Enlightenment and brain damage?

[How to be wise]

With enlightenment being this universal god-like experience, it is, in the end of the day, just a brain function. So is it possible to ‘lose’ your enlightenment in some kind of an accident just like how people lose their memory or other functions of their head? Also, other self-actualized attainments like emotional mastery and being ecstasic all the time. Can you lose them if your have a certain brain injury?

Edited December 26, 2017 by How to be wise

[Nahm]

@How to be wise that’s the materialist paradigm. You would not be able to lose enlightenment because there wasn’t anything gained to begin with. The brain, and the person it’s in, are a dream within what is permanent. Ultimately, that’s you. There would only be the illusion of something gained and something lost. No one could know what the experience is without experiencing it. 

[How to be wise]

2 minutes ago, Nahm said:

@How to be wise that’s the materialist paradigm. You would not be able to lose enlightenment because there wasn’t anything gained to begin with. The brain, and the person it’s in, are a dream within what is permanent. Ultimately, that’s you. There would only be the illusion of something gained and something lost. No one could know what the experience is without experiencing it. 

I understand enlightenment quite well. But I’m speaking practically here. If sadhguru was in a motorbike accident and loses his memory, will he still be enlightened? Enlightenment is a phenomenon of the brain. 

It’s quite hard to have this conversation because enlightenment doesn’t occur anywhere and the brain doesn’t exist and so on. But, just like snorting some psychedelics up your brain can give you an enlightenment experience, there can be things that happen to the brain that can lose your enlightenment. Stop being so ‘new age’ here. I’m not disagreeing with you when you say that the brain doesn’t cause our reality. But what I’m saying is that your perception of reality can change if the structure of your brain changes. 

[Afonso]

45 minutes ago, Nahm said:

@How to be wise that’s the materialist paradigm. You would not be able to lose enlightenment because there wasn’t anything gained to begin with. The brain, and the person it’s in, are a dream within what is permanent. Ultimately, that’s you. There would only be the illusion of something gained and something lost. No one could know what the experience is without experiencing it. 

That's a good point but I wonder, isn't Enlightenment like a body thing? Even after having experienced No-Self, there's still this doubt. If I take 5-MeO, then it is the body that takes it... So it makes sense that somehow it can fall back. Couldn't the illusion come back somehow?

Edited December 26, 2017 by Afonso

[Nahm]

10 minutes ago, Afonso said:

That's a good point but I wonder, isn't Enlightenment like a body thing? Even after having experienced No-Self, there's still this doubt. If I take 5-MeO, then it is the body that takes it... So it makes sense that somehow it can fall back. Couldn't the illusion come back somehow?

There is a being, and it is just being. Within it, it is ‘imagining’ being Afonso, and within Afonso is a thought about what it is to be only the being, which isn’t being experienced, because it is being Afonso, thinking, and asking the question. This Being, being Afonso, minus the thinking, minus the question, is the actual answer - because then there is no answer, because there no longer is a question, no duality happening within the Being.   Also, Being, no longer being Afonso, is the actual answer, because then Being is not being Afonso, so there is no Afonso thinking about this. When we are only being, such as ‘on a trip’, or in meditation, this gets real funny real fast, because we see that we were already this Being all along, which was being Afonso. Then we tend to come ‘out of’ the trip, and resume thinking, and eventually we say, (because this is the nature of thinking, of duality)  “wait...what was...how did that...was I?....etc”. 

[AleksM]

 

Light  (DNA emits light, scientifically proven in the 1950).

Light is the blueprint of the physical organism.

So when the physical organism experiences damage, the light is not lost.

When you meditate, you are downloading higher electromagnetic light frequencies into your body.

[Leo Gura]

You guys still don't get it.

THERE ARE NO BRAINS!

Like, seriously.

[Joseph Maynor]

10 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

You guys still don't get it.

THERE ARE NO BRAINS!

Like, seriously.

