Soul vs. Innermost Self

Great Debates
121

Morphine disagrees with you, pretty demonstrably. And the fact that we haven’t prefectly mastered the art of manipulating the self by splashing it with chemicals, means precisely nothing. Obviously.

And (snerk), if spiritualism took completely 100% over, then mental health would be a thing of the past! :smiley:

Congratulations. You have just successfully equated spending time in the spirit world to spending time dreaming, successfully acknowledging that your god and spirituality has the same amount of reality as that time I dreamed that I was helping a group of Shirt Tales characters defend a fort against violent monstrous invaders! You have achieved enlightment: your beliefs and experiences are a product of your dreams and your imagination!

Congratulations. Now you can do something more constructive with your time, such as building model planes or amassing a large DVD collection. Or, you can hastily duck your head back beneath the surface of the Happy Fun Fun Fantasy pool, and continue as you have been. Your choice.

122

Morphine blocks pain transmission in the body. It doesn’t make you happy. There will never be the day when “self” is controlled by drugs. If the efforts put into drugs were put into working with thoughts many would be healed completely.

Yes, you do enter the spirit world when you dream, all dreams are meaningful, not what science thinks of them because they can’t understand them. Just try to go without dreaming for awhile and see what happens, it is not pretty.

Everything in life has meaning. Not just the things we can figure out or those we think we can figure out. Everything has a reason. If it didn’t it wouldn’t happen.

123

Not that you care about or acknowledge anyone’s personal experience but your own, but I have personally observed a dramatic difference in behavior caused by morphine, and nothing else but morphine.

My dad doesn’t much like christmas. He doesn’t say much during it (aside from politely accepting the limited set of gifts he lets us give him (gift cards only)) and leaves as quickly as possible. One year he had the terrible misfortune of shattering his ankle the day before christmas due to slipping on tracked-in snow, resulting in him spending christmas in a wheelchair and on morphine. He enjoyed the holiday like never before or since. If he had merely been spared his pain as you claim, he would have disliked it as much as ever (his emotions being unchanged), and in addition been pissed-off at the injury, the immobility, the impending loss of work, and the impending massive financial hit, all of which are things that would bother him very much. Except that the morphine was making him happy.

Similarly, the other night my sister was describing, laughing, the bizzare behavior of her husband while on pain meds for cutting his hand half-off. (Not morphine; I don’t recall which it was.) We’re talking about a personality change here, buddy. Drug-induced.

Now, I know you spit in the eye of anyone’s experiences except your own, if they conflict with the tales of souls and spirits and love and so forth that you like to spin, but regardless, if you were actually talking about reality, then you would be compelled to admit that unless the above-described events were imaginary, then yes, drugs can effect the emotions and personality.

Dreams have meaning in the same way that the garbage in your can has value; it’s the scooped-up detrius of your day all packed together pretty much at random.

You can pull things from your Font Of Declarations That Are Pretty Consistently Wrong all day, but that doesn’t change the reality of things.

124

And I can relate many people who took drugs with no change in their emotions. Not a problem. Dreams are an attempt to bring spiritual experiences into a physical dimension. It is common for people to ignore or berate those things they don’t understand. Believe what you will. There is good evidence of separation of consciousness and body.

125

speck, plank, etc.

126

You’re right that’s not a problem - for my position. Nobody claims that all drugs always will effect your emotions or thinking capacity; an aspirin bottle is not a 500-pack of trips to happy-land, after all. However, if I say that SOME drugs can effect the emotions (and seem to do so in the significant majority of cases that they’re used), then you showing that some don’t means nothing.

I’m only trying to show that it sometimes happens that chemicals can effect the mood; that only requires one valid* example. And I provided two, without even having to go looking.

*Emphasis on valid.

I believe you just said that Shirt Tales are an example of part of a spiritual experience, that my brain’s trying to bring into “a physical dimension”. (Not that dreams occur in anything even close to a physical dimension, but I digress.) As a child I had a vivid dream about the Thundercats as well.

So, you just said that your “spiritual experiences” have a strong relation with things that are entirely fictional, completely made-up. Complete with examples!

127

TOM? is that you? How’s the movie prospects after all the recent publicity?

128

Laugh on, my friends. Almost 90% of the world believes in their spiritual nature. They are correct.

There is a need to ignore a lot of evidence to believe differently.

129

That is impossible, given that they don’t agree with each other. They can’t all be right; they can’t even mostly be right.

And that’s ignoring the fact that such beliefs are, to be blunt, stupid. And it doesn’t matter how many people believe a stupid thing; it makes it no less stupid.

Not at all, since there is zero evidence. Less than zero, since the evidence we do have leans against souls, spirits, and all the rest.

130

Aaaaand **lekatt ** derails, fucks up, and in essence totally ruins yet another GD thread. Is anyone keeping count? Thanks, lekatt. We all appreciate your contribution. I’d ask you to stay out of GD, but you are so full of evangelical zeal and conviction in your own infallibility that you just can’t help trying to bring ‘enlightenment’ to us ignorant masses, so I guess asking would be a waste of time.

131

lekatt, there are drugs that treat mood disorders which do cause changes in the personality but without making someone “happy.” I can understand that. It is wrong, for example, to call prozac a “happy pill.” If a person is not having problems with seratonin levels in the brain, then the prozac is not going to give that person a high. Morphine, on the other hand, especially when it is introduced into a person’s system for the first time, can cause feelings of euphoria. The more often the person is exposed to the morphine, the less likely she or he is to experience feelings of euphoria.

