(May 8, 2013 at 3:39 pm)apophenia Wrote:


"The Master [Linji] saw a monk coming and held his fly whisk straight up. The monk made a low bow, whereupon the Master struck him a blow. The Master saw another monk coming and again held his fly whisk straight up. The monk paid no attention, whereupon the Master struck him a blow as well."

Swords, sticks, flying stars and now fly whisks. Those guys are good.

(May 9, 2013 at 8:37 am)enrico Wrote: Your feelings are not dismissed as casually at all.
I am rather saying that the more you climb the ladder of emancipation and the more you will feel.
When you take a lift to the first floor you can see a little but when you take the lift to the top floor you have a much better vision.
The same thing apply when you activate the glands located along our spinal column.
At the bottom you have the gland controlling the matter, then the one controlling the liquid, then light (heat) air, space mind and spirit.
Materialistic people are happy living in the material world but the point is HOW DO THEY KNOW HOW GOOD IS LIVING AT THE TOP IF THEY NEVER CARE TO GET THERE?
These people are totally convinced that their vision is the ultimate.

Since my brain, and thus my eyes, are located at the top of my spinal column above all my glands, does that mean that my vision is indeed the ultimate?

Apart from which I live in a fourth floor flat and take the stairs.

Also, shouting at me doesn't make your point any better. On the contrary it's more likely to make me think your points lack substance.

(May 9, 2013 at 12:29 pm)apophenia Wrote:


Many mystical traditions "claim" that the truth can only be known through experience. (meditation, yoga, whatever) None has ever been able to demonstrate that what they have found is truth. The way they have defined it, it can't be demonstrated. So do we take such assertions on faith? Or do we acknowledge that while yes, there may be aspects of living that can only be understood nonverbally, the mind has a great capacity to fool itself, and desperately seeking after these experiences is simply priming the mind to tell itself lies?

To explore a new realm is fascinating and delightful. However, before you explore that realm, take a care to be sure that it actually exists. If you convince yourself that it exists, when it does not, and let your mind's powers of imagination convince you you are exploring that world when you are just being fooled by a mind eager to satisfy itself, you have not enhanced your world, you have taken away from its overall quality by squandering your resources in pointless head games and believing things that aren't true.

You climb the mountain. When you get at very top you enjoy a beautiful feeling (the vision and all other inner feeling and the satisfaction to be there).
When you get dawn to earth your friend ask you...........WAS IT NICE TO BE THERE AT THE VERY TOP?
You try your best to describe how nice was to be there.
Unfortunately your friend can only grasp less then 1% of what you where feeling when you were up there.
That is how the system works.
Unless you climb up there yourself there is no way in the world that you can feel that magical feeling to be up there.
At the same time unless you practice what i am talking about there is no way i can demonstrate or make you feel what i feel.
This of course does not mean that what i am talking does not exist.
In other term refusing to understand this point is a clear sign of locking oneself into the dogma.

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(May 10, 2013 at 9:21 am)Stimbo Wrote:

(May 9, 2013 at 8:37 am)enrico Wrote: Your feelings are not dismissed as casually at all.
I am rather saying that the more you climb the ladder of emancipation and the more you will feel.
When you take a lift to the first floor you can see a little but when you take the lift to the top floor you have a much better vision.
The same thing apply when you activate the glands located along our spinal column.
At the bottom you have the gland controlling the matter, then the one controlling the liquid, then light (heat) air, space mind and spirit.
Materialistic people are happy living in the material world but the point is HOW DO THEY KNOW HOW GOOD IS LIVING AT THE TOP IF THEY NEVER CARE TO GET THERE?
These people are totally convinced that their vision is the ultimate.

Since my brain, and thus my eyes, are located at the top of my spinal column above all my glands, does that mean that my vision is indeed the ultimate?

1) It is the pineal gland at the very top, not your eyes.
2) Your eyes are only an instrument that YOU use to collect information and your brain is a storage of information. Again it is important not to confuse the driver with the vehicle.
3) The main 7 glands are the key to reach the ultimate feeling not the eyes or the brain.

Quote:Apart from which I live in a fourth floor flat and take the stairs.

I hope you understand that it was an example when i said that to be at the top you may have a better vision.

Quote:Also, shouting at me doesn't make your point any better. On the contrary it's more likely to make me think your points lack substance.

