StephenK

@Mighty Mouse You really are a miserable little creature aren't you?

@Truth Addict Haha, that was great.

Wow, such great wisdom. I guess you should get that tattooed on your forehead. Truly profound stuff.

Most people here are talking out of their ass, I agree. Yourself included. These constant attempts to negate the usefulness of logic while at the same time using logic to make arguments is laughable and ultimately self serving. The constant attempts to negate empirical evidence whilst appealing to empirical evidence (you assume that you're talking to another person on the internet, assuming your message is getting through to another 'person', assuming you didn't come into being 1 second ago, assuming your family exists, etc, etc.) Pure contradiction. I just call bullshit when someone is inauthentic and deliberately deceptive in declaring the paradigm(s) they're working from. Truly walking contradictions picking and choosing from different paradigms to validate their peak experiences. Just pure self deception. This incessant circle-jerk leads to anyone coming along and rambling off about why they 'have the truth', as is proved in this thread. I understand not-self because I have BOTH experienced it and have logically validated its truth through hard work and by having a basic understanding of how the human brain is conditioned and wired. I understand meaninglessness because it is logically self evident, but I am aware the self-construct naturally recoils at the idea (for very obvious evolutionary and sociological reasons). The attempts to selectively divorce logic from spirituality baffles me. The two speak the same language and are intricately tied together. They always have been. I suspect that the selective use of logic and what sometimes seems to be a real phobia to it, might reflect something far more sinister going on with the deceptive mind. People espousing their peak experiences as objective reality whilst selectively negating the use of empiricism and logic leads to the incessant hellhole of people saying 'It's all fear', 'It's all terror', 'It's all love', 'It's all (insert peak experience here)'. There is no bottom, just different layers of perception and until you see this, you're constantly lying to yourself that you're getting anywhere 'deeper' or have reached the 'base' -- whatever that may be. You are the kind of person that just sees someone with a contradictory idea to your own and lumps them into a box while screaching: "Flatlander! Flatlander! Materialist!' You do not see the nuance of positions. I do not believe the 'materialist paradigm' to be objectively true, but I see that it has incredible explanatory power. You've relegated everything to black and white boxes. Skeptics of all kinds are needed. As soon as they are removed from this forum, the spiral into self serving mental masturbation will reach its climax point -- but I guess climaxing was always the point of masturbating...

Wow, you've really convinced me. Nice argument there.

Bingo! So stop appealing to your illusory personal authority on the matter. No one is buying it, nor should they. Until you can demonstrate why your experience is anything other than fear simply running amok in your mind (your amygdala going haywire), stop making metaphysical claims about reality and existence.

This is just utter narcissism on your part. You've dropped reasoning things through and are now just appealing to your illusory personal authority on the matter, no different to a self proclaimed guru. Your game is transparent and everyone can see it. Wake up man.

I agree. I think everyone who is engaging with Thanatos in this thread has had very real experiences of this mind-state we refer to as the 'void' or 'dark night'. For me it was brought on without the use of psychedelics. The biggest insight for me was that the experience of the void is just that: an experience.

Bullshit. I guess when I feel that my dog is barking too loud, it is objectively annoying too? Anyone that disagrees with me on that must be wrong, huh? Your metaphysics and logical foundations are broken. Cheers

No. For the colorblind, the empirical evidence that color is a subjective hallucination caused by the brain processing information from photons. If you can't simply see the difference between the truth of meaninglessness and the emotional reaction to that truth, then I can't help you bud. You're spinning stories to fit your narrative. As soon as a person tries to spin stories about why their 'feelings' are objective, I know they're bullshitting themselves.

When you look at a 'red' rose, are you aware that it is not objectively red? Are you aware that to someone who is color blind, it is not red? That is, in order for rational dialogue to form, we need to separate our subjective experiences from the empirical evidence? Damn dude, I thought you were here on this forum as a skeptic haha.

I'm afraid it is the case. If it's a feeling, then by definition it is a subjective experience superimposed upon a neutral idea called 'meaninglessness'. If you can't see this, then you're sadly completely under the illusion of not being able to differentiate between reality and your subjective experience of it.

Sounds like your mind is filled with aversion to meaninglessness. If so, you've got work to do if you wish to be liberated of that aversion. Meaninglessness does not logically imply unpleasantness -- that is an inference made by your mind. If you're not experiencing aversion to meaninglessness however, then what is the problem?

Regardless of whether one believes in the self or not, first-person experience still takes on positive or negative qualities, and these positive or negative experiences will drive desire or aversion. The negation of 'self' is not a negation of direct experience itself.

You never had a point to begin with. Logic alone does not call for any action to be taken -- it never did. Even if you're suffering immensely, logic alone does not dictate that one should or shouldn't end it. Suffering just 'is'. You are deriving a normative statement from a set of facts and trying to bridge the is-ought gap. Doctors can do whatever the **** they want. You are in effect saying nothing, so I can't really respond to anything. Besides that, this topic of 'doctors' you've brought up is a big bait-and-switch from the original topic.

