Why do you seek out these videos/people in the first place?
Suppose you were living off the grid somewhere miles from the nearest self-appointed mystic or guru. Would you still feel like you’re living a lie? Without any contact with these people, would you be able to express your own truth? Would you be able to stop obsessing about all this?
Probably only if I never read their stuff in the first place. But with these things in my head it doesn’t matter where I go.
I guess I’m just afraid of stuff like “you are the universe” or “your body is an illusion” being true because they threaten everything my view is built on. The first part would disconnect me from people I care about and I don’t even know where to begin on the second.
It’s fear, I’m afraid to lose things and afraid of those things being true.
The fact that these silly people are imagining fantasies doesn’t invalidate the reality. You look to your left - you see a tree. You take some peyote or whatever and suddenly you feel like you’re the entire universe - this could make you feel like the tree is part of you, or you’re part of the tree, or you’re too busy watching the galaxies inside your navel to notice the tree --I don’t know, I haven’t taken peyote. But after it all, or even during it all, if you swing your arm to the left, your arm will hit that tree.
The reality you live in, that you perceive with your eyes, that your loved ones exist in - that reality has, well, reality. Is it the only way to perceive or describe that reality? Nope! You can also view every person as a collection of organs attached to a brain, and think about their organs as separate things. You can recognize that every person, place, or tree is made out of atoms and molecules, hooked together by chemicals and atomic forces. You can recognize that on the scale of the particles within the atoms there’s actually massive spans of space between everything - the universe is basically a sparse collection of particles in a sea of nothing, held together by a lattice of weird and powerful forces.
These are all different ways of perceiving and describing reality, but does the fact everyone’s made of organs, atoms, and subatomic particles mean they can’t get together, hang out, and play video games? Nope! The existence of other ways to perceive and describe reality doesn’t invalidate the very real reality in which we operate in our daily lives.
If there are other, woo-like ways to describe/perceive reality -we’re all the universe, it’s all illusions, there are ghosts and gods around, there are actually tiny elves controlling our muppet-arms with puppeteer rods- even if any of these ways of describing reality are accurate, it won’t change anything. The normal common way of perceiving reality will remain valid.
Even if they say otherwise while trying to get you to buy something.
I didn’t look at it that way. I just though that there is one way and anything else is wrong.
The way they put it, the subjective way we experience reality (including likes and dislikes) is not real or it is false. That the true reality is empty of our tastes and judgments about it. So I me it seems like my daily life is a lie. I don’t know how other people aren’t bothered by such a thing, I would love to learn how.
But I guess it comes down to me being so obsessed with being right that being wrong is unacceptable especially in the case with reality.
I mean if there is an objective truth then should it not be lived by rather than our subjective realities?
The logic behind subjectivity being that the mind “made it up” and therefor it isn’t the truth or real.
Well, the way I avoid being bothered by it is because I’m of the opinion that these people are full of shit. I dismiss them out of hand. Suffice to say this approach is quick and easy and leaves a lot of time to hang out with people and play video games and such.
But, you may reasonably ask, how am I able to dismiss them so easily? How can I be certain they’re wrong?
Well, for a starter, I can say with an extremely high degree of confidence that observable reality is based on objective truth. It’s simply too consistent and coherent to be a figment of my imagination.
Does this mean that my human perception of the objective truth of reality is perfectly accurate? Of course it’s not - I wear glasses. Without them everything’s blurred, and them on straight vertical lines literally appear curved to me. (It’s kind of annoying, but my optometrist assures me it’s unavoidable if I want things in focus.) So obviously my eyes are a limited and innacurate view of reality - even before I get to the fact I can’t see infrared and such. There is a lot of reality that I cannot observe directly and accurately with my mere senses. Infrared, radar, the stuff on the other side of the wall in front of me. My perceptions are limited.
But that doesn’t change the fact that what I do see is far, far too consistent and coherent for it to be imagined. I mean, I know what my imagination looks like. I know how solid that is - or rather, isn’t. Observable reality isn’t like that. So it’s real all right.
See the distinction? I can’t see everything, and I can’t see it perfectly accurately, but what I do see is based directly on something that’s real, and I can be quite certain of that because it’s all too consistent and coherent to be a dream. My limited and imperfect perception isn’t an indicator that things are unreal.
And anybody who disputes that? They’re full of it. Now, there might be other real things, other objects, planes, and realms out there that are also real, that are beyond my ability to perceive with my normal senses. Auras. Ghosts. Heaven. Peyote-vision. Canada. Things and places outside of the range of my sight and other senses. And that’s fine! There could be things I haven’t seen and don’t know about. They could even be really interesting things! I’m not ruling that out at all.