Some people swear when they want to be heard like Minimalist and Stimbo, other people like Enrico sometime write small sentences in upper case.
Who said.........Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast The First Stone?

(May 10, 2013 at 10:02 am)enrico Wrote: You climb the mountain. When you get at very top you enjoy a beautiful feeling (the vision and all other inner feeling and the satisfaction to be there).
When you get dawn to earth your friend ask you...........WAS IT NICE TO BE THERE AT THE VERY TOP?
You try your best to describe how nice was to be there.
Unfortunately your friend can only grasp less then 1% of what you where feeling when you were up there.
That is how the system works.
Unless you climb up there yourself there is no way in the world that you can feel that magical feeling to be up there.
At the same time unless you practice what i am talking about there is no way i can demonstrate or make you feel what i feel.
This of course does not mean that what i am talking does not exist.
In other term refusing to understand this point is a clear sign of locking oneself into the dogma.

I tell the blind man, "climb upon my back, and I will take you to the beautiful mountain." And so he does, and we journey many hours, and finally I stop and set him down. I say to him, "Isn't this beautiful, the cool mountain air blowing over you?" He agrees, and I have him climb once more upon my back, and many hours later we arrive in the tavern. Inside the tavern, the blind man regales the people with a tale of his journey up the mountain, and how wonderful it was to experience the summit. The people believe he went to the top of the mountain, for such things are not unheard of, but none can feel what he feels. After he is done telling his tale, I tell mine. The truth is, the blind man never went up the mountain. I had many accomplices, who, used fans to make wind, lights and glowing coals to manipulate wind and temperature, and people and devices to imitate the sounds of nature that one might hear upon ascending a mountain. The fact is that we never went far from the village, and never even approached the mountain. The blind man is unconvinced. He declares, "I know what I felt, it was the mountain, I felt the cool mountain air. I heard birdsong in the air." We clap him on the shoulder and order another round of drinks.

Why did the blind man believe he was on the mountain? Surely the tricks they had played on him, the breezes, the sounds, these made it easy for him to believe, surely. But the key ingredient was what the blind man was expecting. He expected to be taken to the mountaintop, so he interpreted these things he experienced as a part of being taken to the mountain top. If he had been told that he was being taken to a stream in the woods, he would have interpreted the same feelings and sensations as evidence that he had visited a stream. It was his expectations which led him astray, not the wind, or the noises, or anything else. How do you know your expectations about this mountaintop are not also leading you astray. You insist that you can clearly tell that they aren't, just as the blind man insisted he was on the mountain. The truth is, you have nothing but your "feeling" that you are right, and your confidence in its truth, so you have no way of knowing that you are not like the blind man. And all your protestations simply tell us that you are ignorant of how we fool ourselves about these things, and fail to take that into account. It's not that I don't "understand" your point as you say, I don't agree with your implicit point that my "feelings" and "experience" of such a climb can be reliably depended upon not to lead me astray. I can't, because after studying psychology for many years, it's clear that the mind can easily lead itself astray in this manner.

In Robert Burton's book On Being Certain, he gives the example of returning to your hometown 20 years after you left in order to take part in a high school reunion. You arranged over the phone to meet at Izzy's house, and you'll all take Izzy's minivan to the reunion. Since this is your home town, you don't bother with maps, you just drive straight into town. You pull up in front of the house that you think is Izzy's and stop. You're sure this is Izzy's house. It's the same as it was 20 years ago, and you have a feeling of confidence that you are right. There's no way you could be mistaken. It just "feels" right. So you go and knock on the door, and a strange woman answers the door. She explains that this is not Izzy's house, and moreover it has never been Izzy's house — she has lived there alone for 40 years. So what went wrong? How could you have been so wrong about which house was the right one? The problem lies in how our brains tell us that we have the right answer. When we arrive at the right answer, our brains generate a feeling, and it is the presence of that feeling alongside the answer which we trust to indicate the answer is right. If we're reasonably intelligent, the bulk of the times we have that "feeling" we will also have the right answer. But not always. Sometimes, the feeling is generated in our brains accompanying the wrong answer, and perhaps at times generated for any answer. (People on certain drugs may report that everything "made sense." Is it possible that things did not actually make sense, but rather that the "feeling" that things "make sense" was stuck in the on position? I don't know, but it seems a distinct possibility.)