That has been my experience and may not be true for everyone. I have had five abdomenal surgeries and most of the time morphine was used to control pain. The euphoric effect lessened each time.

132

I can understand if your body is racked with pain, your mood is not likely to be very cheerful, however, the drug only works on the body reducing or stopping the pain. This in turn makes you feel better, it is not the drug that makes you feel better, it is the absence of pain. The way this can be tracked is when the drug wears off and the pain returns so does the bad mood. On the contrary there are people who being close to death and in terrible pain still try to help others with a cheerful mood. I worked in a hospital for a number of years and did volunteer hospice work. I have seen a lot of people close to death and held the hand of many a person while they died. Each is an individual and the drugs they were on made no difference in how they faced their final minutes.

In this thread we are talking about the inner self as opposed to soul. I am saying the inner self is the soul or spirit as the word I like to use. It cannot be damaged or altered by physical things. The mind, personality, spirit, soul, consciousness, psych, and other words all point to that inner self, that “I” that you know you are, and if we are to help others with mental problems it is necessary to use the language of the mind, thoughts, and beliefs. Can beliefs hurt you, yes, a big yes. People have starved to dead because they thought potatos were poison. What we believe and therefor what we think is very important and the reason we keep learning and gaining knowledge. It is only our fears that hold us in bondage. So why can’t we examine our fears and our beliefs in a civic manner. I think we can if we try.

133

By my count, you’ve been hoist by your own petard. Yours and the Shirt Tales’s, that is. You should be laughing at yourself.

Piffle. Removing the pain didn’t make my dad happy. It made him happier than if he’d been in pain, but merely being clear-headed enough to recognize your misfortune isn’t going to drive you to enjoy a holiday you detest.

At this point, you’re not just denying reality (like you usually do). No, you’re also calling me a liar.

And, “The way this can be tracked is when the drug wears off and the pain returns so does the bad mood.”? That’s just dumb. If the drug both takes away the pain and causes additional giddiness, then when the drug wears off, of course the giddiness is going to go away too, and you’re not going to be able to track how much of the change in happiness is caused by the lost drug-induced giddiness, as opposed to the happiness changed by regaining the pain.

134

Maybe folks should stop aiding him in doing so. Is the temptation so hard to resist?

135

It’s been discussed. The main point for not ignoring him seems to be that there are other people reading the boards and not participating that might buy his ‘ideas’. Anyone seeing this without knowing about his posting history might think we’re agreeing or condoning it. Basically, we know we can’t fight his ignorance, so we’re actually fighting other’s ignorance.

136

OKay,

I’m thinking that can be done by recognizing it for the same old stuff without actually engaging in one more pointless lengthy discussion. But hey, to each his or her own.

137

Err… I believe this is a place to debate the great issues of our time. In a debate there are usually two sides, sometimes more, and people present arguments in behalf of one side of another. No one is forced to post or even to read the posts. There is seldom a clear winner in this kind of discussion, but there is an exchange of ideas and knowledge that is useful to all parties. It promotes understanding of opposing views. This thread on inner self is a very interesting one to me so I will post in it. Now does anyone out there have an on-topic post concerning this subject?

138

I could repost the second half of #133, if you like. Or, you could make a post on the topic, and we could lovingly and respectfully respond to its salient points, like we usually do. (Or something like that.)

139

I found you quite by accident. I discovered I wanted to comment after reading some of the posts in this topic.

I am the author of the quote you posted. Dead is Just a Four Letter Word - A death experience - free ebook

At risk of being laughed out of here by those believing only what they can touch and see is real, I signed up just to do this.

I did die. “I” was not dead.

Words are symbols for thoughts and, as such, can obscure as much as enlighten. I’ll do the best I can with them.

The unique, living essence of you that you know as “yourself” is not extinquished when the body ceases to function, in my experience.

That part of you that thinks, feels, computes, loves, and knows itself as apart from any other being, continues to exist.

It remembers, communicates, shares it’s thoughts and feelings with others like itself in a way most can’t do here.

Small words, short phrases - You live. Your body is not part of “you” any more. You live without that body.

A belief system that equates “self” only with your physical existence is unrealistic.

How many of you have felt terrible and had a friend who “lifted your spirit”? Your illness was not gone, your reason for being depressed did not change, but the caring words of a friend, a hug, a touch, eased something inside you.

Inside you is meat. That didn’t change. The other “inside” is your “self”.

You don’t say “eased my brain”, you say “eased my mind”. A mind has no physical existence, but you know you have one. A brain doesn’t imagine, it’s meat. Your mind does that. Show it to me.

You have a heart of meat but that is not what breaks when love is lost, is it? The heart of your self is what hurts. That meat heart keeps beating even when you wish it would stop. That self heart doesn’t risk itself so easily again. It has to heal and mend enough to try loving again. Show it to me.

By not understanding there is an invisible part of you that exists beyond the body you ignore “it”, the very self of you. How can you nurture your self or mature your self if you don’t know you have a self that is not meat?

You can become rooted in a physical existence by the way your “mind” thinks. I believe that when your body stops working, when “you” die, you will find out you were mistaken.

I think you will be glad you were wrong. I know I was. I lived and was glad of it!

Okay, let’er rip.

140

Do you have any documentary evidence for this death?