Mankind is evolving so rapidly that our mind can't keep up. It adjusts so it is capable of managing our daily way of life, but is unable to focus on certain levels of our consciousness we have neglected over the past few centuries. Maybe that's why some people can reach this state by using certain drugs, which seem to block those influences.
Mankind is evolving so rapidly that our mind can't keep up. It adjusts so it is capable of managing our daily way of life, but is unable to focus on certain levels of our consciousness we have neglected over the past few centuries. Maybe that's why some people can reach this state by using certain drugs, which seem to block those influences.
I'm almost finished with Colin Wilson's book "The Occult", in which he basically mentions (with some flawed research--perhaps due to the published date) that modern day city dwelling and our generally fast-paced lives have terminated our need to look inside and into our subconsciousness. He states that it is those who want to break out from the "outward" living, look into the occult, which he states is the quest for inner knowledge. He mentions psychedelics and other shamanistic drugs, but mentions how he doesn't feel they serve as tools of looking into our consciousness due to their nature to contort and create different feelings.
I'd have to agree with him, drugs can't really block the influences of modern living, but perhaps can allow "drug users" to search for a way to extend their 'enlightened' ideology beyond the drug trip... which can't be a bad thing. But overall, drugs aren't the way to go when trying to explore the vastness of our consciousness.
Also, you said; "we have neglected over the past few centuries". I am led to believe that we lose abilities as we 'evolve' as a species, preferably for the better. There is no reason for us to really delve into our psyche, because eventually our subconscious thoughts and such would become so mundane that we would lose the ability to focus on them--if not we'd wish to lose the ability so we can focus on our dreams and aspirations.
Life is complex, we've got a lot of money to deal with, a lot of science and a lot of technology... we can't afford to not live externally anymore. If we were primitive or living in a country that has yet to develop, our ideas of the subconscious would be entirely different. Drugs may be a temporary escape (not offering a look into ourselves, but a relaxing and 'other' world to experience), but as you can see with any 'regular' drug user, their lives aren't exactly perfect and they aren't any more enlightened than the average person.
tl;dr, drugs aren't magical substances that offer great insight, instead they create illusions of grandeur.
Yeah, i think this is true. The whole "Third Eye" issue, in Tool's explaination, states that one should find ways to get to a higher state of consciousness. The theory of Inner makes the "third eye" sound like some sort of primitive "state of mind".
Like Rivek said, i think it is quite the opposite.
Well, it can be viewed both ways although, my intention really had nothing to do with it being a primitive state of mind. Perhaps I worded it poorly. I would think that being in a higher state of consciousness would induce intuition and the such.
__________________ "WITHOUT A LITTLE EVIL, GOOD WOULD NEVER EXIST"
Maybe "opening one's third eye" means reaching a higher level of consciousness so you understand how this primitive instinct is triggered by certain influences and developing the ablity to control those actions?
That's kind of what I was trying to say
__________________ "WITHOUT A LITTLE EVIL, GOOD WOULD NEVER EXIST"
I'm almost finished with Colin Wilson's book "The Occult", in which he basically mentions (with some flawed research--perhaps due to the published date) that modern day city dwelling and our generally fast-paced lives have terminated our need to look inside and into our subconsciousness. He states that it is those who want to break out from the "outward" living, look into the occult, which he states is the quest for inner knowledge. He mentions psychedelics and other shamanistic drugs, but mentions how he doesn't feel they serve as tools of looking into our consciousness due to their nature to contort and create different feelings.
I'd have to agree with him, drugs can't really block the influences of modern living, but perhaps can allow "drug users" to search for a way to extend their 'enlightened' ideology beyond the drug trip... which can't be a bad thing. But overall, drugs aren't the way to go when trying to explore the vastness of our consciousness.
Also, you said; "we have neglected over the past few centuries". I am led to believe that we lose abilities as we 'evolve' as a species, preferably for the better. There is no reason for us to really delve into our psyche, because eventually our subconscious thoughts and such would become so mundane that we would lose the ability to focus on them--if not we'd wish to lose the ability so we can focus on our dreams and aspirations.