There is a neurological disorder known as Capgras delusion in which the patient can experience the sight of a loved one, a spouse or a parent, and believe that they are not that person's real spouse or parent, they just "look like" the person's spouse or parent, but really are simply insidious doubles. No matter how you reason with them, they're convinced these people aren't their real loved ones. For some Capgras delusion patients, you can have their loved one talk to them over the phone, and they will recognize and believe them to be the genuine article. V.S. Ramachandran has a theory about this. It is known that facial recognition in the brain travels through, not one, but two separate systems. The neural pathways proceed a ways, and then the signal is split. One goes to a visual processing center, the other goes to an emotional processing center. Ramachandran's theory is that the pathway to the emotional center is disrupted in Capgras delusion patients such that the visual processing center recognizes the visual similarity of the loved one, but because the pathway is cutoff, the brain never generates the feeling that this is the right person. So they see the person as identical, but they don't identify them as being the same as their loved one because the brain never generates the signal that they are "the right ones."

This has been a lot of information at once, but the ultimate question is, how do you know these experiences you have that you "feel" are important and truthful are in fact important and truthful? If you say that you feel that you can't be mistaken, you've fallen into a clever trap. Your brain determines right or wrong by generating such feelings, sometimes in the absence of being right. Perhaps these experiences of your are simply conditioning your brain to generate a "feeling" of rightness and meaning to accompany them, and they have no intrinsic rightness to them at all. Can you tell me how you tell the difference between experiences that have intrinsic rightness, and which generate the feeling of rightness, and those that generate the feeling, but have no intrinsic rightness? I don't think you can.

Moreover, believing that these experiences lead to truth because someone else has told you that they do is more dogmatic than being skeptical of the truth of these experiences. Saying that your beliefs are true, that no evidence will convince you otherwise, and not allowing the possibility that you might be wrong, that's dogmatic thinking; saying that these experiences are interesting, but you're not sure they tell us anything real, and you'll wait for some real evidence, that's not dogmatic; it's just sound reasoning. I think you are mistaken about who is engaged in dogmatic thinking here. Prove me wrong. I think you are letting your expectations lead you to a confidence in the truth of these things when you should be considerably less confident about them.

(May 10, 2013 at 1:15 pm)apophenia Wrote: There is a neurological disorder known as Capgras delusion in which the patient can experience the sight of a loved one, a spouse or a parent, and believe that they are not that person's real spouse or parent, they just "look like" the person's spouse or parent, but really are simply insidious doubles.

Apophenia, I wish you would perform thorough research before posting. If you are unaware, Wikipedia is not an acceptable reference source in a postgraduate (MSc, PhD) academic setting; in certain instances, there is information in Wikipedia that is factually inaccurate.

Capgras Delusion is not a neurological disorder; it is a specific set of delusional/psychotic symptoms that most commonly occur in people who are suffering from severe psychosis-based mental disorders, such as paranoid schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder or psychotic depression. It is formally classified as a "delusional misidentification syndrome". Although, however, it can occur in a person who is suffering from a neurodegenerative disorder.

Mental disorders are not classified as neurological disorders. HERE is an official page from "National Institutes of Health" that lists all the Neurological Disorders.

I was unaware that it occurs outside of a neurological incident. Thank you for the correction. I will point out, however, that nothing that you've said differs from the information in the Wikipedia entry, and this is not an academic setting.

(May 8, 2013 at 6:31 am)Godschild Wrote:

(May 3, 2013 at 10:44 am)enrico Wrote:
When i asked Godschild how all the people who born before Jesus or those who never heard about him could be saved he failed to reply.
Of course he can not reply considering that his knowledge is based on dogma.

I must have missed your request, sorry. Those who do not get a chance to hear about Jesus and I do mean witnessed to God will judge them on their belief there is a God and how they lived according to that belief. What all is taken into consideration by God is up to Him. Those who came before Christ, the same thing, there is no way I or anyone else could give a complete answer because we are not God and thus do not know all He has planned.

Thanks for my laugh of the day, G-C. What a festering pile of steaming shit you cooked up there.

(May 10, 2013 at 3:33 pm)apophenia Wrote: I was unaware that it occurs outside of a neurological incident. Thank you for the correction. I will point out, however, that nothing that you've said differs from the information in the Wikipedia entry, and this is not an academic setting.