This is deep.  Thanks.  It really gets at the way the Mind individuates reality and then turns a heterogyny into a monolith.  We need to see how language does this on the larger scale Leo.  The way that the Mind and language work together to order reality is what people need to be able to see with the highest degree of awareness.  This awareness in me is one of my greatest strengths in this work at this point.  But it requires some theory, some explanation to bring about this kind of awareness.  That’s because people aren’t exposed to these ideas unless they happened upon them in Philosophy studies or somehow otherwise.

Edited December 26, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[sarapr]

6 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

You guys still don't get it.

THERE ARE NO BRAINS!

Like, seriously.

But you said it yourself that  appearances affect other appearances. That person will  certainly not feel the oneness with the world anymore.

[mp22]

1 minute ago, Leo Gura said:

You guys still don't get it.

THERE ARE NO BRAINS!

Like, seriously.

With all due respect, you indoctrinated yourself into believing this through selective readings, drugs and meditation.  You don't like debates, logic, the scientific method, the law of non-contradiction and critical thinking. Basically all the tools that we use to make sense of our world and distinguish between quackery and reality.  The final obstacle was the brain because one could always claim that this is all happening in your head and so you got rid of that too.  Seriously, you took a drug which affects your brain to determine that it does not exist.

[ahmad ibdah]

Maybe in order to answer that we must first understand what madness is,what consciousness loss is. What does it mean to have your own consciousness? How come millions of electrical signals that goes in circles in your brain neurons generates the consciousness you use to relate to everything around you? What does it mean that you no longer exist? That your consciousness was "stolen" from you? Where did you go?

[Nahm]

@mp22 do you know what you are?

[Nahm]

@ahmad ibdah do you know what you are?

[Afonso]

@Leo Gura I can only recall previous No-Self experiences. The only thing that was "real" was the Now experience. So life is like a movie, and everything in the movie is as real as a pixels on a screen. So anything that "happens" is an illusion, there's only the screen shining different frames. So, there's nothing really going on, even though the movie seems continuous and perfectly logical and materialistic. Is this your point?

So, "taking" 5-MeO is just parts of the movie where the screen recognises itself, everything apart from that, brain, chemicals, etc., is just part of the picture frames.

I can see where this is heading but still hard to grasp. Could you elaborate?

Edited December 26, 2017 by Afonso

[RichardY]

Is this some kind of buddhist/Jedi Selfless type of stuff. The abrogation of the self leading to "Jedi reflexes". A CPU being the "brain" of a computer. 

 

 

[Leo Gura]

@mp22 When proclaiming another's delusion, first make sure that you are not a victim of it yourself.

[snowleopard]

Well, apparently there can be major brain impairment and still be relatively normal awareness, as in this example.  Also, there is now significant evidence that some psychedelics actually temporarily reduce brain activity, and that, at least in some cases, brain damage, e.g. due to strokes, is associated with enriched consciousness, as explained in this Scientific American article.  However, not sure anyone really knows how brain activity correlates to the so-called awakened state. But it might make for an intriguing study.

[How to be wise]

12 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

@mp22 When proclaiming another's delusion, first make sure that you are not a victim of it yourself.

We’re trying to talk about if brain damage can unenlighten you please don’t bring enlightenment and strange loops in this.

Edited December 26, 2017 by How to be wise

[Socrates]

@Leo Gura Give me a longer answer to what mp22 said.

I get that kind of response too often "You are deluded and not me" when I am talking about this kind of stuff with people.

What is the best way to investigate If i am wrong and how do I communicate this?

[Edvard]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

You guys still don't get it.

THERE ARE NO BRAINS!

Like, seriously.

That's a belief though. It is what it is. But I am getting conscious enough to see that what is «percieved» as reality really is just layer upon layer of thoughts. When I get there my body/ego wrecks in discomfort, preventing me from getting even deeper. But I get further the more the practice has lasted.