Life is complex, we've got a lot of money to deal with, a lot of science and a lot of technology... we can't afford to not live externally anymore. If we were primitive or living in a country that has yet to develop, our ideas of the subconscious would be entirely different. Drugs may be a temporary escape (not offering a look into ourselves, but a relaxing and 'other' world to experience), but as you can see with any 'regular' drug user, their lives aren't exactly perfect and they aren't any more enlightened than the average person.
tl;dr, drugs aren't magical substances that offer great insight, instead they create illusions of grandeur.
I agree. As the human species has evolved over the thousands of years natural selection weeds out the aspects that are no longer needed or useful. I remember reading somewhere that our DNA contains several dormant strands of coding that seem to have absolutely no use that we know of. As our race has moved forward more and more with technology, so does our reliance of self drop. On one hand, we have evolved, yet on other levels regarding our psyche and connection to others and ourselves it has degraded, we no longer rely on each other as a human race as much as we did in ancient times. If anybody's seen the movie Lawnmower Man, there was a scene at one point that Jobe (I think that was his name) became god like and went on a little rant about how people were so much more in tune with themselves and had a higher state of consciousness back then and that's why we have stories of wizards and such from those times.
__________________ "WITHOUT A LITTLE EVIL, GOOD WOULD NEVER EXIST"
I agree. As the human species has evolved over the thousands of years natural selection weeds out the aspects that are no longer needed or useful. I remember reading somewhere that our DNA contains several dormant strands of coding that seem to have absolutely no use that we know of. As our race has moved forward more and more with technology, so does our reliance of self drop. On one hand, we have evolved, yet on other levels regarding our psyche and connection to others and ourselves it has degraded, we no longer rely on each other as a human race as much as we did in ancient times. If anybody's seen the movie Lawnmower Man, there was a scene at one point that Jobe (I think that was his name) became god like and went on a little rant about how people were so much more in tune with themselves and had a higher state of consciousness back then and that's why we have stories of wizards and such from those times.
I can't see as to how we have degraded--we just lose what we don't use. It's rumoured we used to have tails, webbed fingers, etc. If there is any truth to this--or if there isn't, it doesn't matter. It can't be denied that we have evolved from a species of neanderthals and have had our bodies and minds modified greatly from those ancestors. Sure we have lost a lot of what they had,but I definitely would not say that is a degrading form.
Speaking of lose of intuition... When we were less 'evolved' beings, we required a greater sense of intuition as we were more animal and had to worry about our lives and such, with predators and conflicts with one another. Now that we live in a city environment, live in great numbers, don't have to hunt, we don't need to live in a constant state of panic/and/or/aggression. Instead we must focus on, like I said before, jobs, money, relationships--all of which require more technical knowledge and require little to no insight from the mind.
I think that's the main reason as to why we have 'degraded' in that area. It's not required.
I can't see as to how we have degraded--we just lose what we don't use. It's rumoured we used to have tails, webbed fingers, etc. If there is any truth to this--or if there isn't, it doesn't matter. It can't be denied that we have evolved from a species of neanderthals and have had our bodies and minds modified greatly from those ancestors. Sure we have lost a lot of what they had,but I definitely would not say that is a degrading form.
Speaking of lose of intuition... When we were less 'evolved' beings, we required a greater sense of intuition as we were more animal and had to worry about our lives and such, with predators and conflicts with one another. Now that we live in a city environment, live in great numbers, don't have to hunt, we don't need to live in a constant state of panic/and/or/aggression. Instead we must focus on, like I said before, jobs, money, relationships--all of which require more technical knowledge and require little to no insight from the mind.
I think that's the main reason as to why we have 'degraded' in that area. It's not required.
You basically just argued with me by repeating the exact point I was making. Perhaps you misread my post.
__________________ "WITHOUT A LITTLE EVIL, GOOD WOULD NEVER EXIST"
in that civilization has confused us so that we no longer can differentiate between fight and flight (panic/agression). we focus on symbols rather than reality. cities are built on tangents and ideas long forgotten and no longer needed. the strands are all twisted, convoluted, and rusty from non-use.
i am interested in intuition and telepathy over words and information.
