Enlightenment and brain damage?

[egoless]

6 minutes ago, Nahm said:

@egoless it’s ok in any case. Lots of people live perfectly happy lives “being just the brain” so to speak. There really is no right or wrong. ❤️ Opinions are for fun. 

Basically there are two equal possibilities of reality for me right now. None of them have solid proofs and both of them can lead to circular belief. 

1) Reality is infinite matter. And some of this matter generates the consciousness. Therefore there are many consciousness ... The reality is like rick and morty. After death of certain brain the consciousness generated by it ceases to exist.

2) Your reality. There is only infinite being consciousness - the pure knowing which generates matter and everything else. and by generating brain and mind it generates the finite world.

 

None of those have the initial proof and in order to get on either path you need initial belief of the possibility of it being the Truth.... This belief will lead to circular belief systems - "Enlightenment" or materialistic paradigm.

So what's the conclusion? We don't know anyyyyyyyything!!!!!!!! So start living in the moment and just experience your life at the fullest. That's the only fkin thing you could ever do really..........

 

Edited December 27, 2017 by egoless

[Nahm]

@egoless sounds good man. As always thanks for the interesting convo! ❤️

[egoless]

4 minutes ago, Nahm said:

@egoless sounds good man. As always thanks for the interesting convo! ❤️

I tried man. I tried really hardcore. I’ve read and listened to the immense amount of info, self inquired daily and meditated for hours, tripped but this is the final conclusion I have arrived right now. It suddenly stroke me. And do you know when this happened? After huge, the biggest non-dual glimpse I’ve had. I was like wait a moment this in itself could be a circular belief. And you know what happened then? The non-dual experience vanished totally...

I clearly saw the possibility that whole Enlightenment notion could be just another very profound circular brainwash you could do to yourself after years of practice...

Edited December 27, 2017 by egoless

[snowleopard]

@egoless  Once 'what one is in essence' has been put into words, then it is a mere story, even the most plausible scientific theory, or esoteric philosophy, or eloquent description -- which are all you'll ever hear from someone else. ... Which does one believe, the direct knowing, or the story?

[egoless]

Just now, snowleopard said:

@egoless  Once 'what one is in essence' has been put into words, then it is a mere story, even the most plausible scientific theory, or esoteric philosophy, or eloquent description -- which are all you'll ever hear from someone else. ... Which does one believe, the direct knowing, or the story?

Exactly and the only thing I know is that experience we call living. And searching for the answers in the rabbit holes may be just a waste of this experience.... When you dig dig dig in the end you could dig out the grave for yourself. and the whole your life would be wasted in the digging of the grave!

[AleksM]

@egoless @snowleopard @Nahm @Shin @Leo Gura 

So, if energy cannot be created or destroyed, that means that consciousness existed prior to the materialization of the brain. Simple as that.

The materialized is manifested from the unmanifested. Energy is not materialized but we know that it is there.

Phenomena and appearances are not reality and studying the appearances Will not get us closer to reality. This does not mean studying phenomena is not useful. Studying phenoma is important so that we can better understand the principles that govern the universe. We are subject to those governing principles, so understanding what those principles are is very important in the sense that we can better align the energy flow.

 Certain phenomena is a result of certain actions. Phenomena is outside our control, only action/response is in our control. So, when we know how phenomena is being affected by our response we can choose different actions.

However, there is an ingrained self-aligning mechanism embedded in the universe and we can rise to higher levels of consciousness, by noticing how a certain action feels like. Feeling doesn't require rational understanding. Thinking is not feeling.

The danger of identifying with the body is that we identify with a certain stimulation of the senses, and what we actually are is beyond the senses. This keeps us a slave to the senses. When we are identified with the stimulus, we are acting like animals.

(Watched only half of the video on brain don't exist, so I can't give a complete commentary on that video yet).

[egoless]

@AleksM So my main concern and unanswered question is - what is the proof that brain does not generate the consciousness? How do you know that consciousness is the energy and not the connection of brain neurons made out of matter?

[Shin]

14 minutes ago, egoless said:

@AleksM So my main concern and unanswered question is - what is the proof that brain does not generate the consciousness? How do you know that consciousness is the energy and not the connection of brain neurons made out of matter?

There is only one way to know, you know what that is, so now chop-chop.

Edited December 27, 2017 by Shin

[egoless]

@Shin I'll paste again what I've already told to Nahm:

 

"I tried man. I tried really hardcore. I’ve read and listened to the immense amount of info, self inquired daily and meditated for hours, tripped but this is the final conclusion I have arrived right now. It suddenly stroke me. And do you know when this happened? After huge, the biggest non-dual glimpse I’ve had. I was like wait a moment this in itself could be a circular belief. And you know what happened then? The non-dual experience vanished totally...

I clearly saw the possibility that whole Enlightenment notion could be just another very profound circular brainwash you could do to yourself after years of practice..."

[Nahm]

@AleksM awesome!  Any thoughts on what is energy and how do you know that it is there, let alone know that we know, and where is there? Is phenomena this energy? 

[Nahm]

@egoless sounds like you’re almost there. It’d be a shame to give up. Maybe there is an underlying ‘creator’, and you are it, and creating this experience, and the path to it, the way to know it, is to create. 

[snowleopard]

@AleksM  That is a 'phenomenal' description ... Now back to the noumenal. 

[AleksM]

@egoless

If the brain generated consciousness then we can't explain paranormal events, near death experiences (when the brain completely shuts down), past life memories, astral projection, remote viewing and other transpersonal experiences. So we have no other choice, then leaving that paradigm that brain creates consciousness.

