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Sa Skimrande

A Timely Epiphany.... perhaps.

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I think I had an epiphany today, not a religious mumbo jumbo thing but I think I finally worked out the meaning of life, it just came at me and like wow it certainly changed my mood in an instant as I had been dwelling in a bit of negativity as of late.

 

And so it also came at me all this AS stuff what it is exactly and that the way it is presented and understood is kind of negative and imprisoning, but through it I know there is some things that I struggle with, but struggling is not can't do and so I understand the goal is to find out what our problems are in life and work on them to better oneself as nothing is impossible and there is a lot of thought to suggest our purpose in life is to better ourselves and so I plan to not avoid the stuff I can't do and actually practice the stuff I suck at with the notion; practice makes perfect.

 

Oh and the meaning of life is to live - experience and try to make the very best of it and here another saying comes to mind ;

 

Live every day as if it was your last.

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If i lived everyday like it was my last, i'd be the size of a house and die of quadruple heart failure due to all the food i would be eating. and that wouldn't be a good quality of life. so i'd say; and what you should all do (but probably wont) is not to let life pass you by. be ready to capitalise on every avalible oppertunity. pain is temporary, glory lasts a lifetime. dont stop, dont look back, just keep moving forwards. and when you get to the end of the road, ensure you have no regrets. write that song; go on safari, see the world. tell that girl at work you like her. your never to young to start a bucket list! you never know when it's going to be curtains, so break the institution of your mind, leave the comfort zone and get as far away from it as possible. otherwise, you'll be on that death bed thinking, 'if only i was brave enough to do *insert dream here* but my *insert excuse here* stopped me'

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A scary epiphany I had the other night was that maybe I was the only one experiencing 'this' world and that everyone else are simply simulations. How would you know the difference? The emotions experienced in interaction are real, sure. But how can I truly know that everyone else is real? The emotional connection I sense may just be a response to an artificially-generated simulation which makes me believe it's more real than it actually is.

 

But then that got me thinking that if that were true then there would have to be some higher-dimension/other place where the simulation was running and where my mind physically was (and this is getting into the realms of Matrix-philosophy). So what is real? How do you define real? Where is 'real'?

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Mike, that's close to something I used to wonder when I was a kid - I mean a really little kid. I used to wonder whether my perception animated everything (although, obviously, I didn't think it with that vocabulary). I remember thinking it sitting on the back of mum's bike, which means that at the oldest, I would have been four, I think.

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But then that got me thinking that if that were true then there would have to be some higher-dimension/other place where the simulation was running and where my mind physically was (and this is getting into the realms of Matrix-philosophy). So what is real? How do you define real? Where is 'real'?

 

This is getting into metacognitive territory which I find very interesting.

 

http://www.stevefleming.org/storage/Philos.%20Trans.%20R.%20Soc.%20Lond.%20B%20Biol.%20Sci.%202012%20Fleming-1.pdf

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How do you keep getting hold of these journal articles, Raydon? I use the OU library for stuff like that, but I'm nearing the end of my degree, so I won't have access anymore.

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Perhaps why this is of late, is that I am being attracted to the concept of dharma and so I have been reading a lot about a certain philosophy on life where everything is part of the experience instead of the pigeon holes most like to shelve stuff in to get lost in the mess of the mind. But because of another, I am also now finding myself drawn to looking into chakra theory and I have already restarted my Iyengar yoga practice, and boy have I degraded, the yoga clearly demonstrates.

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I practised yoga (Hatha and Pranayama)many years ago, and gained great benefit from it, alas I have also let it slip. Having read some recent articles linking the Vagus nerve to ASD and many of the symptoms I am suffering, and that Ujjayi Pranayama actually stimulates this nerve I am considering exploring this path again. Interesting how science is finding reasons for how these old methods work.

 

There seems to be alot of research being done around the Polyvagal theory. The use of music in a structured way as a stimulant and control is also a very promising area.

