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Sr. Member
Joined: 20 Feb 2003
Posts: 4628
Location: London, UK
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 12:54 am
Post subject:
Seriously, dude... get a life
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Jr. Member
Joined: 19 Mar 2011
Posts: 49
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 1:50 am
Post subject:
NeonVomit wrote:
Seriously, dude... get a life
What do you mean by "get"? I don't think in terms of "getting something". How can you
You dont't need to "get" a life. You already "have" it. You just have to open your eyes and see that, which you already have. If you always think in terms of "getting something" you will not "get", rather you will "miss" life. So No, thank you, but i don't like that kind of attitude. I have life here and now and i dont't need to get it.
Create goals, seduce people: Now this is the goal! You must have this, otherwise life is purposeless! They start running, because they have an achieving mind. But where does it lead? It leads into more and more neurosis.
Only a nonachieving mind can be at peace.
But a nonachieving mind is possible only with the background of a cosmic purposelessness.
If the whole existence is purposeless then there is no need for you to be purposeful. Then you can play, you can sing and dance, you can enjoy, you can love and live, and
there is no need to create any goal. Here and now, this very moment, the ultimate is present.
If you are available the ultimate can enter you. But you are not available here;
your mind is somewhere in the future, in some goal.
Ask a child. He will look at you as if you are a fool.
There is no need for purpose.
Your mind has been corrupted. Universities, colleges, education, society, have corrupted you. They have made it a conditioning deep down within you that unless something has a purpose it is useless so everything must have a purpose.
A child playing has no purpose. At the most, if the child could explain he would say, Because I feel good. Running, I feel more alive. Collecting flowers, I enjoy, it is ecstatic. But there is no purpose. The very act in itself is beautiful, ecstatic.
To be alive is enough, there is no need for any purpose. :
Your mind has been corrupted by economists, mathematicians, theologians. They have corrupted your mind, because they all talk about purpose. They say, Do something if something is achieved through it. Dont do anything which leads nowhere. But I tell you that the more you can enjoy things which are useless, the happier you will be.
The more you can enjoy things which are purposeless, the more innocent and blissful you will be. When you dont need any purpose you simply celebrate your being.
You feel gratitude just that you are, just that you breathe. It is such a blessing that you can breathe, that you are alert, conscious, alive, aflame. Is it not enough?
Do you need something to achieve so that you can feel good, so that you can feel valued, so that you can feel life is justified? What more can you achieve than what you are? What more can be added to your life? What more can you add to it?
Nothing can be added, and the effort will destroy you the effort to add something.
But for many centuries all over the world they have been teaching every child to be purposive.
Dont waste your time! Dont waste your life! And what do they mean? They mean, Transform your life into a bank balance. When you die you must die rich. That is the purpose.
If you want to live richly you have to live here and now,
not a single moment is to be lost. If you want to achieve something, you will die a rich man but you will live a poor man, your life will be poor.
Look at rich people: their life is absolutely poor, because they are wasting it transforming it into bank balances, changing their life into money, into big houses, big cars. Their whole effort is that life has to be changed for some things. When they die you can count their things.
Buddha became a beggar. He was born a king, he became a beggar. Why? Just to live richly...
because he came to understand that there are two ways to live: one is to die richly, the other is to live richly.
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Sr. Member
Joined: 04 Mar 2002
Posts: 3774
Location: Satellite Of Love
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 2:16 am
Post subject:
Cthulhu fhtagn!
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Peace Warrior
Joined: 31 Jul 2010
Posts: 106
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 4:04 am
Post subject:
Alienred wrote:
Only a nonachieving mind can be at peace.
But ..... so what are you trying to achieve with your posts here then?
What would OSHO say about that?
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Sr. Member
Joined: 29 Dec 2008
Posts: 1907
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 8:50 am
Post subject:
You don't understand what he means by "being" and Consciousness!
Oh sure I actually expected this one.
Being has nothing to do with the mind or philosophy or science.It's another dimension beyond mind, beyond space and time which can never be reached by science - it's impossible! But nevertheless you can have a taste of it.
Oh now I get it. It doesn't exist.
Oh but sure you can explain how that is. Beyond time and space is usually something that does not exist. (Unless you ask Immanuel Kant who pretty much says that space and time are only ways to perceive not how things actually are)
Once again you are underestimating science. If you or Osho or anyone can truly know something about it then so should science too.
I bet you didn't even read my post
You misudestood everything because of this. And you argued just for the sake of arguing.
Oh Really? Like the part about Karl Marx and Oshos terrible Ad Hominem argument? Or the crap about vegetarians? And most of all all the things about science not being able to study consciousness? At least I understand what people mean by that.
Right now try to close your eyes and stop thinking for at least 1 minute completely - no thoughts at all.
Just stop!
Complete silence.
Try to listen to it (silence) - no thoughts at all just for 1 minute - Ok?
Sorry not possible unless I die. Perception is brainfunction as well and thoughts are not always as word so listening would be thinking too.
"Looking at a sunset, just for a second you forget your separateness: you are the sunset. That is the moment when you feel the beauty of it. But the moment you say that it is a beautiful sunset, you are no longer feeling it; you have come back to your separate, enclosed entity of the ego. Now the mind is speaking. And this is one of the mysteries, that the mind can speak, and knows nothing; and the heart knows everything, and cannot speak. Perhaps to know too much makes it difficult to speak; the mind knows so little, it is possible for it to speak.
" -
Yeah this kind of parts just repeat themselves.
Do you know what we are looking at here?
This is simply Aesthetic and intuitive talking that would make Nietzsche mad. It is quite hollow really. It is not based on much and my problem is that a poem that claims to be an article should be told it's just a poem.
Because he experienced them.
Krishnamurti and Eckhart Tolle experienced the same, that's why they are all talking about the same things.
If there was just a little bit of "being" left in you would have understood it.
But I am afraid you are completely lost inside your mind.
Please watch the video and try to feel the silence between the words of the speaker...
And I experience you are wrong. That is the problem with intuitionism.
What do you mean by "get"? I don't think in terms of "getting something". How can you get life?
You dont't need to "get" a life. You already "have" it. You just have to open your eyes and see that, which you already have. If you always think in terms of "getting something" you will not "get", rather you will "miss" life. So No, thank you, but i don't like that kind of attitude. I have life here and now and i dont't need to get it
Oh but now he is in an argumentative state of mind.
Linguistically words have syntax and semantics in language.
Most of the Oshos phrases lack either one.
Now to demonstrate I will show what a nonsensical phrase looks like. Blue is half a meter long and appleness weighs 50kg.
Now you probably just don't get the semantics on that one because indeed clearly you do need to get a life.
Peace Warrior wrote:
Alienred wrote:
Only a nonachieving mind can be at peace.
But ..... so what are you trying to achieve with your posts here then?
What would OSHO say about that?
A good point but he will ignore it. Just like with all religious people he thinks he is doing it right. He doesn't need to evaluate himself because he feels he is in control of the world through religion.
Now this is the end of discussion. Now it's multiplayer time and I did warn you.
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Sr. Member
Joined: 29 Dec 2008
Posts: 1907
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 8:51 am
Post subject:
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body.[2]
Dualism and monism are the two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mind-body problem. Dualism can be traced back to Plato,[3] and the Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy,[4] but it was most precisely formulated by René Descartes in the 17th century.[5] Substance Dualists argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, whereas Property Dualists maintain that the mind is a group of independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is not a distinct substance.[6]
Monism is the position that mind and body are not ontologically distinct kinds of entities. This view was first advocated in Western philosophy by Parmenides in the 5th century BC and was later espoused by the 17th century rationalist Baruch Spinoza.[7] Physicalists argue that only the entities postulated by physical theory exist, and that the mind will eventually be explained in terms of these entities as physical theory continues to evolve. Idealists maintain that the mind is all that exists and that the external world is either mental itself, or an illusion created by the mind. Neutral monists adhere to the position that there is some other, neutral substance, and that both matter and mind are properties of this unknown substance. The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been variations of physicalism; these positions include behaviorism, the type identity theory, anomalous monism and functionalism.[8]
Most modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive or non-reductive physicalist position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the body.[8] These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, especially in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences.[9][10][11][12] Other philosophers, however, adopt a non-physicalist position that challenges the notion that the mind is a purely physical construct. Reductive physicalists assert that all mental states and properties will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physiological processes and states.[13][14][15] Non-reductive physicalists argue that although the brain is all there is to the mind, the predicates and vocabulary used in mental descriptions and explanations are indispensable, and cannot be reduced to the language and lower-level explanations of physical science.[16][17] Continued neuroscientific progress has helped to clarify some of these issues. However, they are far from having been resolved, and modern philosophers of mind continue to ask how the subjective qualities and the intentionality (aboutness) of mental states and properties can be explained in naturalistic terms.[18][19]
Mindbody problem
Main article: Mindbody problem
The mind-body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes.[2] The main aim of philosophers working in this area is to determine the nature of the mind and mental states/processes, and howor even ifminds are affected by and can affect the body.
