Sociopath Community

AppleGenius said: 

Ah ok, I thought you implied that the descriptive model is real in the sense that, e.g., some Newtonian force necessarily exists as a separate entity in the Universe because the Newtonian model correctly describes how two bodies with different masses move w.r.t. each other in lieu of any perturbation. But I see that's not what you were saying.

Thanks.

For me, anything that can not be observed can not be confirmed.

I think you mean *absent* any perturbation not quite in lieu. ;) But anyway It’s hard to recall for me are you talking about Newton’s law of gravitation = F= Gmm/r^2

Med said: 

AppleGenius said: 

Ah ok, I thought you implied that the descriptive model is real in the sense that, e.g., some Newtonian force necessarily exists as a separate entity in the Universe because the Newtonian model correctly describes how two bodies with different masses move w.r.t. each other in lieu of any perturbation. But I see that's not what you were saying.

Thanks.

For me, anything that can not be observed can not be confirmed.

I think you mean *absent* any perturbation not quite in lieu. ;) But anyway It’s hard to recall for me are you talking about Newton’s law of gravitation = F= Gmm/r^2

Yes, thanks Med. I meant absent any perturbation. Yeah, I was using Newton's law of gravity as an example.

The yoga stuff I've been into lately resonates with a lot of what's in this thread.

Wikipedia said:

Buddha Shakyamuni often told his disciples to regard all phenomena as dreams. He used many examples, like an echo, a city in the clouds or a rainbow to illustrate the illusory nature of the phenomenal world. Dreams represent just one type of illusion. The whole universe arises and dissolves like a mirage. Everything about us, even the most enlightened qualities, are also dreamlike phenomena. There's nothing that is not encompassed within the dream of illusory being; so in going to sleep, you're just passing from one dream state to another.

https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/far-willing-go-wake/ said:

You’ve said that through lucid dreaming we can transform sleep into a window to the deepest experiences of reality. However, we often experience dreams as unreal. We can do things in dreams that we can’t in waking reality, like fly. What can we make of this?

One of the reasons we don’t have the same capabilities in waking reality as we do in dreams is because we take waking reality to be real. When you truly wake up, the waking world is just as real—or just as unreal—as the dream world. You start to see that the waking state is fundamentally no different from the dream state. It’s the mind expressing itself in two different mediums.

For many reasons—fear being the primary one—we make this so-called waking reality more real than our dreaming reality. Reification is a way to create an egoic sanctuary, a place where the ego feels safe. When the world is seen as illusory, the ego freaks out. It has nothing to stand on. Therefore it sees waking reality as real and the dream world as unreal.

The fundamental charter of these practices is to see the one taste of all these different dimensions of the mind so we’re no longer privileging one state over another. We have a very powerful prejudice toward waking consciousness, and that wake-centricity is the source of so many problems.

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In your book, you write, “Dream yoga will reveal your passion for ignorance.” It seems like tremendous resistance can come up for people when attempting these practices. Why does that happen?

Wake-centricity is a huge obstacle. It’s a level of discrimination we don’t even know we’re afflicted by, and that’s what makes it so insidious.

Wake-centricity—which is really egocentricity—reflects ego’s bias toward the waking state. People are afraid of some of these nocturnal practices because they’re afraid of the dark. That’s just ego keeping up its defenses. Ego hides out in the dark. Darkness is a code word for ignorance, and nighttime is an archetype of that ignorance.

Every time we go to sleep or get lost in discursive thought, ego is recharging its samsaric batteries. Not everybody wants to engage in dream yoga, because it will show us just how far we’re willing to go to wake up. Ego lives and hangs out in the darkness of ignorance, and when we try to penetrate it with nocturnal practices, there is part of us that just doesn’t want to go there.

AppleGenius said: 

Ah ok, I thought you implied that the descriptive model is real in the sense that, e.g., some Newtonian force necessarily exists as a separate entity in the Universe because the Newtonian model correctly describes how two bodies with different masses move w.r.t. each other in lieu of any perturbation. But I see that's not what you were saying.

Thanks.

For me, anything that can not be observed can not be confirmed.

 Naturally, as a Bayesian you cannot update your priors without an observation. 

Tryptamine said: 

The yoga stuff I've been into lately resonates with a lot of what's in this thread.

 

Wikipedia said:

Buddha Shakyamuni often told his disciples to regard all phenomena as dreams. He used many examples, like an echo, a city in the clouds or a rainbow to illustrate the illusory nature of the phenomenal world. Dreams represent just one type of illusion. The whole universe arises and dissolves like a mirage. Everything about us, even the most enlightened qualities, are also dreamlike phenomena. There's nothing that is not encompassed within the dream of illusory being; so in going to sleep, you're just passing from one dream state to another.

 This reminds me of something Graham Harman has talked about but I cannot quite recall what he calls it, it's phantom object or   something of the sort. But it essentially amounts to a object that is seemingly real but in actuality illusion or an object that is real   but cannot be sensed under normal circumstances and as such the illusion is that it doesn't exist. 

Your confusion is understandable. You were a white larvae that pupated into an Afrikan...