Mason Riggle

Seriously though, is anyone working on this? Boston Dynamics, get at me when Atlas learns to lovingly fold my skivvies and stack them neatly in the top drawer.

@El Duderino I may be wrong, but it occurs to me to think about this like normal waking.. how long can you stay awake before you unwillingly fall back asleep, only to awaken again when you are ready, or circumstances force you to awaken?

@RMQualtrough sure, sometimes I am aware of my thoughts, sometimes not. This doesn't feel like control to me, however. Perhaps it used to. I always intellectually understand, that I am just 'being me', no matter what I am doing, and I never have to try to 'be me'. I am always aware that, if I suddenly became you (atom for atom, experience for experience, memory for memory, etc.), like, if I WAS you.. I would have no choice but to do exactly what you are doing now.

Try cutting just one or two and see how that goes...

@Vibroverse

@RMQualtrough how much control could you possibly have if you don't even know how you are controlling anything? I could make a robot and program it to behave a certain way, and then look at it and say.. oh look, that robot is controlling itself. But is it? Is the robot 'in control' of 'how it behaves'?

@RMQualtrough to even recognize that your hands are moving is thought. Thoughts can be without words. Even babies think. Dogs think. Fish think.

@Vibroverse you are confusing 'the contents of experience' with 'experience'. No matter what 'the contents of your experience' are, it is all the same 'experience'. Drinking a cold coffee, and drinking a hot coffee seem like two different experiences, but both occur within 'the totality of experience', which is your entire life.. the sum of all the contents of experience, is your one experience.

@Vibroverse "Any attempt to deviate from what is happening, is just more 'what is happening'." - Me

@Vibroverse how could what is occurring ever occur 'other than how it is occurring'?

I suppose this creates suffering for you. The root of all suffering, it has been said, is the attachment to the notion that things should be different than how they are.

sort of?? I'm not sure I understand the question. How does a lightning bolt 'choose' it's path through the atmosphere? Well, it doesn't really choose in the normal sense.. it simply, 'takes the path of least resistance'.. another way to say this, lightning behaves exactly as it prefers to behave, according to it's structure, and the forces acting upon it. This is how you behave. You always do exactly what your organism prefers to do, and the only way it could do otherwise, is if it preferred some other way of being more.

@RMQualtrough when you say 'I control my hands'.. does this happen by thinking about controlling your hands or not? If your hands are controlled by how you think about moving them, but you don't control your thoughts... how exactly are you controlling your hands?

"If I am in a Dream Now" The wording of this gives clues to where the confusion lies. Imagine dreaming this sentence while you sleep at night. Are you really 'in' the dream? Or is it rather that dreaming is happening, and the thought 'If I am in a dream now..' is just 'more dreaming'? You are not IN a dream.. the dream is you. "You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm." - Sam Harris

@4201 maybe it's just me, but it all seems straight forward and direct. If I consider my organism to be a system, I can compare it to how other systems function. I can, for instance, consider a rock to be a system, albeit a rather simple and slowly changing one, and recognize it as a relationship between it's internal makeup, and external forces. If I push on a rock, it reacts to this push. If I heat a rock, it might explode or melt... but the rock also 'resists' exploding or melting or moving. It 'wants' or 'prefers' (for lack of better terms) to be in the state it is in, and will 'resist' being 'pushed away' from this state. There is a state that 'you' prefer, and you 'desire' to be in that state, and when external forces try to move you away from that state, this is 'not preferred'.. it is 'suffering'.. it 'feels bad'. Granted.. human organisms are very complex systems compared to rocks. The brain has powerful abilities to observe what is causing it to be not how it prefers to be, and complex systems for determining how best to return to how it prefers to be.

@Vibroverse the problem with this is that you are already creating the dream you prefer, now, and this is it.

"If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. I am not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be." And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren't God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not God in a politically kingly sense, but god in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not." the Dream of Life, by Alan Watts.

@RMQualtrough do you feel 'assaulted' by your thoughts? Are you 'controlling' your thoughts?

@RMQualtrough perhaps it also helps to consider the following - 'If YOU are causing your hands to move, what is causing 'you' to cause your hands to move?" Is there anything causing you to 'be how you are being, when you be how you are?'. Is the 'you' who is causing your hands to move not 'your hands'? If 'your hands' are not 'you'.. what are you?

Because THIS isn't exactly like the dreams you dream at night. I could tell you that the coaster under my coffee mug is shaped similar to a frisbee. It's round. But this doesn't mean my coaster is 'exactly like a frisbee'. The 'dream analogy' is an analogy.

Consider.. is 'feeling hungry' good or bad? It doesn't 'feel good' to 'feel hungry', but without 'feeling hungry' (suffering from hunger), how would we know to eat? Suffering (feeling bad) is how you know what you desire. What do you desire? Well, you desire not to suffer.

The poor Id never gets any love.

@The Buddha yep. Same thing, different perspective. 'I am.' seems closer to Truth than 'I am _____ (fill in the blank)'.

The 'dissolving' of the ego can also be seen as the 'growing of the ego', where instead of getting smaller and smaller until it disappears.. it gets bigger and bigger and recognizes itself as 'all of it', at which point there is no difference between 'ego' and 'that which is not ego'.

@The Buddha I'm not sure any of it is 'wrong'. Ego is not wrong. It's just arbitrary, the same way the difference between a knife and a sword is arbitrary. The difference is whatever we say it is. When I see a whirlpool.. I can recognize it as a whirlpool.. or rather, a pattern of 'whirlpooling' within the river.. but I can also recognize that the 'whirlpool' isn't 'causing itself'.. it's not 'doing anything' other than 'being how it is'.. it's a function of what the entire river is doing.