Our perceptual experiences depend on stimuli that arrive at our various sensory organs from the external world, and these stimuli cause changes in our mental states, ultimately causing us to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for a slice of pizza, for example, will tend to cause that person to move his or her body in a specific manner and in a specific direction to obtain what he or she wants. The question, then, is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of gray matter endowed with nothing but electrochemical properties.[8]
A related problem is how someone's propositional attitudes (e.g. beliefs and desires) cause that individual's neurons to fire and his muscles to contract. These comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from at least the time of René Descartes.[5]
[edit]Dualist solutions to the mindbody problem
Dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter (or body). It begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.[6] One of the earliest known formulations of mind-body dualism was expressed in the eastern Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy (c. 650 BCE), which divided the world into purusha (mind/spirit) and prakriti (material substance).[4] Specifically, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali presents an analytical approach to the nature of the mind.
In Western Philosophy, the earliest discussions of dualist ideas are in the writings of Plato who maintained that humans' "intelligence" (a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in terms of, their physical body.[3][20] However, the best-known version of dualism is due to René Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a non-extended, non-physical substance, a "res cogitans".[5] Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the seat of intelligence. He was therefore the first to formulate the mind-body problem in the form in which it still exists today.[5]
[edit]Arguments for dualism
The most frequently used argument in favour of dualism is that it appeals to the common-sense intuition that conscious experience is distinct from inanimate matter. If asked what the mind is, the average person would usually respond by identifying it with their self, their personality, their soul, or some other such entity. They would almost certainly deny that the mind simply is the brain, or vice-versa, finding the idea that there is just one ontological entity at play to be too mechanistic, or simply unintelligible.[6] Many modern philosophers of mind think that these intuitions are misleading and that we should use our critical faculties, along with empirical evidence from the sciences, to examine these assumptions to determine whether there is any real basis to them.[6]
Another important argument in favor of dualism is that the mental and the physical seem to have quite different, and perhaps irreconcilable, properties.[21] Mental events have a subjective quality, whereas physical events do not. So, for example, one can reasonably ask what a burnt finger feels like, or what a blue sky looks like, or what nice music sounds like to a person. But it is meaningless, or at least odd, to ask what a surge in the uptake of glutamate in the dorsolateral portion of the hippocampus feels like.
Philosophers of mind call the subjective aspects of mental events 'qualia' or 'raw feels'.[21] There is something that it is like to feel pain, to see a familiar shade of blue, and so on. There are qualia involved in these mental events that seem particularly difficult to reduce to anything physical.[22]
If consciousness (the mind) can exist independently of physical reality (the brain), one must explain how physical memories are created concerning consciousness. Dualism must therefore explain how consciousness affects physical reality. One possible explanation is that of a miracle, proposed by Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche, where all mind-body interactions require the direct intervention of God. A similar position by Albert Einstein considers the mind's comprehension of sense impression to be a miracle.[23] Another possible explanation has been proposed by C. S. Lewis,[24] is the Argument from Reason: if, as monism implies, all of our thoughts are the effects of physical causes, then we have no reason for assuming that they are also the consequent of a reasonable ground. Knowledge, however, is apprehended by reasoning from ground to consequent. Therefore, if monism is correct, there would be no way of knowing thisor anything elsewe could not even suppose it, except by a fluke.
The zombie argument is based on a thought experiment proposed by Todd Moody, and developed by David Chalmers in his book The Conscious Mind. The basic idea is that one can imagine one's body, and therefore conceive the existence of one's body, without any conscious states being associated with this body. Chalmers' argument is that it seems very plausible that such a being could exist because all that is needed is that all and only the things that the physical sciences describe about a zombie must be true of it. Since none of the concepts involved in these sciences make reference to consciousness or other mental phenomena, and any physical entity can be by definition described scientifically via physics, the move from conceivability to possibility is not such a large one.[25] Others such as Dennett have argued that the notion of a philosophical zombie is an incoherent,[26] or unlikely,[27] concept. It has been argued under physicalism that one must either believe that anyone including oneself might be a zombie, or that no one can be a zombiefollowing from the assertion that one's own conviction about being (or not being) a zombie is a product of the physical world and is therefore no different from anyone else's. This argument has been expressed by Dennett who argues that "Zombies think they are conscious; think they have qualia; think they suffer painsthey are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!" [26]
Interactionist dualism
Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals (1648)
Interactionist dualism, or simply interactionism, is the particular form of dualism first espoused by Descartes in the Meditations.[5] In the 20th century, its major defenders have been Karl Popper and John Carew Eccles.[28] It is the view that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, causally interact with physical states.[6]
Descartes' famous argument for this position can be summarized as follows: Seth has a clear and distinct idea of his mind as a thinking thing that has no spatial extension (i.e., it cannot be measured in terms of length, weight, height, and so on). He also has a clear and distinct idea of his body as something that is spatially extended, subject to quantification and not able to think. It follows that mind and body are not identical because they have radically different properties.[5]
At the same time, however, it is clear that Seth's mental states (desires, beliefs, etc.) have causal effects on his body and vice-versa: A child touches a hot stove (physical event) which causes pain (mental event) and makes her yell (physical event), this in turn provokes a sense of fear and protectiveness in the caregiver (mental event), and so on.
Descartes' argument crucially depends on the premise that what Seth believes to be "clear and distinct" ideas in his mind are necessarily true. Many contemporary philosophers doubt this.[29][30][31] For example, Joseph Agassi suggests that several scientific discoveries made since the early 20th century have undermined the idea of privileged access to one's own ideas. Freud has shown that a psychologically-trained observer can understand a person's unconscious motivations better than the person himself does. Duhem has shown that a philosopher of science can know a person's methods of discovery better than that person herself does, while Malinowski has shown that an anthropologist can know a person's customs and habits better than the person whose customs and habits they are. He also asserts that modern psychological experiments that cause people to see things that are not there provide grounds for rejecting Descartes' argument, because scientists can describe a person's perceptions better than the person herself can.[32][33] The weakness common to all these arguments against interactionism is that they put all introspective insight in doubt. We know people make mistakes about the world (including other's internal states), but not always. Therefore, it is logically absurd to assume persons are always in error about their own mental states and judgements about the nature of the mind itself.
[edit]Other forms of dualism
Four varieties of dualism. The arrows indicate the direction of the causal interactions. Occasionalism is not shown.