Also, as I already told, I have a personal experience with me seeing a ghost(light being). If the brain created consciousness, the ghost would not be there.

Quote

Consciousness can operate beyond the brain, body, and the present, as hundreds of experiments and millions of testimonials affirm. Consciousness cannot, therefore, be identical with the brain.

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One of the first modern thinkers to endorse an outside-the-brain view of consciousness was William James, who is considered the father of American psychology. In his 1898 Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard University, James took a courageous stand against what he called “the fangs of cerebralism and the idea that consciousness is produced by the brain. He acknowledged that arrested brain development in childhood can lead to mental retardation, that strokes or blows to the head can abolish memory or consciousness, and that certain chemicals can change the quality of thought. But to consider this as proof that the brain actually makes consciousness, James said, is irrational.

Why irrational? Consider a radio, an invention that was introduced during James’s lifetime, and which he used to illustrate the mind-brain relationship. If one bangs a radio with a hammer, it ceases to function. But that does not mean that the origin of the sounds was the radio itself; the sound originated from outside it in the form of an electromagnetic signal. The radio received, modified, and amplified the external signal into something recognizable as sound. Just so, the brain can be damaged in various ways that distort the quality of consciousness – trauma, stroke, nutritional deficiencies, dementia, etc. But this does not necessarily mean the brain “made” the consciousness that is now disturbed, or that consciousness is identical to the brain.

British philosopher Chris Carter endorses this analogy. Equating mind and brain is irrational, he says as listening to music on a radio, smashing the radio’s receiver, and thereby concluding that the radio was producing the music.

To update the analogy, consider a television set. We can damage a television set so severely that we lose the image on the screen, but this doesn’t prove that the TV actually produced the image. We know that David Letterman does not live behind the TV screen on which he appears; yet the contention that brain equals consciousness is as absurd as if he did.

My conclusion is that consciousness is not a thing or substance, but is a nonlocal phenomenon. Nonlocal is merely a fancy word for infinite. If something is nonlocal, it is not localized to specific points in space, such as brains or bodies, or to specific points in time, such as the present.

Source: http://www.superconsciousness.com/topics/science/why-consciousness-not-brain

 

 

Quote

The most promising developments in hard science offering models for transpersonal experience are David Bohm’s idea of the implicate order (Bohm 1980), Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphogenetic fields (Sheldrake 1981 and 1988) and Ervin Laszlo’s hypothesis of the psi fi eld or Akashic field (Laszlo 1993 and 2004).

Source: https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/non-local-consciousness-and-the-brain/

 

Quote

The brain and consciousness are linked together, but the brain does not produce consciousness. Consciousness is something altogether different and separate. The math doesn't lie."

It would appear that consciousness may be something that the brain accesses, but does not generate.

Read the original source: http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/quantum-physicist-consciousness-arises-outside-brain#ixzz52UKYiis1 

 

[egoless]

@AleksM I'm not saying that you did not see the ghost. In fact I don't know that. But the materialistic answer would be that various changes in the brain could contribute to the hallucinations and different perceptions. We don't know when the brain is completely shut down so NDEs could be explained by this. About paranormal activities I have never experienced those so I can't tell anything. Therefore, they are non-existent in my experience.

P.S. I'm not implying on anything I am just offering the possible explanations.

Edited December 27, 2017 by egoless

[Echoes]

There are infinite dreams/reality planes. This here might be a materialism simulation. Of course it is very very convincing, just like any dream. The dream or simulation of materialism is so perfect that it is believed to be not just a simulation but actually a material world. People then, in this simulation, say "but look at this alzheimer patient, and this brain damage, and this causal chain of brain-behavior/experience change. Surely it must be happening because of a brain and a physical world!" But this is nothing more than underappreciation of what reality can do. Why should reality not be able to create a absolutely perfectly convincing illusion? Because a logical story based on perceptions says otherwise? but this story is also just happening! There is an actuality of happening, and then a story that says the actual perceived truth is not the actual truth, but only a consequence of a  "real" foundation (brain, matter, cosmos, big bang, quantum field, etc.) that is not the perceived happening. It is because the actual happening is too simple for the thought process to comprehend, so it creates a "logical" story to justify it's existence.

[egoless]

@Echoes Then why couldn't be the same be said about the Enlightenment? Why not the other way around? That it is such a convincing circular belief that it completely brings you the liberation from the self???

[Echoes]

@egoless Well you can say the same about enlightenment. There is no "enlightenment". This is where language collapses. Every philosophical perspective has 1 magical "foundation". The magical "foundation" of "enlightenment/nonduality" is the "NOW/being/happening/awareness" itself. It's the recognition that existence is mysteriously and bizarrely just happening, without needing a justification. The magical foundation of the thought process is a brain in a universe, because of a big bang out of nothing, etc. But the magical foundation of "nonduality" is so directly in your face that it doesn't need the reasoning of the other metaphysical magical foundations. The magical foundation is self evident

Edited December 27, 2017 by Echoes

[SOUL]

From the perspective of seeking inner peace and fulfillment these types of discussions are the fuel for self created turmoil. A battle with the word "belief" emblazoned on the sword slices it's way through the mind but at any moment one can lay down that sword and be free from it, the middle way.

Edited December 27, 2017 by SOUL

[egoless]

@SOUL If I wanted the way of belief I would follow the religion. 

[SOUL]

@egoless  ... and that is your belief.