You are most welcome.

I understand that this is not an academic setting. I am simply pointing out the fact that Wikipedia is sometimes inaccurate; it is not considered as a credible source academically.

The Wikipedia article does make an incorrect claim in the "History" section (last sentence), in which it states the following: "Today the Capgras syndrome is understood as a neurological disorder, in which the delusion primarily results from organic brain lesions or degeneration." This is technically incorrect.

(May 10, 2013 at 1:15 pm)apophenia Wrote: ...

Then you must give us all

The following are passages from a document cited by one of the authors of the Wikipedia entry.

Douwe Draaisma.

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Quote:Joseph Capgras (1873-1950) was a Paris psychiatrist, working mainly in Maison Blanche and later in the Sainte-Anne-hospital (Luauté). The woman that would go down medical history as “the first Capgras patient” was a certain Mme. M, a 53-year-old seamstress. In the final year of World War I she had been admitted to Maison Blanche, where she came under the care of Capgras. She was intensely delusional, claiming that she wasn’t really Mme. M, but a descendant of king Henri IV, heiress to an immense fortune. She said that her father had made a deathbed-confession that he had snatched her as a fifteen-months-old from her cradle in a family of nobility. Her true name, she said, was Mathilde de Rio Branco. A second delusional theme was that her daughter and husband had been replaced by what she called “sosies,” impostors who were the spitting image of her loved ones but impostors nevertheless. In 1923, Capgras and his colleague Reboul-Lachaux published a case study on Mme. M., indicating that her delusions of grandeur were a case of “folie raisonnante,” a concept of their own finding, meaning that the delusions were bizarre, but internally consistent (Capgras and Reboul-Lachaux; Ellis et al.). The authors explained that the “illusion des sosies,” as they dubbed it, was caused by “identification agnosia.” That is, Mme. M. had no trouble recognizing faces, she just failed to identify these faces as the faces of her dear ones. The idea of “doubles” was in a sense a natural consequence of recognizing a face but not experiencing the warmth and familiarity that comes naturally with seeing this face. Her implicit reasoning seemed to be that if she didn’t warm to her daughter emotionally, then it couldn’t really be her daughter. Capgras and Reboul-Lachaux argued that doubles were a creation of a “logique des émotions.” A few years later a Paris colleague proposed to rename the “illusion des sosies” into Capgras Syndrome.

If Capgras had simply published his 1923 explanation and left it at that, he would still be revered as the first psychiatrist who had a clear incling on the most probable explanation. Unfortunately, his initial article was followed by a series of articles championing psychoanalytical explanations. In 1924 he published a case study of a woman who claimed that her father was a double, due, Capgras assumed, to her incestuous desire towards him, a desire so taboo that it forced her to conclude that it couldn’t really be her father (Capgras and Carrette). This set the stage for a series of Freudian explanations for doubles, for instance by arguing that creating a double is a subconscious way of handling mounting tensions between ambivalent feelings: all hostility is projected on the impostor, whereas the lost dear one tends to be idealized.

Thus, Capgras Syndrome, as originally conceived, was a female disorder, part of the general diagnosis of hysteria. For the first fifteen years or so all case studies featured women. The first case of a male Capgras patient, in 1936, was published as something of a discovery, this case was so anomalous that the author hinted at latent homosexuality (Murray). Taking the long view on Capgras, one will find that the patient population developed from exclusively female to an ever smaller but still robust female overrepresentation of 2 to 1 today (Berson; De Pauw).

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Quote:In most cases of Capgras Syndrome the doubles are part of a system of paranoid delusions. This is one of the reasons why every effort of loved ones to convince the patient that they aren’t doubles, but still truly their son, daughter or husband, meets with hostility. It may, in fact, make matters worse: the patient will weave their efforts into his paranoid system. In The Echo Maker this happened to Karin: when she began to talk about things that only she and Mark knew about, he became instantly suspicious, for this could only mean that this impostor woman had extorted private information from the true Karin — apparently there were more people involved in the plot than he first suspected. Hints at intimacy by loved ones tend to fuel the paranoia. Sadly, this also implies that the status of being a double is not without risk. There are cases on record in which the patient actually killed the double. In Missouri a Capgras patient was convinced that his stepfather had been replaced by an alien and decapitated him to look for the batteries and microfilms (Blount).