Edited by raydon

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Odd regarding music, there is something when it is mixed with dance and it is known by dancers as 'The zone' and when one is in it, ones vision actually blurs and the music is all there is and you know you moving to it in perfection, oh and time seems to slow down but speed up at the same time in that just as one is getting into the groove and enjoying it, the music comes to an end. I have experienced it twice in four years of dancing and perhaps it is one of the reasons I continue, as the zone I want to attain again as to me it comes across as pure meditation and that from someone that keeps trying to meditate and failing is big. Now I generally suck at my dancing, I know why, because I keep failing to disengage the brain and just do, but when one is constantly thinking, it is hard to stop thinking, but when I have attained the zone in class the tutor the first time it happened was standing there with her gob open and eyes wide as she later said the movement was perfection and what was freaky was I looked like I was half asleep. But the problem is the brain, perhaps we think too much when really we should just 'be'.

 

The same can be had with music on it's own, but with me, music I can't just sit still and listen, I have to move to it now and so I have theorised music is a language and set of instructions in that it inspires movement and since I have been dancing, I have learned to know what kind of movement much music inspires.

 

But of science and pseudo science, a theory has long been held by pagans of all people where they believe in time science will coincide with ancient science and ancient science won't be pseudoscience anymore. But where science fails, and perhaps it is good that it fails is when it comes to the metaphysical as scientists that have wandered into this area, well, it wrecks their career, Tesla was one of them where his experimentations into magnetism and electricity crept into the metaphysical and well he was discredited after that by the science community, but personally I believe he was onto something as magnetism, we don't yet know all the properties of it.

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Mike, that's close to something I used to wonder when I was a kid - I mean a really little kid.

 

I'm sorry to hear you were discouraged from thinking about things like this. But don't ever be scared to think outside the box Mannify - there's no shame in it. Some of the best inventions that were ever found were discovered purely by accident such as with the 'apple' incident which sparked Isaac Newton's theory of gravity.

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Would it be interesting to understand everything we experience is in fact electrical energy through what our senses sense, none of this stuff actually gets inside the darkness that is the skull containing the brain, what, we see, hear, feel, smell and taste via our senses arrives in the brain as an electrical impulse, where the brain scans it's data banks for similarities to understand what it is we have sensed.

 

It could very well be everything is an illusion and not one illusion is the correct illusion because all of us perceive our realities differently through being different people with different bio chemistries to start with.

 

So what are you seeing, is it the consensus, what seemingly everyone else sees until you ask them or what you are truly seeing and can you believe your eyes ?

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Would it be interesting to understand everything we experience is in fact electrical energy through what our senses sense, none of this stuff actually gets inside the darkness that is the skull containing the brain, what, we see, hear, feel, smell and taste via our senses arrives in the brain as an electrical impulse, where the brain scans it's data banks for similarities to understand what it is we have sensed.

 

It could very well be everything is an illusion and not one illusion is the correct illusion because all of us perceive our realities differently through being different people with different bio chemistries to start with.

 

So what are you seeing, is it the consensus, what seemingly everyone else sees until you ask them or what you are truly seeing and can you believe your eyes ?

 

But now you're getting to the point where it pushes our understanding of consciousness - i.e. What is consciousness? Where is consciousness? Where are you? How are you? The more you puzzle over it the more puzzling it becomes and it almost becomes unreal. I mean if we're not really here - i.e. if 'here' is just electrical signals and our minds are too then we're not real 'here'.

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And again, it makes one think of the movie; The matrix

 

But I have once again been lured back into studying the ancient Indian sciences, where I feel they have a clue, what with ancient sciences that that modern science has yet to explain so negates it until it knows better, which gives me the impression a lot of modern science could be looking in the wrong place, so keen it is not to be associated with pseudoscience of which I understand is all about money. But what if everything is all part of the same and not separate as it seems we have a propensity to pigeon hole ?

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Science is all about what we can observe and measure. But the things we're talking about here cannot be measured, or even observed for that matter. Consciousness for example has no length; it has no width, no height. How do you measure something which has no ascertainable dimension?