[edit]Psychophysical parallelism
Psychophysical parallelism, or simply parallelism, is the view that mind and body, while having distinct ontological statuses, do not causally influence one another. Instead, they run along parallel paths (mind events causally interact with mind events and brain events causally interact with brain events) and only seem to influence each other.[34] This view was most prominently defended by Gottfried Leibniz. Although Leibniz was an ontological monist who believed that only one type of substance, the monad, exists in the universe, and that everything is reducible to it, he nonetheless maintained that there was an important distinction between "the mental" and "the physical" in terms of causation. He held that God had arranged things in advance so that minds and bodies would be in harmony with each other. This is known as the doctrine of pre-established harmony.[35]
Occasionalism is the view espoused by Nicholas Malebranche that asserts that all supposedly causal relations between physical events, or between physical and mental events, are not really causal at all. While body and mind are different substances, causes (whether mental or physical) are related to their effects by an act of God's intervention on each specific occasion.[36]
[edit]Property dualism
Property dualism, is the view that the world is constituted of just one kind of substance - the physical kind - and there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties. In other words, it is the view that non-physical, mental properties (such as beliefs, desires and emotions) inhere in some physical bodies (at least, brains). How mental and physical properties relate causally depends on the variety of property dualism in question, and is not always a clear issue. Sub-varieties of property dualism include:-
Strong emergentism asserts that when matter is organized in the appropriate way (i.e. in the way that living human bodies are organized), mental properties emerge. in a way not fully accountable for by physical laws. Hence, it is a form of emergent materialism.[6] These emergent properties have an independent ontological status and cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, the physical substrate from which they emerge. They are dependent on the physical properties from which they emerge, but opinions vary as to the coherence of top-down causation, i.e. the causal effectiveness of such properties. A form of property dualism has been espoused by David Chalmers and the concept has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years,[37] but was already suggested in the 19th century by William James.
Epiphenomenalism is a doctrine first formulated by Thomas Henry Huxley.[38] It consists of the view that mental phenomena are causally ineffectual, where one or more mental states do not have any influence on physical states. Physical events can cause other physical events and physical events can cause mental events, but mental events cannot cause anything, since they are just causally inert by-products (i.e. epiphenomena) of the physical world.[34] This view has been defended most strongly in recent times by Frank Jackson.[39]
Non-reductive Physicalism is the view that mental properties form a separate ontological class to physical properties: mental states (such as qualia) are not reducible to physical states. The ontological stance towards qualia in the case of non-reductive physicalism does not imply that qualia are causally inert; this is what distinguishes it from epiphenomenalism.
Panpsychism is the view that all matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all objects have a unified center of experience or point of view. Superficially, it seems to be a form of property dualism, since it regards everything as having both mental and physical properties. However, some panpsychists say mechanical behaviour is derived from primitive mentality of atoms and moleculesas are sophisticated mentality and organic behaviour, the difference being attributed to the presence or absence of complex structure in a compound object. So long as the reduction of non-mental properties to mental ones is in place, panpsychism is not a (strong) form of property dualism; otherwise it is.
[edit]Dual aspect theory
Dual aspect theory is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance. (Thus it is a mixed position, which is monistic in some respects). The theory's relationship to neutral monism is ill-defined, but one proffered distinction says that whereas neutral monism allows the context of a given group of neutral elements to determine whether the group is mental, physical, both, or neither, double-aspect theory requires the mental and the physical to be inseparable and mutually irreducible (though distinct).[40]
[edit]Monist solutions to the mindbody problem
In contrast to dualism, monism does not accept any fundamental divisions. The fundamentally disseparate nature of reality has been central to forms of eastern philosophies for over two millennia. In Indian and Chinese philosophy, monism is integral to how experience is understood. Today, the most common forms of monism in Western philosophy are physicalist.[8] Physicalistic monism asserts that the only existing substance is physical, in some sense of that term to be clarified by our best science.[41] However, a variety of formulations (see below) are possible. Another form of monism, idealism, states that the only existing substance is mental. Although pure idealism, such as that of George Berkeley, is uncommon in contemporary Western philosophy, a more sophisticated variant called panpsychism, according to which mental experience and properties may be at the foundation of physical experience and properties, has been espoused by some philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead and David Ray Griffin.[37]
Phenomenalism is the theory that representations (or sense data) of external objects are all that exist. Such a view was briefly adopted by Bertrand Russell and many of the logical positivists during the early 20th century.[42] A third possibility is to accept the existence of a basic substance that is neither physical nor mental. The mental and physical would then both be properties of this neutral substance. Such a position was adopted by Baruch Spinoza[7] and was popularized by Ernst Mach[43] in the 19th century. This neutral monism, as it is called, resembles property dualism.
[edit]Physicalistic monisms
Main article: Behaviorism
Behaviorism dominated philosophy of mind for much of the 20th century, especially the first half.[8] In psychology, behaviorism developed as a reaction to the inadequacies of introspectionism.[41] Introspective reports on one's own interior mental life are not subject to careful examination for accuracy and cannot be used to form predictive generalizations. Without generalizability and the possibility of third-person examination, the behaviorists argued, psychology cannot be scientific.[41] The way out, therefore, was to eliminate the idea of an interior mental life (and hence an ontologically independent mind) altogether and focus instead on the description of observable behavior.[44]
Parallel to these developments in psychology, a philosophical behaviorism (sometimes called logical behaviorism) was developed.[41] This is characterized by a strong verificationism, which generally considers unverifiable statements about interior mental life senseless. For the behaviorist, mental states are not interior states on which one can make introspective reports. They are just descriptions of behavior or dispositions to behave in certain ways, made by third parties to explain and predict others' behavior.[45]
Philosophical behaviorism has fallen out of favor since the latter half of the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of cognitivism.[2] Cognitivists reject behaviorism due to several perceived problems. For example, behaviorism could be said to be counter-intuitive when it maintains that someone is talking about behavior in the event that a person is experiencing a painful headache.
[edit]Identity theory
Main article: Type physicalism
Type physicalism (or type-identity theory) was developed by John Smart[15] and Ullin Place[46] as a direct reaction to the failure of behaviorism. These philosophers reasoned that, if mental states are something material, but not behavioral, then mental states are probably identical to internal states of the brain. In very simplified terms: a mental state M is nothing other than brain state B. The mental state "desire for a cup of coffee" would thus be nothing more than the "firing of certain neurons in certain brain regions".[15]
The classic Identity theory and Anomalous Monism in contrast. For the Identity theory, every token instantiation of a single mental type corresponds (as indicated by the arrows) to a physical token of a single physical type. For anomalous monism, the token-token correspondences can fall outside of the type-type correspondences. The result is token identity.
Despite its initial plausibility, the identity theory faces a strong challenge in the form of the thesis of multiple realizability, first formulated by Hilary Putnam.[17] It is obvious that not only humans, but many different species of animals can, for example, experience pain. However, it seems highly unlikely that all of these diverse organisms with the same pain experience are in the identical brain state. And if this is the case, then pain cannot be identical to a specific brain state. The identity theory is thus empirically unfounded.[17]
On the other hand, even granted the above, it does not follow that identity theories of all types must be abandoned. According to token identity theories, the fact that a certain brain state is connected with only one mental state of a person does not have to mean that there is an absolute correlation between types of mental states and types of brain state. The type-token distinction can be illustrated by a simple example: the word "green" contains four types of letters (g, r, e, n) with two tokens (occurrences) of the letter e along with one each of the others. The idea of token identity is that only particular occurrences of mental events are identical with particular occurrences or tokenings of physical events.[47] Anomalous monism (see below) and most other non-reductive physicalisms are token-identity theories.[48] Despite these problems, there is a renewed interest in the type identity theory today, primarily due to the influence of Jaegwon Kim.[15]
Main article: Functionalism (philosophy of mind)
Functionalism was formulated by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor as a reaction to the inadequacies of the identity theory.[17] Putnam and Fodor saw mental states in terms of an empirical computational theory of the mind.[49] At about the same time or slightly after, D.M. Armstrong and David Kellogg Lewis formulated a version of functionalism that analyzed the mental concepts of folk psychology in terms of functional roles.[50] Finally, Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use led to a version of functionalism as a theory of meaning, further developed by Wilfrid Sellars and Gilbert Harman. Another one, psychofunctionalism, is an approach adopted by naturalistic Philosophy of Mind associated with Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn.
What all these different varieties of functionalism share in common is the thesis that mental states are characterized by their causal relations with other mental states and with sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. That is, functionalism abstracts away from the details of the physical implementation of a mental state by characterizing it in terms of non-mental functional properties. For example, a kidney is characterized scientifically by its functional role in filtering blood and maintaining certain chemical balances. From this point of view, it does not really matter whether the kidney be made up of organic tissue, plastic nanotubes or silicon chips: it is the role that it plays and its relations to other organs that define it as a kidney.[49]
[edit]Non-reductive physicalism
Main article: Non-reductive physicalism
Non-reductionist philosophers hold firmly to two essential convictions with regard to mind-body relations: 1) Physicalism is true and mental states must be physical states, but 2) All reductionist proposals are unsatisfactory: mental states cannot be reduced to behavior, brain states or functional states.[41] Hence, the question arises whether there can still be a non-reductive physicalism. Donald Davidson's anomalous monism[16] is an attempt to formulate such a physicalism.