__________________ Time is still the infinite jest.
I can't see as to how we have degraded--we just lose what we don't use. It's rumoured we used to have tails, webbed fingers, etc. If there is any truth to this--or if there isn't, it doesn't matter. It can't be denied that we have evolved from a species of neanderthals and have had our bodies and minds modified greatly from those ancestors. Sure we have lost a lot of what they had,but I definitely would not say that is a degrading form.
On the contrary, that's just wat the evolution theory refers to. We loose what we don't need. The coccyx, or tailbone, is a remnant of what used to be our "tail", for that matter. Also whales have a remnant of some sort of pelvis which seems to prove that certain mammals returned to a sealife enviroment.
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Speaking of lose of intuition... When we were less 'evolved' beings, we required a greater sense of intuition as we were more animal and had to worry about our lives and such, with predators and conflicts with one another. Now that we live in a city environment, live in great numbers, don't have to hunt, we don't need to live in a constant state of panic/and/or/aggression. Instead we must focus on, like I said before, jobs, money, relationships--all of which require more technical knowledge and require little to no insight from the mind. I think that's the main reason as to why we have 'degraded' in that area. It's not required.
Maybe it was wrong when i stated that mankind was evolving rapidly. What i was trying to say was that nowadays modern lives ask more attention from us then, let's say, one century ago. Technology is changing every day, forcing us to adjust again and again. Look at what has been invented and discovered in the last hundred years. Our mind is constantly working overtime just to keep up.
You''ll have to agree with me on the fact that although life is made alot easier by technology, people are busier then ever with all-day live. I meant; job, social life, household and all sorts of bureaucrasy bullshit.
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Is it really so hard to give weight to the thought that, at the very least, our neurocortexes are developing more and more quickly from generation to generation than in any time in our history?
Sure it must be developing, i just think this evolving process takes so much time, it's only measurable over a period of more than one or two centuries.
That's the nature of progress, it's exponential. It always has been.
And given that progress as far as mankind's achievements has been exponential, I see no reason why the same thing wouldn't apply to evolution. Consider the amount of time that our species, **** sapiens sapiens, was made of barely civilized hunter-gatherer tribe groups in east Africa (200,000 years) versus the amount of time since civilization as we know it was solidified (about 5000 years ago). Give some thought to the innovations of the past century or two and how they would have been incomprehensible to the people of the more distant past... and I'm not talking about all the electronic gadgets we have around these days, but things as simple as lift and chemical propulsion of a wheeled conveyance. Is it really so hard to give weight to the thought that, at the very least, our neurocortexes are developing more and more quickly from generation to generation than in any time in our history?
I think this is hitting the nail right on the head. If you think of humans as machines, we have already established our purposes and what we can do. But like any modern objects, there isn't many new inventions, but rather slight modifications that make an object more useful than prior. I think that we will no longer evolve or grow over a long period of time--but instead get steady little upgrades that rapidly increase our comprehension of technology and time management.
"s it really so hard to give weight to the thought that, at the very least, our neurocortexes are developing more and more quickly from generation to generation than in any time in our history?" I believe that is exactly what is happening... We are growing at a faster and faster rate as our knowledge expands.
Evolution takes place over a several generations.
Im not sure what the lower limit is, but 2 or 3 is definitely too low.
The only way that we would see evolutionary change in our lifetimes, is by having sex at a VERY young age, hence shortening the gap between generations.
Well, could you tell in other words what intuition comes from?
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To me it's more of an instinctual drive - inborn or heavily-learned responses to certain situations, maybe even touching on sort of a "collective unconscious" type of thing. Think of it like this: even children recognize undesirable social situations, such as being made fun of and picked on, from the very first experience. How would they know to be hurt/angry/whatever by being made fun of so early on? I hypothesize that there is some sort of racial memory carried along in the genes after so long, to where ostracization, undesirable as it was to tribe dynamics and survival of the individual, became intuitively bad and to be avoided.