But no matter how many other realms and things there might be, nothing can unmake the reality of the realm I’m in. Observable reality is real, indisputably, and anybody who says otherwise is confused, deluded, or a liar trying to sell me something.
I agree! However we can be quite certain that observed reality is based on objective truth.
Solipsism again, huh? Well want to hear something neat?
Solipsism presumes that that mind, at least, is real. Cogito Ergo Sum and all that.
Wherever your senses are coming from, they’re hella consistent and coherent. Solipsism posits that they come from your mind (which, recall, is real).
Your senses also clearly aren’t coming from the same place as your conscious mind, or from your imagination as you experience it.
This means that, logically speaking, even solipsism asserts that your senses are based in something real that is outside of your conscious mind and your normal imagination. Which is to say, that your senses are based in a reality outside of what you would normally consider “yourself”. Again, this is true even under solipsism.
The only really novel thing solipsism does is it questions the nature of the reality that underlies our perceptions - while very carefully refusing to so much as speculating about the answers to any of the questions. This is unlike science, which also questions the nature of the reality that underlies our perceptions - but then goes on to try to come up with answers (organs, atoms, subatomic particles, underlying forces, and so on).
Oh, and the other novel thing solipsism does is it tries to pretend that other people’s minds are less real than your mind is, via the mechanic of carefully ignoring the fact that the minds of those you encounter clearly have complexities and operating mechanics that are beyond the ability of your conscious mind to directly perceive. Solipsism deals with this massive oversight by whistling innocently and distracting the solipsist with appeals to his own ego.
Those are certainly interesting points.
But when I speak about solipsism I mean that I temporarily believed in it. The sensations that resulted were odd. Everything around me felt unreal or illusory. Driving became dangerous and even my interactions with people suffered. Under idealism I believed that if I didn’t see something it didn’t exist which led to some interesting times.
What I mean is that my mind created something based on what I believed to be true (not that it was of course). The same is happening with this “you are the universe” stuff. Like one page put it as you are going nowhere because you are everything. So you driving a car is you driving you to go through you. It made no sense.
So I tried to understand what they were getting at and thought about molecules and atoms. If you you listen to Carl Sagan he says something like you are made of the same elements as the first stars and so is everything else. So in that sense I am made of similar molecules but just in a different form or structure then others (another thing they say is death is a myth it’s just the passing of form which might be true if you look at everything being made of similar elements). But that doesn’t make me the road, or the ocean, or a bee. According to them it does, then there is the issue about what the cut off point is for “separateness” as in what makes one thing distinct, where do you determine the end point. They use our limbs as an example for cut off points that seem to be arbitrary. Or a mountain as being X tall relative to the ground. They claim separateness is some illusion even though at the molecular level it does exist. They use the example of a cracker to refute “essence” since if you break down a cracker enough it loses its “crackerness“, but I don’t think they know how chemistry works. Some components lose the properties of their parts when they combine. A cracker technically has a “ness” since no matter how you break it down to pieces (crumbs) you won’t get water or flour.
But it’s confounded when I have never seen the molecule argument used. Topped off by all the examples they have of personal experience. Like how they saw and felt powerful things. I know that’s not really evidence but it’s convicning to me.
A little addition: I think by pictures they mean that what we think something is based on senses and experience than what it actually is. Kind of like how we thinning someone is kind due to experience but if they were they would be all the time. In short I think they refer to the image we make of things based on judgments we form.
Again just a guess though since it really wasn’t explained.
I can’t really tell you what they actually mean with any confidence, because all I know about what they said is what you’ve explained, which means that with my extra layer of Telephone I know less about it than you do! So I can only speculate about what sort of silly woo they’re peddling. From what you say it just sounds like the standard ‘we are connected to everything via magic I am friends with the rocks and trees and we are all brothers together peace love yaddah yaddah yaddah’ business.
I think it’s a mistake trying to figure out how this stuff works with hard science like molecules and reality - that’s like trying to figure out how the animals in Charlotte’s Web are able to talk. Their worldviews are straight-up complete fiction. They’re telling fantasy stories to each other, and they’re able to believe these stories because meditation and/or peyote make the mind feel good. (Or so I hear - I haven’t tried either.)
Well meditation can give one the feeling of being the universe due to altering blood flow to the area of the brain that helps let us know where our body ends and the everything else begins. My guess is that the sensation they get from that is the basis of claim.
Also in regards to the “you are the universe”, the answer given to me was that before you there was the universe. Since they believe there is no death but just the passing of form, my guess is that the parts that make you up (molecules and atoms) don’t actually die, so therefor you don’t truly die. The pieces that make up your body go forth and bind with other pieces to make something else. At least that’s what I think they mean, they never actually use that part. From where I stand and see I am this body, which is MADE of the same stuff as other things in the universe, but eventually dies and breaks down when that happens. So when this body is no more I am no more, but the parts are still there. I am not the parts, I was the whole that those parts made. Considering there isn’t proof that consciousness survives death I’m still sticking to the whole you are the body and not “awareness”. The body is part of the whole but not the whole. Like a puzzle piece being a part of the whole but not the whole.