Davidson uses the thesis of supervenience: mental states supervene on physical states, but are not reducible to them. "Supervenience" therefore describes a functional dependence: there can be no change in the mental without some change in the physicalcausal reducibility between the mental and physical without ontological reducibility.[51]
Because non-reductive physicalist theories attempt to both retain the ontological distinction between mind and body and to try to solve the 'surfeit of explanations puzzle' in some way; critics often see this as a paradox and point out the similarities to epiphenomenalism, in that it is the brain that is seen as the root 'cause' not the mind, and the mind seems to be rendered inert.
Epiphenomenalism regards one or more mental states as the byproduct of physical brain states, having no influence on physical states. The interaction is one-way (solving the 'surfeit of explanations puzzle') but leaving us with non-reducible mental states (as a byproduct of brain states) - both ontologically and causally irreducible to physical states. Pain would be seen by epiphenomenaliasts as being caused by the brain state but as not having effects on other brain states, though it might have effects on other mental states (i.e. cause distress).
[edit]Weak emergentism
Main article: Emergentism
Weak emergentism is a form of "non-reductive physicalism" that involves a layered view of nature, with the layers arranged in terms of increasing complexity and each corresponding to its own special science. Some philosophers hold that emergent properties causally interact with more fundamental levels, while others maintain that higher-order properties simply supervene over lower levels without direct causal interaction. The latter group therefore holds a less strict, or "weaker", definition of emergentism, which can be rigorously stated as follows: a property P of composite object O is emergent if it is metaphysically impossible for another object to lack property P if that object is composed of parts with intrinsic properties identical to those in O and has those parts in an identical configuration.
Sometimes emergentists use the example of water having a new property when Hydrogen H and Oxygen O combine to form H2O (water). In this example there "emerges" a new property of a transparent liquid that would not have been predicted by understanding hydrogen and oxygen as a gas. This is analogous to physical properties of the brain giving rise to a mental state. Emergentists try to solve the notorious mind-body gap this way. One problem for emergentism is the idea of "causal closure" in the world that does not allow for a mind-to-body causation.[52]
[edit]Eliminative materialism
Main article: Eliminative materialism
If one is a materialist and believes that all aspects of our common sense psychology will find reduction to a mature cognitive-neuroscience, and that non-reductive materialism is mistaken, then one can adopt a final, more radical position: eliminative materialism.
There are several varieties of eliminative materialism, but all maintain that our common-sense "folk psychology" badly misrepresents the nature of some aspect of cognition. Eliminativists such as Patricia and Paul Churchland argue that while folk psychology treats cognition as fundamentally sentence-like, the non-linguistic vector/matrix model of neural network theory or connectionism will prove to be a much more accurate account of how the brain works.[13]
The Churchlands often invoke the fate of other, erroneous popular theories and ontologies that have arisen in the course of history.[13][14] For example, Ptolemaic astronomy served to explain and roughly predict the motions of the planets for centuries, but eventually this model of the solar system was eliminated in favor of the Copernican model. The Churchlands believe the same eliminative fate awaits the "sentence-cruncher" model of the mind in which thought and behavior are the result of manipulating sentence-like states called "propositional attitudes
[edit]Non-physicalist monisms
Idealism is the form of monism that sees the world as consiting of minds, mental contents and or consciousness. Idealists are not faced with explaining how for minds arise from bodies: rather, the world, bodies and objects are regarded as mere apperances held by minds. However, accounting for the mind-body problem is not usually the main motivation for idealsim; rather, idealists tend to be motivated by skepticism or religious considerations. Idealism is prominent in Eastern religious and philosophical thought. It has gone through several cycles of popularity and neglect in the history of Western philosophy.
Different varieties of idealism may hold that there are
multiple minds (pluralistic idealism)
only one human mind (solipsism)
or a single Absolute, Anima Mundi, One or Oversoul.
[edit]Neutral monism
Neutral monism, in philosophy, is the metaphysical view that the mental and the physical are two ways of organizing or describing the same elements, which are themselves "neutral," that is, neither physical nor mental. This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things. Rather, neutral monism claims the universe consists of only one kind of stuff, in the form of neutral elements that are in themselves neither mental nor physical. These neutral elements might have the properties of color and shape, just as we experience those properties. But these shaped and colored elements do not exist in a mind (considered as a substantial entity, whether dualistically or physicalistically); they exist on their own.
[edit]Linguistic criticism of the mindbody problem
Each attempt to answer the mind-body problem encounters substantial problems. Some philosophers argue that this is because there is an underlying conceptual confusion.[53] These philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers in the tradition of linguistic criticism, therefore reject the problem as illusory.[54] They argue that it is an error to ask how mental and biological states fit together. Rather it should simply be accepted that human experience can be described in different waysfor instance, in a mental and in a biological vocabulary. Illusory problems arise if one tries to describe the one in terms of the other's vocabulary or if the mental vocabulary is used in the wrong contexts.[54] This is the case, for instance, if one searches for mental states of the brain. The brain is simply the wrong context for the use of mental vocabularythe search for mental states of the brain is therefore a category error or a sort of fallacy of reasoning.[54]
Today, such a position is often adopted by interpreters of Wittgenstein such as Peter Hacker.[53] However, Hilary Putnam, the originator of functionalism, has also adopted the position that the mind-body problem is an illusory problem which should be dissolved according to the manner of Wittgenstein.[55]
[edit]Externalism and internalism
Where is the mind located? If the mind is a physical phenomenon of some kind, it has to be located somewhere. There are two possible options: either the mind is internal to the body (internalism) or the mind is external to it (externalism). More generally, either the mind depends only on events and properties taking place inside the subject's body or it depends also on factors external to it.
Proponents of internalism are committed to the view that neural activity is sufficient to produce the mind. Proponents of externalism maintain that the surrounding world is in some sense constitutive of the mind.
Externalism differentiates into several versions. The main ones are semantic externalism, cognitive externalism, phenomenal externalism. Each of these versions of externalism can further be divided whether they refer only to the content or to the vehicles of mind.
Semantic externalism holds that the semantic content of the mind is totally or partially defined by state of affairs external to the body of the subject. Hilary Putnam's Twin earth thought experiment is a good example.
Cognitive externalism is a very broad collections of views that suggests the role of the environment, of tools, of development, and of the body in fleshing out cognition. Embodied cognition, the extended mind, and enactivism are good examples.
Phenomenal externalism suggests that the phenomenal aspects of the mind are external to the body. Authors who addressed this possibility are Ted Honderich, Edwin Holt, Francois Tonneau, Kevin O'Regan, Riccardo Manzotti, Teed Rockwell.
[edit]Naturalism and its problems
The thesis of physicalism is that the mind is part of the material (or physical) world. Such a position faces the problem that the mind has certain properties that no other material thing seems to possess. Physicalism must therefore explain how it is possible that these properties can nonetheless emerge from a material thing. The project of providing such an explanation is often referred to as the "naturalization of the mental."[41] Some of the crucial problems that this project attempts to resolve include the existence of qualia and the nature of intentionality.[41]
Main article: Qualia
Many mental states seem to be experienced subjectively in different ways by different individuals.[22] And it is characteristic of a mental state that it has some experiential quality, e.g. of pain, that it hurts. However, the sensation of pain between two individuals may not be identical, since no one has a perfect way to measure how much something hurts or of describing exactly how it feels to hurt. Philosophers and scientists therefore ask where these experiences come from. The existence of cerebral events, in and of themselves, cannot explain why they are accompanied by these corresponding qualitative experiences. The puzzle of why many cerebral processes occur with an accompanying experiential aspect in consciousness seems impossible to explain.[21]
Yet it also seems to many that science will eventually have to explain such experiences.[41] This follows from an assumption about the possibility of reductive explanations. According to this view, if an attempt can be successfully made to explain a phenomenon reductively (e.g., water), then it can be explained why the phenomenon has all of its properties (e.g., fluidity, transparency).[41] In the case of mental states, this means that there needs to be an explanation of why they have the property of being experienced in a certain way.
