on discord, but I'm responsive here as well. Add me if you're curious, and skeptics too please chime in. If you are a Buddhist dogmatist though I'm not interested. Thanks for reading.
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Notes -
Society doesn't work in a way which supports human well-being. Advertisement for instance attempts to create a need that it then tries to fulfill. And it's possible that even if we managed to make all of a society enlightened, they would cease to exist in a single generation as they either renounced marriage, or became so uninterested in conflict that another country could easily conquer them. I also believe that Postmodernism has made society worse, even though it has correctly identified that some things are social constructs (and incorrectly made human nature out to be a construct). But yeah, Chesterton's fence applies here. Many bad things have good second-order effects, and maybe good things have bad second-order effects.
Teaching these things is difficult, but only because we're so corrupted by societies teachings. I believe that a child would grasp them more easily.
There's a small possibility that we all have weak reality-bending powers in that our subconsciousness can affect the universe, and there's a chance that one can make this power stronger. I once visualized that I got an A in a class that I had barely studies for, and I somehow did. How? My presentation was mediocre at best. The situation with my brother is also not understood by neither science nor old books (except those which cover mind-blowing things).
John Wheeler was an extremely intelligent scientist and won many awards, and he arrived at a "participatory universe theory". And the general ratio of highly intelligent people who believe in strange things is quite high. There's also some research by the CIA like the gateway process: https://www.vice.com/en/article/found-page-25-of-the-cias-gateway-report-on-astral-projection/
And it's possible that beliefs influences reality in a way such that reality is the superimposing of all beliefs, which means that the doubts of many can cancel out the beliefs of few (which may be why many cultures warn that one should not say their wishes out loud). Another theory of mine is that things cannot change state while they're observed (the Quantum Zeno effect?), which means that they need to be unobserved in order to be malleable. Lets again use Tarot cards as an example, but shuffling the cards while you're not observing them, you create unobserved states, and the cards become "undecided". Now, as you observe a card, it's decided, and your subconsciousness (or your past and future trajectory) somehow influences this choice. Some call the set of unobserved/undecided things "Chaos". For chaotic things, very small inputs can result in vastly different outputs, but this means that the energy of the human brain is enough (as the future trajectory of events can be altered by spending a few calories worth of energy). Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kia_(magic)
But isn't it more fun to find these truths yourself? If you figure everything out, you will be bored (this seems a bit like your current problem actually) And if somebody discover a "mind-blowing" secret before us, and gets access to a higher power, we may be in trouble. Especially if some government gets their hand on said knowledge.
Your quote by Aristotle seems to be the same thing I wrote earlier about there being no true language and no true axiomatic system, but that "You must choose one". It's like when we talk - we have to choose a language in order to talk. Any language will do, but we cannot speak of anything which does not have a word in that language, trapping us.
There's a rule in effect, but it's difficult to construct a rule which explains all examples. I think that submission to a higher power vs making oneself out to be the higher power is the difference between white magic and black magic. There's many warnings that black magic can destroy you or make you go insane. It may just be that being humble has a lot of benefits for the psyche - after all, basically ever culture to ever exist has spoken positively about humility. It's possible that herd morality is to blame for this virtue of humility (an aspect of human nature in normies say "The nail which sticks out gets hammered down") but even non-conformists tend to come up with a saying similar to "Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted." It's possible that "authorities" just have higher, well, authority over the programming of the mind. After all, most socities have leaders whose words are absolute. Just like humans crave external validation and overestimate the importance of others opinions, our brain may value the worldview of authorities very highly.
I know some of them. One is that contradiction works differently than you'd think. Trying to be positive, and trying not to be negative are not the same. You can be positive, but the more you try "not to be negative" the harder you will fail. This is related to "Do or do not, there is no try". Also sometimes communicated like this: "When you try to be happy, you reinforce the idea that you're not already happy, which makes you stuck in the unhappy stage". The Tao Te Ching also has a bunch of rules which are just the opposite of what one would expect.
I think I've seen something like that over at https://qualiacomputing.com While I don't think you can solve reality or human nature with mathematics, these are the guys who have come the closest to being able to do this so far.
Like the attempt to eliminate evil and the attempt to eliminate suffering, eliminating the dark night of the soul may be naive. The dark night could be an important step in reaching enlightenment, like how getting your pulse up is an important step in lowering your resting heart rate, and kind of like how nihilism can be a transitory state between belief in the external and belief in the self. You can eliminate bad dreams quite easily, but I believe that they're just reflections of your general situation in life, or even important messages from your subconsciousness. Anyway, if you want to eliminate bad dreams, you need to tell yourself that these dreams do you no good, and have conflicting parts of yourself agree with this. Hypnosis should work as well, as long as your subconsciousness perceive the person who hypnotizes you as an authority. But again, even so-called bad things exist for a reason. There's a duality principle here as well. Or perhaps this "bad" thing is a part of something bigger. We don't like having red lights in traffic, but eliminating red lights would be a terrible idea. We only know this because we know why traffic lights exist, but some things seem bad without us knowing why they exist, so getting rid of them is dangerous.
I'm not interested in truths, really, but results. Belief is cheap. So long as we're confined to the same outcomes as the ancients, it's hard to be optimistic.
That's a strong argument, I will give you that. We can only hope for something better if either of these are true:
1: We're more intelligent now
2: The ancients stopped progressing because they were content with what they achieved
3: Modern technology or circumstances makes it possible to go further (biofeedback and such?)
4: Having access to all of these different schools of knowledge thanks to the internet, and being able to combine them or pick the best parts of each, allows us to go further in some sense.
That being said, it's not an uncommon idea (and I discovered it myself independently) that we are god, and that we had to make ourselves forget that we were, in order to be able to live. If you wrote a book, and you were to enter the story you had written, then you'd need to forget that you were the author in order to enjoy it and immerse yourself in it. Being god is empty. "Against boredom even the gods struggle in vain". Even people who reach the peak in video games tend to get the urge to start over. Besides, limitation is important. Writers block is a result of having too many choices. "Everything" and "Nothing" have many things in common. I think they might be the same thing, actually. Things can only exist with limitations (Language can only exist because some combinations of letters and punctuation aren't allowed)
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