It’s confusing me.
But what I told you are the answers they gave me. There wasn’t an explanation just another non-sequitur.
I’m pretty certain that they believe that people who die have souls that live on without really dying. I’m pretty sure they don’t mean that people live on because their decomposing bodies leave molecules behind. And I’m quite certain that there’s no point whatsoever in trying to bend their fantasy fiction to fit within anything real or scientific. It’s not supposed to be scientific - it’s spiritual. It’s magic.
Seriously - this is fantasy. It’s as compatible with reality as the fiction books I’ve written, where people have psychic powers. And I mean exactly as compatible - in both cases a fiction has been created that pretends that reality works in a way that allows the scientific powers. The main difference is that I handwave a change in the universe that allows it - and that my books are way more entertaining to think about. (Buy them! Buy them all! All two of them! Bwahahahahaha!)
Ahem. Where was I. Oh yes.
Don’t waste your time trying to make the woo make sense - even the people who believe in the woo don’t attempt to figure out how it works like you’re doing. Because it won’t happen - it’s not designed to make sense in real reality. It’s just woo. It just do what woo do.
So your time is better spent doing other things. Fun things! Like watching movies, playing games, hanging out with (non-woo) friends, or, well, reading fiction books. (Whistles innocently.)
But my brain has to figure out how it works so I can take it apart. Carl Sagan said something along similar lines like “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself”. Well it was " Because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
I know that the basis of their claim is likely as a result of meditation (blood flow and all that), which is why I never get an explanation. But…I don’t know. For someone reason I thin they are right (even though reason says otherwise and working backwards from a conclusion is wrong because you don’t seek evidence that you are right you look at what the facts say). The facts say that I (this body) is made of the same materials as other objects in the universe. When it dies everything dissipates and I (the body) cease to be.
You can’t figure out how it works because it doesn’t work. It’s fiction.
Take Harry Potter. In Harry Potter certain people can say words and make certain gestures with a stick composed of various strange materials and things happen. There is no effort whatsoever in the books to propose a chain of causation between those words being voiced and those materials moving around, and the events that result from those words and motions happening. It just happens because magic. This magic clearly has rules, but there is no mechanism behind it to be found - the story didn’t require it and JK Rowling didn’t describe it, and almost certainly didn’t even design it. Were you to attempt to disprove Harry Potter magic by showing that the mechanism behind it doesn’t work you’d be stymied - there’s no mechanism to examine.
In woo, there’s also no mechanism to examine. They make a bunch of assertions and claim that certain actions will cause certain effects, but they don’t say how - and when it sounds like they are saying how things work it inevitably devolves into a pile of buzzwords that make no sense. Because there’s no “there” there.
Don’t waste your time. If their nonsense actually worked, science would already describe it. It doesn’t because it doesn’t.
Their reasoning for being the universe was that before you there was the universe. Not sure how that works. Then by realizing you are the universe you can live to the age of the universe and something about immortality. Reading the brochure made it sound like these people fear death. But being able to imagine what their claims would be and feel like if true gives me pause.
What about the experiences and “insight” these people have through their teachings and practice? That’s what really gets me.
Their experiences and “insights” are bullshit and woo, designed to separate the gullible from their money.
If you must get into a philosopher, I suggest David Hume.
Here is an article from a woman who’s existential crisis was solved by reading Hume. (It even talks about Buddhism.) The money quote:
(Religious people might be annoyed at the digs at God, but I think it’s possible to embrace this attitude with your faith intact, as long as you admit that it is faith.)
But that’s not the most important thing. What I want to talk about is this:
Look, if you are for real here–and I believe that you are; If your philosophical obsessions are interfering with your ability to act in the world, you need to see a doctor. I’m not saying that to insult you or put you down, I have mental health problems myself. I’m just saying that a doctor could guide you to a therapist or a psychiatrist who would be able to help you be less affected by these intrusive thoughts. A doctor would be much more helpful than a bunch of snarky message board folk who you don’t seem to listen to anyway.
Good luck.
What would it take to convince you that it doesn’t work?
It would feel exactly like bathing in warm butter. And I mean exactly like.
Er, spoiler alert!
I should hope you can agree that this “insight” certainly isn’t informational insight, because it doesn’t come with sufficient information for them to even be able to explain it clearly. Which means it must be emotional insight. Or should I say emotional “insight”.
I strongly suspect you could get similar “insight” from smoking weed.