I could be way off though, lol. I'm quite often wrong about these things.
Do you think intuition have something to do witn instinctual drive?
You almost entirely answered the question yourself here. I do think that intuition is closely related to instinct, so much so that sometimes I slip and equate the two. To clarify though, I think that inuition is a development of our cognition that is very close to instinct on a scale moving from pure instinct to pure reason.
While I agree that intuition and instinct are both closely inter-related, I disagree that intuition/instinct develops into pure reasoning. These two are definitely separate things. Intuition/instinct is strictly a gut feeling, it's entirely intangible, whereas pure reason is when you are logically making a decision based on your knowledge of the situation. For instance, you may have a gut feeling to completely buy into said stock (intuition/instinct/gut feeling) but you're logic on the other hand is that from what you know the numbers don't add up and it may very well be a bad decision. People battle with situations like that all the time, where you're heart's telling you one thing but your logic is telling you something different. Anyways, at least if I'm understanding correctly, that's my opinion.
__________________ "WITHOUT A LITTLE EVIL, GOOD WOULD NEVER EXIST"
It took from the beginning of man until 1903 for humans to achieve manned flight. That's roughly 20,000 years.
66 years later a man was on the moon. (or, if you're the type of person who actually believes the whole thing was a hoax, within the first third century we will be on the moon [again], putting it somewhere between 100 and 135 years.)
20,000 to 66.
All progress is exponential.
This is of course just one example. But there are many like it throughout history. As progress continues, it builds upon itself, to the point where the rate of change at a certain point in the future will be much greater than now or in the past.
Technological advances do not have anything to do with evolution, unless in the context of G.E.
The concept here is progress, and how it is generally exponential. I'm not equating technology in and of itself to evolution in and of itself, I'm equating the ever-increasing rate of change of technology with the ever-increasing rate of change of evolution.
So you're saying that we've evolved faster over the last couple of generations, and that our exponential technological progress is a result of that evolution?
Because that would be laughable to any biologist, no offense
All those advances are indeed milestones in history, but i would not draw a correlation to these events. If you could define precisely what groups these singular three events, and excludes various other milestones in human history, that would definitely help solidify your argument
And that's pretty much what I'm saying. The next part of my opinion in the matter we've been discussing is that the concept of the "Third Eye", which in many practices is considered to be one of the ultimate tools of understanding of man, is far removed from intuition... which, if I'm reading you correctly in your earlier posts, is an idea you disagree with.
Well yeah, I think the "third eye" concept is definitely not in the realm of the logical and/or educated decision aspect. It's definitely more along the lines of intuition/instinct/gut feeling. Attaining a higher level of consciousness per se is the same as attaining a stronger connection within oneself to their intuition and instincts, it's a a tool to learn to understand those feelings and how to efficiently utilize them to their highest potential. Sure, enlightening oneself logically requires educating oneself as well but when we're strictly talking about the concept of the "third eye" it's based on having a much higher fundamental understanding of oneself, life and the people in it which in no way can be strictly based on learned experiences and education. Don't get me wrong, I think those things may also play an important role from another perspective, however, they are not the primary point here.
__________________ "WITHOUT A LITTLE EVIL, GOOD WOULD NEVER EXIST"
hmm, i wouldn't classify evolution under exponential growth, as it relates specifically to time.
Its akin to suggesting time goes faster as it progresses, which would definitely be amusing
Well, technology is most definitely exponential. It's on an extremely steep climb. The speed at which technology progresses is consistently getting faster and faster, the more and more we learn about technology the faster it's developing. But in a small way I can agree with what Rivek was saying about the fact that perhaps the faster rate at which technology is developing and in the way we humans depend on it more and more, the less dependent we become on ourselves in turn speeding up the process of our own evolution as our body's DNA may more quickly process the weeding out of aspects it no longer deems necessaty. I'm not saying this will happen over a few years, but it may be possible to still at least affect the time length and shorten it.