The 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger criticized the ontological assumptions underpinning such a reductive model, and claimed that it was impossible to make sense of experience in these terms. This is because, according to Heidegger, the nature of our subjective experience and its qualities is impossible to understand in terms of Cartesian "substances" that bear "properties." Another way to put this is that the very concept of qualitative experience is incoherent in terms ofor is semantically incommensurable with the concept ofsubstances that bear properties.[56]
This problem of explaining introspective first-person aspects of mental states and consciousness in general in terms of third-person quantitative neuroscience is called the explanatory gap.[57] There are several different views of the nature of this gap among contemporary philosophers of mind. David Chalmers and the early Frank Jackson interpret the gap as ontological in nature; that is, they maintain that qualia can never be explained by science because physicalism is false. There are two separate categories involved and one cannot be reduced to the other.[58] An alternative view is taken by philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn. According to them, the gap is epistemological in nature. For Nagel, science is not yet able to explain subjective experience because it has not yet arrived at the level or kind of knowledge that is required. We are not even able to formulate the problem coherently.[22] For McGinn, on other hand, the problem is one of permanent and inherent biological limitations. We are not able to resolve the explanatory gap because the realm of subjective experiences is cognitively closed to us in the same manner that quantum physics is cognitively closed to elephants.[59] Other philosophers liquidate the gap as purely a semantic problem. This semantic problem, of course, led to the famous "Qualia Question", which is: Does Red cause Redness?
Main article: Intentionality
John Searleone of the most influential philosophers of mind, proponent of biological naturalism (Berkeley 2002)
Intentionality is the capacity of mental states to be directed towards (about) or be in relation with something in the external world.[19] This property of mental states entails that they have contents and semantic referents and can therefore be assigned truth values. When one tries to reduce these states to natural processes there arises a problem: natural processes are not true or false, they simply happen.[60] It would not make any sense to say that a natural process is true or false. But mental ideas or judgments are true or false, so how then can mental states (ideas or judgments) be natural processes? The possibility of assigning semantic value to ideas must mean that such ideas are about facts. Thus, for example, the idea that Herodotus was a historian refers to Herodotus and to the fact that he was an historian. If the fact is true, then the idea is true; otherwise, it is false. But where does this relation come from? In the brain, there are only electrochemical processes and these seem not to have anything to do with Herodotus.[18]
[edit]Philosophy of mind and science
Humans are corporeal beings and, as such, they are subject to examination and description by the natural sciences. Since mental processes are intimately related to bodily processes, the descriptions that the natural sciences furnish of human beings play an important role in the philosophy of mind.[2] There are many scientific disciplines that study processes related to the mental. The list of such sciences includes: biology, computer science, cognitive science, cybernetics, linguistics, medicine, pharmacology, and psychology.[61]
Main article: Neurobiology
The theoretical background of biology, as is the case with modern natural sciences in general, is fundamentally materialistic. The objects of study are, in the first place, physical processes, which are considered to be the foundations of mental activity and behavior.[62] The increasing success of biology in the explanation of mental phenomena can be seen by the absence of any empirical refutation of its fundamental presupposition: "there can be no change in the mental states of a person without a change in brain states."[61]
Within the field of neurobiology, there are many subdisciplines that are concerned with the relations between mental and physical states and processes:[62] Sensory neurophysiology investigates the relation between the processes of perception and stimulation.[63] Cognitive neuroscience studies the correlations between mental processes and neural processes.[63] Neuropsychology describes the dependence of mental faculties on specific anatomical regions of the brain.[63] Lastly, evolutionary biology studies the origins and development of the human nervous system and, in as much as this is the basis of the mind, also describes the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of mental phenomena beginning from their most primitive stages.[61] Evolutionary biology furthermore places tight constraints on any philosophical theory of the mind, as the gene-based mechanism of natural selection does not allow any giant leaps in the development of neural complexity or neural software but only incremental steps over long time periods.[64]
Since the 1980s, sophisticated neuroimaging procedures, such as fMRI (above), have furnished increasing knowledge about the workings of the human brain, shedding light on ancient philosophical problems.
The methodological breakthroughs of the neurosciences, in particular the introduction of high-tech neuroimaging procedures, has propelled scientists toward the elaboration of increasingly ambitious research programs: one of the main goals is to describe and comprehend the neural processes which correspond to mental functions (see: neural correlate).[62] Several groups are inspired by these advances.
[edit]Computer science
Main article: Computer science
Computer science concerns itself with the automatic processing of information (or at least with physical systems of symbols to which information is assigned) by means of such things as computers.[65] From the beginning, computer programmers have been able to develop programs that permit computers to carry out tasks for which organic beings need a mind. A simple example is multiplication. But it is clear that computers do not use a mind to multiply. Could they, someday, come to have what we call a mind? This question has been propelled into the forefront of much philosophical debate because of investigations in the field of artificial intelligence.
Within AI, it is common to distinguish between a modest research program and a more ambitious one: this distinction was coined by John Searle in terms of a weak AI and strong AI. The exclusive objective of "weak AI", according to Searle, is the successful simulation of mental states, with no attempt to make computers become conscious or aware, etc. The objective of strong AI, on the contrary, is a computer with consciousness similar to that of human beings.[66] The program of strong AI goes back to one of the pioneers of computation Alan Turing. As an answer to the question "Can computers think?", he formulated the famous Turing test.[67] Turing believed that a computer could be said to "think" when, if placed in a room by itself next to another room that contained a human being and with the same questions being asked of both the computer and the human being by a third party human being, the computer's responses turned out to be indistinguishable from those of the human. Essentially, Turing's view of machine intelligence followed the behaviourist model of the mindintelligence is as intelligence does. The Turing test has received many criticisms, among which the most famous is probably the Chinese room thought experiment formulated by Searle.[66]
The question about the possible sensitivity (qualia) of computers or robots still remains open. Some computer scientists believe that the specialty of AI can still make new contributions to the resolution of the "mind body problem". They suggest that based on the reciprocal influences between software and hardware that takes place in all computers, it is possible that someday theories can be discovered that help us to understand the reciprocal influences between the human mind and the brain (wetware).[68]
Main article: Psychology
Psychology is the science that investigates mental states directly. It uses generally empirical methods to investigate concrete mental states like joy, fear or obsessions. Psychology investigates the laws that bind these mental states to each other or with inputs and outputs to the human organism.[69]
An example of this is the psychology of perception. Scientists working in this field have discovered general principles of the perception of forms. A law of the psychology of forms says that objects that move in the same direction are perceived as related to each other.[61] This law describes a relation between visual input and mental perceptual states. However, it does not suggest anything about the nature of perceptual states. The laws discovered by psychology are compatible with all the answers to the mind-body problem already described.
[edit]Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does, and how it works. It includes research on intelligence and behavior, especially focusing on how information is represented, processed, and transformed (in faculties such as perception, language, memory, reasoning, and emotion) within nervous systems (human or other animal) and machines (e.g. computers). Cognitive science consists of multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and education.[70] It spans many levels of analysis, from low-level learning and decision mechanisms to high-level logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization.
[edit]Philosophy of mind in the continental tradition
Most of the discussion in this article has focused on one style or tradition of philosophy in modern Western culture, usually called analytic philosophy (sometimes described as Anglo-American philosophy).[71] Many other schools of thought exist, however, which are sometimes subsumed under the broad label of continental philosophy.[71] In any case, though topics and methods here are numerous, in relation to the philosophy of mind the various schools that fall under this label (phenomenology, existentialism, etc.) can globally be seen to differ from the analytic school in that they focus less on language and logical analysis alone but also take in other forms of understanding human existence and experience. With reference specifically to the discussion of the mind, this tends to translate into attempts to grasp the concepts of thought and perceptual experience in some sense that does not merely involve the analysis of linguistic forms.[71]
In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel discusses three distinct types of mind: the 'subjective mind', the mind of an individual; the 'objective mind', the mind of society and of the State; and the 'Absolute mind', a unity of all concepts. See also Hegel's Philosophy of Mind from his Encyclopedia.[72]
In 1896, Henri Bergson made in Matter and Memory "Essay on the relation of body and spirit" a forceful case for the ontological difference of body and mind by reducing the problem to the more definite one of memory, thus allowing for a solution built on the empirical test case of aphasia.
