Mongu9719

Member
 View profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    159

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Mongu9719

  3. Posted

    @Inliytened1 @Leo Gura can you as God, imagine what being a rock is like? Can you limit yourself if you wanted to? People become all kinds of things on salvia. One guy become Beyoncé’s birth certificate. Can we manufacture a psychedelic which creates the experience of you being Beyoncé’s birth certificate? We can target neurotransmitters in the brain which can create the experience of being that. Could we also create a psychedelic in which you can speed up time for yourself and see future events? Can we create one in which I reverse time and become 10 years old? Are the possibilities truly endless or can our stream of conciousness only be altered in specific ways? Are there limits to what a psychedelic can do?

  4. Posted

    @Leo Gura My examination of different paradigms, my research, and my intellectualisation all distract me from becoming concious of conciousness. I can get lost in conceptualisation because the mind doesn’t want to turn inwards. Abandoning all concepts and ideas is necessary then to become concious of what conciousness is. This is what marks the transition from stage yellow to turquoise. As I long as I continue to distract myself on this forum by trying to understand awakening and conciousness the farther I get away from The Truth. The next step for me is to do the practices and stop distracting myself on this forum. 

  7. Posted · Edited by Mongu9719

    @Serotoninluv so are you saying that there is a second-order level of conciousness which is material which is what this scientific explanation  is pointing to, and a first order which is immaterial which is what Leo is talking about? Ultimately both are part of the first order or absolute conciousness . Right?

  9. Posted · Edited by Mongu9719

    @Leo Gura didn’t you say that there were relative levels of conciousness? That’s what spiral dynamics is right? But also everything is conciousness. Do these relative levels only exist because I think I’m a human being? If I erased that distinction then I would realise that everything is conciousness? I think I’m finally begin to grasp what you have been saying for so long.

  10. Posted

    @Serotoninluv hmm ok I think I understand now. A materialist can’t pinpoint what material aspect of the brain actually produces conciousness. They can point to neurons but that doesn’t actually explain anything, because regardless of how the brain is arranged, it still doesn’t explain the subjective experience of conciousness. Even if they can point to a specific arrangements of neurons and and all of the neurotransmitters involved, it would only explain the appearance of conciousness but not conciousness itself.  The only conclusion you can arrive at then is that any material explanation for conciousness is insufficient because it  leads to a strange loop or  “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” The main reason I posted this was so I could get a better understanding of  the materialist paradigm and think it through myself. Thanks for the response. This is really tricky for my mind to grasp but I think I understand it better now. 

  11. Posted · Edited by Mongu9719

    @Serotoninluv our “isness” is just an illusion created by the brain. Just like how our brain creates an internal-model  of “white-light” even though “white-light” is much more complex than our human brain can process. It is an outline, a rough estimate. That is what conciousness is to us. A rough model of our internal subjective experience which can be clinically demonstrated as is the case with patients that have brain damage, damaging their ability to be concious. Just as there are neural correlates for “white light” in the visual cortex, there are an entire arrangement of neurons which model conciousness in our brains. It is self-contained and self explanatory.

  13. Posted

    @Leo Gura why is it foolish? Wouldn’t it be necessary to understand all perspectives to get the most accurate picture. I’m not saying that this model is absolutely true but it is illuminating. Studying and understanding our neurophysiology gives us a deeper understanding of ourselves. We shouldn’t rule out any possibility even if it comes from a materialistic, reductionist viewpoint.

  14. Posted · Edited by Mongu9719

    @Serotoninluv According to this theory, it is a self-model. Just as we have a self-model which remembers the physical location of our limbs, or the part of our brain which codes white light with brightness without colour. The brain creates a self-model of subjective internal experience. This explains why someone who has damage to a certain part of their brain, are not concious that a ball is being thrown at them yet they still dodge it. The brain recognises that there is a ball and the areas which process visual input light up, but because they have damage to the area of the brain which makes them aware of it, they have no idea that they even dodged it. If this area is damaged even further, it leads to a vegetative state. If the brain is capable of make internal models of external objects and is able to make a self-model of its own attention, then it is not a far stretch to say that it could make a self-model of its own internal experience. What remains to be understood is how these neurons responsible for conciousness compute information.

  15. Posted · Edited by Mongu9719

    This explanation points to a materialistic origin of conciousness. The human mind creates a self model in its mind to remember previous experiences and then areas of the brain corresponding to that experience light up when the person encounters the same experience. Why is this self-model theory not adequate to explain conciousness?

  18. Posted · Edited by Mongu9719

    I, in my normal everyday state, am conscious that I exist and of all the colours and sounds in my visual field. How does this concious experience, differ from “conciousness”. What exactly does it mean to raise my level of conciousness if “I” don’t have any conciousness to raise? If everything is made from conciousness how can “I” become concious of it, if “I” exist within conciousness and am made of it. If “I” am not concious but exist within conciousness , then I am no different that a physical object which also exists within conciousness. Then how can I become concious of something if I didn’t have any conciousness to being with? 

  19. Posted

    Leo always says that because we have essentially been conditioned to believe that we are a human being growing up, we essentially buy into that illusion. In that case should I teach my future child Leo’s guide to enlightenment when he is very young, before the brain is fully formed? This would mean that he would have a much easier time becoming enlightened as he doesn’t have much programming inside him, and he wouldn’t have to work through so much delusion since his brain is primed at this stage (ages 3-10) Or would he go crazy because he would be too young to understand it?

  23. Posted

    @Serotoninluv I don’t think that looking at them as performance enhancing drugs is the right analogy. Think of psychedelics like a rocket ship that blast you off to a far away destination like the moon, while meditation is like driving in a busy street to your local grocery store in your sedan. Both the rocket ship and the sedan are methods of transportation.  Both the sedan and the rocket ship are technologies that benefit us, but the rocket ship is more powerful and has a different use than the sedan. The sedan will probably cause less damage if misused than the rocket ship, and you will probably use it a lot more. Both are useful but for different purposes and in different contexts. In the same way, psychedelics and mediation are just spiritual technologies used to explore and raise  conciousness., each having a different use in terms of both frequency,setting, and purpose. I think it is very harmful to view psychedelics as some kind of performance drug, rather we should view them as powerful spiritual technologies, just like the rocket ship which is a powerful method of transport. And in that way powerful technologies should be treated with care and used infrequently.

  25. Posted

    @LastThursday Don't listen to they naysayers. We only watch the videos and go on the forum for the content,  don't be fooled by anything else. If you want to awaken, do that in your own time. If the content helps you awaken, then that's a bonus.

    Context is just as important as content. Which is why introspection is necessary. Pay attention to the structure because it is what holds everything together. 
     

    How else do you get a bunch of people at very different stages of development to interact together?

    Good question. Perhaps you could  sort them by what stage on the spiral. Perhaps before signing up you would make people fill out a questionnaire which would accurately rank them at a certain stage of the spiral and they would have a badge next to them which would indicate which stage of the spiral they are in. Then these individuals would get sorted into their respective forums, and there would be one main forum where members could interact from all stages of the spiral. Perhaps we could even create an AI program to recommend people with similar values on the forum via certain keywords they use in their posts. Perhaps this AI program would move you up the spiral when certain key words start getting mentioned more. This would allow for a community with structure yet would be fluid enough so that multiple people on the spiral could interact.