__________________ "WITHOUT A LITTLE EVIL, GOOD WOULD NEVER EXIST"
This reminds me a lot of Sartre's ideas from his philosophy of consciousness and particularly The Transcendence of the Ego.
Consciousness must always be "of something" always have an object. In a queer way the world cannot exist without consciousness and consciousness cannot exist without a world to be conscious of, mutual dependence.
Anyway, supposing you are alone, with no one else's consciousness to look at yours (as an object) how can it be said to exist unless it is conscious of itself? This creates a paradox. How does the ego look at itself? Can it be both subject and object simultaneously? Sartre postulates two egos, one reflecting the other.
This calls to mind a quote from Nietzsche, "And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." In relation to this ego discussion, the ego is an abyss, as is all consciousness (according to Sartre). Two abysses put together add up to...?
0+0=0
This idea is very complex and I am at risk for making it too complicated, as I feel I already have. The point is that the ego must "create" itself since it cannot exist otherwise; it posits itself as the sine qua non of existence, so to speak, when really it is quite the reverse. It is essentially unnecessary, and as many seem to indicate, actually a hindrance. What we bring into the world is not our own. I like Maynard's analogy of being like a "midwife."
What if our consiousness is just illusion made by chemical reactions and it is purely only in physical world, nothing more. The world can exist and it does not really depend on any chemical reaction - it just is.
lots of good stuff in this thread. nice work friends.
remember the words of demosthenes, the great philosopher:
"The man who has received a benefit ought always to remember it, but he who has granted it ought to forget the fact at once."
a lot of information is right on the head on this subject in this thread. love the moon analogies, i hadn't seen them before. makes 100% perfect sense.
"While All is in The All, it is equally true that The All is in All."
"There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe. A thought, in this substance, produces the thing that is imagined by the thought. You can form things in your thought, and, by impressing the thought upon formless substance, can cause the thing you think about to be created." - W.D. Wattles, 1920
Last edited by calumny; 06-10-2009 at 11:36 AM..
Reason: adding detail
"There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe. A thought, in this substance, produces the thing that is imagined by the thought. You can form things in your thought, and, by impressing the thought upon formless substance, can cause the thing you think about to be created." - W.D. Wattles, 1920
Saayyy whaaaat?
__________________ "WITHOUT A LITTLE EVIL, GOOD WOULD NEVER EXIST"
:) read "the science of getting rich" if you like. it has it's roots in the kybalion.
Or do you think our mind is tabula rasa and everything we "create" in our mind consists of just stuff we have get into our head by our senses? So we only create new by linking stuff.
Not a form (2d,3d), color, thought or sound could be created as purely "new".
Or do you think our mind is tabula rasa and everything we "create" in our mind consists of just stuff we have get into our head by our senses? So we only create new by linking stuff.
Not a form (2d,3d), color, thought or sound could be created as purely "new".
i do not believe we have a purely blank slate, no. making relation is important, too. read "the blank slate: the modern denial of human nature". it's a good one.
lots of good stuff in this thread. nice work friends.
remember the words of demosthenes, the great philosopher:
"The man who has received a benefit ought always to remember it, but he who has granted it ought to forget the fact at once."
a lot of information is right on the head on this subject in this thread. love the moon analogies, i hadn't seen them before. makes 100% perfect sense.
"While All is in The All, it is equally true that The All is in All."
"There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe. A thought, in this substance, produces the thing that is imagined by the thought. You can form things in your thought, and, by impressing the thought upon formless substance, can cause the thing you think about to be created." - W.D. Wattles, 1920
Wish in one hand,shit in the other...
__________________ i hope when we die, our lives will be defined.
Dude, if that shit was real I wouldn't be sitting here at work right now
hehe
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i do not believe we have a purely blank slate, no. making relation is important, too. read "the blank slate: the modern denial of human nature". it's a good one.
you go ahead and shit in your own hand. it's not abrakadabra magic. you won't poof a rabbit out of a hat. you will act a certain way to bring to life what you desire. the lips of wisdom are closed but to the ears of understanding, and all that yea? check the books, or keep shitting in your hands. let me know how that works for you.