I'm not sure what to make of the claim 'you're already dead'. If that is a comment on the nonexistence of the self, then yes I agree. I guess you could say that the self concept never existed in the first place. In that sense, yes, you (the self concept) have always been 'dead'. However, by logic alone, one can not specify what a doctor should or shouldn't do absent a desire. This is largely encapsulated by the is–ought problem. There have been many attempts to overcome this problem, none of which seem very well reasoned out. Given that, one always needs the premise of desire or aversion in order to drive cognition. That is, in order to 'act' in an utterly indifferent universe, one needs certain premises to motivate thought. Logic alone does not give rise to 'should' statements. Logic alone does not say whether 'you should or shouldn't kill yourself'. An interesting thing to note is that the entirety of the mind is a set of inferences based upon arbitrarily set desires put in place by evolution and society. In this sense, the things that mind infers about the world are paper thin. When one experiences the pain caused by the desire to, say, fit into a social group, one can respond in one of two ways: either one strives to fit in, satiating that neural pathway and getting a serotonin or dopamine hit, or one says, "Hey, this script in my mind that drives me to look for social acceptance is pretty pointless. It causes pain. I am going to liberate myself of this pointless script running in my mind". This second approach is what I think spirituality is largely trying to do with various scripts in the mind, but people prefer to embellish spirituality with some really wacky ideas and flights of fancy to sell the idea to susceptible minds.

I certainly don't think of this site as a temple. In fact, thinking of it as a temple is a bit creepy and authoritarian in my opinion. Because there is such a wide spectrum of beliefs and world views on this site, trying to divide people into camps of 'materialist' and 'non-materialists' is going to be problematic since not everyone will fall strictly into either camp. In the end, it is up to Leo to decide the direction of this site. What drew me to actualized.org was Leo's ability to rationally and articulately take on the materialist paradigm. Dialogue is good. If you're apposed to it (the materialist paradigm), don't reply to those comments.

Yes, yes it is your wiring. The universe itself is 'wired' so to speak. Ask an apple not to fall under the influence of gravity when there is no obstacle in the way. When genetics and environment are taken into account, you are pretty much hardwired (there is a small set of behavioral and experiential modalities that your mind and body can exist in, given your unique neural wiring and physiology). This is not an opinion. This is a fact. Can you regulate your heartbeat on command? Can you induce a state of euphoria for the rest of your life? Can you choose to grow a third arm? Can you choose to be without thought for 20 minutes? People are born with different starting points in life. Some people are born into misery, poverty, abuse etc, and others are born into loving homes, are well fed, have won the genetic lottery of life and are pretty happy. Game theory would suggest that there are different strategies to be played out depending on the cards you have been dealt in life. What you're proposing in this thread is that there is a single strategy to be played that trumps all other strategies, for all players, and masquerading this strategy as reality. From a game theoretic perspective (that is, from a mathematical perspective), you are simply wrong in your assertion that there is a single rational strategy to this problem. I will however grant you that for most people in human history, the game is not worth playing. This however does give one the liberty to make existential claims about the nature of reality, since the human machine with its unique design is but a subset of reality, and to propose models of reality based on a human-centric model is flawed to begin with. As for my experience of egolessness, your assertion that 'there isn’t anything to suggest it was egolessness' means that there is first hand information about the event that you were privy to, and that I was not? Pray tell, were you channeling my mind with dark voodoo magic during this experience? Were you there in my mind? Did you cognize and order the experience as I did? Did you see as I did the neuroses fall one by one from the mind and therefore witness the dropping of suffering from awareness? If you're incapable of getting to these places, or you simply haven't tried, well then all I can say is that it must suck to be you. I don't mean to come off as rude, but that's as clear as I can put it.

I've had numerous experiences of it, so I have personally validated the benefits. For you, what I am saying is just anecdotal evidence. I can do nothing to change that. Yours is your own life to live (or not live). Mine is my own. That is the neurological diversity that exists within humans. The universe is a complex, messy space. Trying to make the diversity of life (and diversity of other minds) conform to your personal experience (your personal neural-wiring) of life is irrational.

I think that largely depends on your brain chemistry and genetics (that call needs to be made on a case by case basis). Suicide is most certainly an option for certain people. Sometimes life is shit and solutions are incredibly improbable. Sometimes it won't get better. Sometimes it will. I think most humans vastly underestimate how painful life can be. But at the same time, there are genuinely people that do enjoy life as a whole (winning the genetic or upbringing lottery). I personally don't do it because of fear. It's that simple. I am also aware of how pleasant life can be when the ego gets out of the way. If I can get to the ego-less space in 10 years, I think it'll be worth the pain. On the other hand, if no progress is shown as I get older, I wouldn't be completely opposed to ending it.

If 'ego' is equated with the idea of 'self', then surely there can exist desires outside of the context of self? Does desire necessitate the existence of a 'self' (as described in spiritual traditions)? I personally don't know.

Reality is fundamentally information. What is information? Information is the relationship/s between different states of consciousness. Those perceived relationships are consciousness. Fundamentally, information is pattern recognition within consciousness, and pattern recognition allows us to anticipate future states of consciousness. The question of there being an 'external reality' is another question all together, and one that I believe can never be answered. There are relationships; that is all that can be said in my opinion.

I'm finding that every time I get find a passion, within a few weeks there comes a time where suddenly it dawns on me that it is completely pointless. That I am chasing a dream that will ultimately mean nothing. Suddenly that passion disappears. After that a strong desire to meditate and liberate myself of worldly desires arrives. This seems to be a recurring, cyclical pattern. Can anyone relate?

Under 'wants' I would add: Social-Rank (status seems to be a big driving force for primates) Sexual-Opportunities (ties in with social-rank) Resources for humans this has turned into the modern consumer society To not die To be fair, the points I made seem to apply to pretty much all species that are configured to work in groups. As for what a chimp does not want, that is just the opposite of what he does want.