In modern times, the two main schools that have developed in response or opposition to this Hegelian tradition are phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenology, founded by Edmund Husserl, focuses on the contents of the human mind (see noema) and how phenomenological processes shape our experiences.[73] Existentialism, a school of thought founded upon the work of Søren Kierkegaard, focuses on the content of experiences and how the mind deals with such experiences.
[edit]Philosophy of mind in Buddhism
"If one were to ask, 'Which aging & death? And whose is this aging & death?' and if one were to ask, 'Is aging & death one thing, and is this the aging & death of someone/something else?' both of them would have the same meaning, even though their words would differ. When there is the view that the jiva is the same as the body, there isn't the leading of the holy life. And when there is the view that the jiva is one thing and the body another, there isn't the leading of the holy life. Avoiding these two extremes, the Tathagata points out the Dhamma in between: From birth as a requisite condition comes aging & death."[74]
Eastern traditions such as Buddhism do not hold to the dualistic mind/body model but do assert that the mind and body are separate entities. Buddhism in particular does not hold to the notion of a soul, or ātman. Some forms of Buddhism assert that a very subtle level of mind leaves the body at the time of death and goes to a new life. According to Buddhist scholar Dharmakirti, the definition of mind is that which is clarity and cognizes. In this definition, 'clarity' refers to the nature of mind, and 'cognizes' to the function of mind. Mind is clarity because it always lacks form and because it possesses the actual power to perceive objects. Mind cognizes because its function is to know or perceive objects. In Ornament of the Seven Sets, Buddhist scholar Khedrubje says that thought, awareness, mind and cognizer are synonyms. Buddha explained that although mind lacks form, it can nevertheless be related to form. Thus, our mind is related to our body and is "located" at different places throughout the body. This is to be understood in the context of how the five sense consciousnesses and the mental consciousness are generated. There are many different types of mindsense awarenesses, mental awarenesses, gross minds, subtle minds, and very subtle mindsand they are all formless (lacking shape, color, sound, smell, taste or tactile properties) and they all function to cognize or know. There is no such thing as a mind without an object known by that mind. Even though none of these minds is form, they can be related to form.[75]
[edit]Topics related to philosophy of mind
There are countless subjects that are affected by the ideas developed in the philosophy of mind. Clear examples of this are the nature of death and its definitive character, the nature of emotion, of perception and of memory. Questions about what a person is and what his or her identity consists of also have much to do with the philosophy of mind. There are two subjects that, in connection with the philosophy of the mind, have aroused special attention: free will and the self.[2]
[edit]Free will
Main article: Free will
In the context of philosophy of mind, the problem of free will takes on renewed intensity. This is certainly the case, at least, for materialistic determinists.[2] According to this position, natural laws completely determine the course of the material world. Mental states, and therefore the will as well, would be material states, which means human behavior and decisions would be completely determined by natural laws. Some take this reasoning a step further: people cannot determine by themselves what they want and what they do. Consequently, they are not free.[76]
This argumentation is rejected, on the one hand, by the compatibilists. Those who adopt this position suggest that the question "Are we free?" can only be answered once we have determined what the term "free" means. The opposite of "free" is not "caused" but "compelled" or "coerced". It is not appropriate to identify freedom with indetermination. A free act is one where the agent could have done otherwise if it had chosen otherwise. In this sense a person can be free even though determinism is true.[76] The most important compatibilist in the history of the philosophy was David Hume.[77] More recently, this position is defended, for example, by Daniel Dennett.[78]
On the other hand, there are also many incompatibilists who reject the argument because they believe that the will is free in a stronger sense called libertarianism.[76] These philosophers affirm the course of the world is either a) not completely determined by natural law where natural law is intercepted by physically independent agency,[79] b) determined by indeterministic natural law only, or c) determined by indeterministic natural law in line with the subjective effort of physically non-reducible agency.[80] Under Libertarianism, the will does not have to be deterministic and, therefore, it is potentially free. Critics of the second proposition (b) accuse the incompatibilists of using an incoherent concept of freedom. They argue as follows: if our will is not determined by anything, then we desire what we desire by pure chance. And if what we desire is purely accidental, we are not free. So if our will is not determined by anything, we are not free.[76]
Main article: Self
The philosophy of mind also has important consequences for the concept of self. If by "self" or "I" one refers to an essential, immutable nucleus of the person, most modern philosophers of mind will affirm that no such thing exists.[81] The idea of a self as an immutable essential nucleus derives from the idea of an immaterial soul. Such an idea is unacceptable to most contemporary philosophers, due to their physicalistic orientations, and due to a general acceptance among philosophers of the scepticism of the concept of 'self' by David Hume, who could never catch himself doing, thinking or feeling anything.[82] However, in the light of empirical results from developmental psychology, developmental biology and neuroscience, the idea of an essential inconstant, material nucleusan integrated representational system distributed over changing patterns of synaptic connectionsseems reasonable.[83] The view of the self as an illusion is accepted by some philosophers, including Daniel Dennett.
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 8:55 am
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Two schools were destroyed in the western Mexican town of Turicato by a radical religious sect that threatens to "destroy coexistence," Mayor Salvador Barrera said.
According to the top local authority, the New Jerusalem community, which settled some 35 years ago in the Turicato municipality of Michoacan state believing it to be hallowed ground, is mostly made up of people from other states with a "low educational profile."
The "dissident Catholic sect" seeks to save "traditional religious life" by having Mass said in Latin, singing night and day, and being governed by rules that they themselves created and are enforced by so-called "celestial police" who have no legal authorization to do so, and who at times "violate" constitutional rights, Barrera said.
"It's impossible to walk around freely, there are patrols that prevent it. People are detained - not long ago they locked up a man and his girlfriend who had committed no infraction and fined them," he said.
A total of some 2,500 people live in New Jerusalem, but over the past six years some 40 percent of the flock decided to shed traditionalist customs, which, according to the mayor, has created conflicts within the community.
The latest result was the demolition last week of six classrooms, six bathrooms and all the furnishings of two schools, after which the buildings were burned down.
The destruction left the community without any educational centers - one had been a kindergarten and the other a primary school - since they had been considered, according to Barrera, "schools of the devil."
"The idea is ridiculous. To me it's perfectly clear that educational institutions form minds that are analytical, critical and with hopes of a better life," so leaders of the sect "see themselves losing any chance of controlling the inhabitants of New Jerusalem the way they want to if the people become educated," he said.
Heading this religious group, which exacts from its followers one salary a week and venerates Our Lady of the Rosary, is an elder who calls himself "Bishop Martin of Tours," and who replaced the sect's founder, "Pope Nabor," as its spiritual leader five years ago.
Barrera estimates at some 400 million pesos ($29 million) the material losses incurred by the destruction of the schools, which had been attended by approximately 200 students, but says that may not be the worst of the matter since the really big problem will happen if immediate action is not taken.
"The greatest loss would be an outbreak of violence and people being killed if the matter isn't dealt with," the mayor said.
He said that as soon as the incident occurred his office "desperately" called on the Michoacan state police but they didn't show up until 1 1/2 hours later when the damage was already done.
Barrera arranged a meeting Thursday with Gov. Fausto Vallejo and they agreed to join forces to "establish a legal foundation for the community."
He said that state government support will mean "patrols 24 hours a day" to isolate the "celestial corps," as New Jerusalem followers call their community police, and that Michoacan state will take charge of security in the area.
The problems are nothing new, since, according to the mayor, in 1999 several members of the sect were expelled for refusing to obey internal regulations ordering women and young girls to be handed over for the sexual satisfaction of their spiritual leader.
"This administration has done everything to avoid bloodshed. But now the intervention of the state government of Michoacan cannot be delayed if this problem is to be solved in the short term," Barrera said.