 

It isn't because modern science is looking in the wrong places - it's more to do with the fact that they're not able to look in the right places. Until someone pinpoints exactly where the consciousness exists and can actually get a handle on it good enough to measure, the best anyone will be able to do is to offer theories for it.

 

This is where science some times gets a bad name because theories are often treated as 'fact' - for example we're all taught about the 'Big Bang' in science lessons in school and yet it has never been proven to have happened. It cannot be unproven either and yet we're told definitively in school that it happened.

 

Yes there are probably many ancient texts which do offer some light where modern science doesn't. But then there may also be ones which have become distorted over the years too (ever played Chinese Whispers?).

Edited by Mike_GX101

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Oh yes, I am fully aware of Chinese Whisper in relation to anything and it is my understanding of what most of modern religion has suffered, that being, maybe there was something there right back at the beginning, but re interpretation on top of re interpretation adding and removing stuff as suits the political expediency of the time has rendered most religions impotent in my opinion.

 

Where I might think different is where Sanskrit is concerned as the belief is not just a religion, it is a way of life as it encompasses every part of life to include philosophy, science, education, healing and personal spiritual development, where everything is looked at from a different point of view and something I have detected in all the Indians I have ever known, an almost child like humility, where an opponent isn't wrong, they just have a different perspective, which might be part of the Dharma, i don't know.

 

But where Sanskrit prospers there is an acceptance of technology as it is recorded from the past as the collection of beliefs attributed to those that live across the Indus river know full well and so with India set to become a world power in a few years time, I don't doubt it at all, but what is perhaps more important, is that I believe they will use their power wisely as I have already mentioned there is something about the Indians that set's them apart from many others.

 

But the religion associated with those that live across the Indus river is the oldest in the world where there is hard evidence to suggest it is at least 9000 years old and it still exists, why ? Coud it be because they have something every other belief is lacking?

 

But I have studied Ayurveda and Yoga over the years and they both work from as best I can understand them from my uneducated western perspective and everyone is talking about Karma, it is part of modern western parlance even, but something I have always avoided is the philosophy as it was in the past way too heavy for me, but as times have changed, I am starting to understand stuff I have read in the past starting to make sense, so I am once again intrigued by a different perspective.

 

But of measure and definition, I wonder what people are attracted to, is it the circle or the square.

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In addition to what I wrote above, insomnia again and I am again watching stuff and so the following series of videos more than adequately explains what I was trying to explain above ;

 

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Hullo Sa Skimrande,

 

Wow, sounds like a real moment of clarity. What your describing sounds to me (and my person centred ways) like Carl Rogers actualising tendency. Rogers believed that every living entity has a sort of in built life force that drives organism forward to be the best that it can be in the environment that it finds itself in. I guess that this sort of philosophy is also present in many eastern cultures and religion.

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The stuff about music is very interesting and fits very well with my experiences. I was sitting here with my usual trance music on when I saw this bit.........I function so much better with music......it acts as an emotional connection to the world, but also as a sheild against outside noise.....but it only works when I'm in control of it. If anyone else has music on I find it really irritating usually, and have been known to leave shops abruptly to avoid it......especially around Christmas!! If anyone whistles near me I get very angry, as no-one can whistle in tune, and I can hear the slightest flaw in music.......often wondered if I have perfect pitch in fact....is that known to be associated with ASD ?

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I know people who read their horoscopes every day and actually take guidance from them. What many don't realise though is that such things are written so generally that they can apply to almost anyone and countless meanings can be obtained from them. Similar things can happen with ancient texts too which can often be so generalised that they can mean anything.

 

What often happens is things like horoscopes instruct the mind to look for patterns or to identify connections with what is being said. Once these connections have been made it can take a lot of willpower to counter the effect the 'script' has had. But if you are aware of the generalisations it shouldn't be hard to do and you may be able to connect with other scripts - for example with horoscopes it should be possible to connect with other star sign scripts besides your own.

 

So as with any new concept (whether it's ancient or scientific) it is important to weigh up pro's and cons of such an argument and not to be too easily led by the positives which of course are the ones they want you to see. Look outside the box and use your own judgement.

Edited by Mike_GX101

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