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 8:56 am
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Thank goodness for the "small minority" that "has recently been vociferous in its opposition to the widely supported programme of teaching of values from a Christian perspective in schools". Hugh Dickey's article moves me to make my voice heard as well.
On his first point, that the Christian teaching programme in schools is concerned with moral principles and values and not religious doctrine, if the "spiritual" issue included in the example given - that "God can comfort us in our sorrows" - is not religious doctrine, what is it?
And I'd like to ask, what comfort could the Christian God give that human individuals can't give each other? I have a feeling the answer would open a big can of doctrinal worms.
On his second point, the high standards set for the teaching of the Christian programmes, one would expect no less for any New Zealans classroom, but that's got nothing to do with my and others' opposition.
Having a Christian-based values programme in schools is repugnant to me for two reasons: first, that it implies these values are somehow special to Christianity, whereas they are in fact human values.
They are espoused as worthwhile for human life as much by people outside of religious affiliation as those within it.
Secondly, the teaching of a fairy story as fact in our education system can't be justified on any level. As far as I'm concerned it will remain a fairy story until the second coming, until born-again Jesus turns out the loaves and fishes in front of my very eyes, water into wine etc. I'd be willing to rethink things at that point.
He argued that opponents of the programmes are insulting principals and boards of trustees. How about the insult to the parents and children who are opposed to it? I believe principals and boards of state schools who would choose the programme should be scrutinised for bias, and for over-stepping their brief.
Only those in charge of Christian schools, where parents knowingly and willingly subscribe to the inclusion of Christian teachings in the curriculum, should be choosing such programmes.
He asked, why don't Christian-opposers also insist that programmes about bullying and drug education have no place in schools? Christianity is a story based on a set of beliefs not proven to have any basis in fact. Bullying and drug-taking are behaviour which occur across the spectrum of the population.
They run counter to widely-held human values of care and respect for self and others, and concerns for health. If values-teaching is part of the curriculum, these would seem to be very valid topics which affect all of us.
I am curious as to why the article's author is so keen to see the Christian-based programme in schools. Containing this material to churches and Christian homes and schools would ensure children of such families receive the teaching he sees as important.
At the same time that would respect the rights and beliefs of non-Christian parents and children, who will benefit equally (or perhaps more so) from general values education.
He accuses those in the "atheistic, rationalistic, secular humanist cause" of "evangelistic fervour". I suspect Mr Dickey of more than a touch of that himself.
The term "rationalist" appears to be a dirty word to him (along with the three other adjectives used). It's not surprising then that the arguments made in the article seem to be largely lacking in reason and logic.
The intensity I detect in his use of these descriptors, often applied, I've noted, by Christians, suggests fear of the power of rationality. I don't think of myself as an "atheistic, rationalist, secular humanist" but I suppose I must be one. I don't believe in any supernatural god. I believe what science has discovered about evolution, and also that science doesn't know everything.
In my experience, taking a rational approach to life doesn't preclude a sense of wonder about the beauties, mysteries and and terrors of the world we live in and the universe beyond. It doesn't preclude any of the virtues and values that religious people sometimes like to claim as belonging only to them. It does mean being intellectually grown up, and also trying to live one's life based on the virtues and positive values - not because a parental god tells me to but because I've learned from experience that's the healthiest and most satisfying way to live.
* Sheryl White, a former primary-school teacher, is a counsellor in addictions and mental health.
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 8:57 am
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Alienred wrote:
NeonVomit wrote:
Seriously, dude... get a life
What do you mean by "get"? I don't think in terms of "getting something". How can you
You dont't need to "get" a life. You already "have" it. You just have to open your eyes and see that, which you already have. If you always think in terms of "getting something" you will not "get", rather you will "miss" life. So No, thank you, but i don't like that kind of attitude. I have life here and now and i dont't need to get it.
Actually it was a semi-diplomatic way to ask you to stop posting bullshit- it was not intended to trigger another rant. I somehow believe your overzealous preaching is linked to sexual frustration. I suggest you masturbate more regularly (I will PM you some porn websites of interest).
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 8:58 am
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Americas Nones the nonreligious are at an all-time high, now comprising nearly one in five Americans (19%), according to a new study by the Pew Center for the People and the Press. The 19% count is based on aggregated surveys of 19,377 people conducted by the Pew Research Center throughout 2011 and reported by USA Today.
This means great news for progress, for reasoned debate, for the status of nonbelievers in our nation, said FFRF Co-President Dan Barker. The freethought movement and FFRF are growing rapidly. There is an explosion of local and campus freethought groups, activities and conferences.
Nones were already the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, according to the definitive American Religious Identification Survey, whose 2008 study showed adult Nones up to 15% from 6% in 1990. ARIS, released in 2009, actually estimated Nones at 20% if responses to broader questions about religious practices were included.
Freethinkers have been highly marginalized, in part for being perceived as making up a small segment of the U.S. population. Actually, there have always been many more nonreligious than Jews, Muslims, Mormons or Eastern religions' adherents, currently respectively at 1.2%, 0.6%, 1.4% and 0.9% of the U.S. population, according to ARIS. Most minority religions, however tiny in numbers, are treated with respect, inclusion and sometimes deference. Its time public officials and the American public wake up to the changing demographics and stop treating atheists and agnostics as outsiders, added Annie Laurie Gaylor, who co-directs FFRF with Barker.
With nonbelievers at about 20% of the population, there is no longer any excuse for leaving us out of the equation. Public officials cannot continue to assume all Americans believe in a deity, or continue to offend 20% of the population by imposing prayer at governmental meetings or government-hosted events. These surveys now show that In God We Trust is a provenly inaccurate motto. Nonbelievers should not be treated as political pariahs, Gaylor said.
Nones in fact were at the time of the last ARIS survey, the second-largest denomination in the nation, Barker said, following Catholics at 25% and tied with Baptists at 15%. According to the new PEW study, nonbelievers now outrank Baptists.
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 8:58 am
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The atheist community has embraced the cause of an Indonesian man, Alexander Aan, who was beaten and jailed after denying Gods existence on Facebook and posting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
The Center for Inquiry, a Washington-based humanist organization, launched a petition Tuesday (July 17) on behalf of Alexander Aan, a 30-year-old Indonesian civil servant currently serving a 30-month jail sentence for deliberately spreading information inciting religious hatred and animosity, according to the judge who sentenced him.
The petition asks the Obama administration to pressure the Indonesian government for Aans release and for better protection of religious freedom in that country, the most populous Muslim nation in the world.
We are hoping that this petition will promote Aans cause and put it in the public consciousness so we can build a better coalition to get him out of jail, said Michael De Dora, CFIs director of public policy. It should matter to all human beings any time another human being is being denied basic human rights.
Aan was arrested in January after posting God doesnt exist and cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to the page of a Facebook group he started dedicated to atheism. The group had 1,200 members
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 8:59 am
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Not to beat a dead horse (I think its still alive), but I vehemently oppose those evolutionists and accommodationists who wont affirm that evolution is unguided and purposeless (in the sense of not being directed by a higher intelligence or teleological force). For to the best of our knowledge evolution, like all natural processes, is purposeless and unguided. After all, scientists have no problem saying that the melting of glaciers, the movement of tectonic plates, or the decay of atoms are processes that are unguided and purposeless.
So when you hear people who accept evolution nevertheless refusing to admit that its unguided and purposeless, you know youre dealing with someone who is osculating the rump of faith. For its only evolution that elicits these disclaimers, and its only evolution that requires such disclaimers to satisfy religious believers.
But evolution is, as far as we can tell, purposeless and unguided. There seems to be no direction, mutations are random, and we havent detected a teleological force or agent that pushes it in one direction. And its important to realize this: the great importance of Darwins theory of natural selection is that an unguided, purposeless process can nevertheless produce animals and plants that are exquisitely adapted to their environment. Thats why its called natural selection, not supernatural selection or simply selection.
Theistic evolution, then, is supernaturalism, and admitting its possibility denies everything we know about how evolution works. It waters down science with superstition. It should be no crimein fact, it should be requiredfor teachers to tell student that natural selection is apparently a purposeless and unguided process (I use the word apparently because were not 100% sure, but really, do we need to tell physics students that the decay of an atom is apparently purposeless?).
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 9:00 am
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Meme theory: Do we come up with ideas or do they, in fact, control us?
Mankind's greatest inventions are all the result of individual flashes of inspiration or are they? Jonnie Hughes argues that, instead, ideas are subject to evolutionary principles, and we humans are little more than their hosts.
Do you have ideas, or do ideas have you? What exactly are ideas? Are they divine sparks of inspiration, the accidental by-products of our weird ape brains, neuronal fireworks displays that find meaning in our lives or are they more than all these things?
One idea that I've spent the past three years of my life investigating is that ideas are, to a very real extent, 'alive' in their own right surviving, reproducing, evolving, going extinct, just like living things.
It sounds a harmless proposition, but the implications are quite startling. If ideas are just like living things, then they are subject to Darwinian rules inherently selfish entities, doing anything and everything they must to survive and propagate. And in this scenario, what are we? Little more than their hosts, their habitats? Vehicles to carry them from one parasitic generation to the next, coerced accomplices to their wild ambitions? If this idea has any substance at all, it will upset a lot of people.
It's not my idea, you understand. 'Meme theory', as it has been labelled, evolved in the minds of people including biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett and psychologist Susan Blackmore, years before it entered mine. But at some point I, too, became infected and, in 2009, I decided to do what every good vehicle should do and take its passenger for a ride.
Like Darwin, I ventured abroad, into the cultural wilderness of America, to search out first-hand evidence that ideas are subject to natural selection. As I crossed the prairies, I classified the changing moustaches of farmers, plotted the evolution of the cowboy hat, dated American barns, and charted a taxonomy of tepees. In doing so, I found the evidence I needed to suggest that ideas do evolve just like the finches and tortoises that Darwin discovered in the Galapagos.
What's more, I found that viewing our world through 'meme goggles' is like suddenly spotting that vase in the optical illusion with the two faces. Your focus shifts from the human beings to the things in between the countless living ideas that skip through our seven billion brains, each one competing for space in our cerebrums and the chance to procreate through our tongue and wrist movements. The mêlée of a new form of life is revealed. It's quite a view! Let me give you a few glimpses, with examples from my notebook.
Jonnie Hughes' book 'On the Origin of Tepees' (One World) can be ordered at the special price of £9.89 (usually £10.99), including p&p; call Independent Books Direct on 0843 0600 030
The cowboy hat
A great demonstration of the logic of meme theory comes when you ask the question "Where did the idea for the cowboy hat come from?". There are three answers to this question, each more provocative than the last.
The textbook answer is that John Batterson Stetson invented the cowboy hat in the 1860s after joining the gold rush to Colorado. The son of a hatter, Stetson noticed the Wild West was short of bespoke headwear. At that time, cowboys had a choice of floppy felt hats, raccoon skins or Derbies. None were perfect for a life in which the rain, wind, dust, sun and cold took turns to torment. So Stetson stitched together fur felts to make a wide-brimmed hat with a tall crown. It looked ridiculous, but it was stiff, waterproof, and cool. He marketed it as 'The Boss of the Plains' and it took the West by storm.
Answer number two: the fact is, The Boss of the Plains didn't look anything like the cowboy hat we know today. The crown was a uniform dome, with no peaks or dents. The brim was flat, no rolled edges. So Stetson didn't invent the cowboy hat the cowboys must have.
The crucial factor is that The Boss was a pricey hat, so each cowboy only ever bought one. They were worn until they fell apart each night under the stars, rolling the brim, each "yee-haw" denting the crown. Soon enough, in the railhead towns, all the true cowboys wore battered hats, so an aesthetic was born that represented the untamed West the pursed, rolled cowboy hat. Anyone wanting to blend in had to have one. Stetson and other manufacturers obliged, evolving their ranges over the years to reflect this desire. What we regard today as the cowboy hat is a product of the climate, the hard Western life and the purchasing selections of a hundred thousand cowboys.
Answer number three: who invented the tiger? No one. The environment, by acting upon thousands of generations of proto-tigers, selecting some and not others, for whatever reasons, created the tiger we know today. That's how meme goggles see the invention of the cowboy hat.
Upon production, Stetson's hat entered a design journey through the selections of a century of cowboys. But it would be wrong to think that the cowboys collectively planned the route. They chose their hats for 'whatever reasons' practical considerations, aesthetic judgements, unfathomable yearnings no two selections alike. The hat simply bounced through this environment, its form changing subtly for forgotten reasons with each generation. End result: a mindless, unplanned ascent to the hat we know today.
Through meme goggles, no one invented the cowboy hat. If anything, it invented itself.
The American barn
The history of the cowboy hat suggests how idea selection comes about, but what about idea variation, the second vital ingredient of Darwinian evolution. Without variation, after all, there is nothing to select.
As I drove across the plains, a perfect case of idea variation materialised on the side of the highway, with examples every few miles the American barn. American barns are icons of the West big, often red, their doors at the gable end, their roofs crooked in cross-section, like a broken stick. It's an ingenious design because the roof maximises the volume of storage space available for crops to overwinter. Where did it come from? The American barn is a composite of the barns the Germans and English built on the east coast, with a crooked roof borrowed from Dutch houses for good measure.
But although the mongrel barns on the highway are clearly now the same 'species', no two are exactly alike. They have differing door designs, roof lengths, window heights, build materials. What causes this variation? The normal response is to say they vary because the farmers wanted them to vary. But, once again, these goggles question that assumption.
Most of the barns I see are pre-industrial, 'raised' by a community, rather than designed by an architect. Picture the scene at one of these barn-raisings: dozens of men and women, some with experience, others without; plenty with strong opinions on what to do when. As the barn goes up, these opinions will be voiced, discussions entertained, decisions made. The availability of funds and building materials, the lie of the land, the wind direction will all play their part.
Ultimately, the barn will come together only upon the negotiation of all these opinions and contributing factors a unique barn realised imperfectly: the result of a never-to-be-repeated interplay between competing instructions, the peculiarities of the environment and a pinch of good old-fashioned randomness just like you or I.
Coca-Cola is perhaps even more American than apple pie, and the reason for this tells us something about the ways ideas inhabit our brains. Invented as a non-alcoholic version of a French 'coca wine' (cocaine and wine, together at last) by John Pemberton in 1886 upon the passing of a prohibition law in Georgia, its potential began to be realised only when Asa Candler founded the Coca-Cola Company in 1889 to market the product. Candler understood that the key to selling a product was not the quality of the product, but the quality of the idea of the product. He made certain that the Coca-Cola brand was visible in as many places as possible on buildings, on ashtrays, on bumper stickers so that Coke would become part of America's routine experience. Today, Coke now stands for America, or the idea of America.
The power of this association is revealed by MRI scanners. Measure the activity of the brain's pleasure centre as people drink different colas, and Coke comes way down the list. But measure the prefrontal cortex the centre for self-identity and it lights up like a candle. Coke remains number one not because it's more pleasurable, but because Candler's brand is the one we associate with our personality.
The American accent
Inheritance is the third vital ingredient of Darwin's evolution. Whenever I opened my mouth on my pilgrimage through America, a significant component of my cultural inheritance became apparent. Whereas they say "Pass the budder", I say "Pahss the butta".
We all collectively inherit accents as mindlessly as we collectively select hats or bring about variations in barns. We unthinkingly imitate the muscle movements that create the word sounds that surround us when we're young. Americans sound like Americans because they were raised among Americans.
In some ways, today's Americans sound more like yesterday's English than today's English. In the 17th century, when the American colonies were formed, almost all English accents were 'rhotic', meaning that they pronounced the letter 'r' like a pirate. It is our accent that has 'drifted' in the interim, turning mainly non-rhotic as our association with the soft-tongued Europeans grew. By the time the Antipodes was colonised, our 'r' sounds had all but disappeared, hence the Australian accent is non-rhotic too. In the States, only New England, which had a tight relationship with Britain into the 18th century, lost their 'r's with us.
The tepee
Looking at hats, barns, accents and soft drinks, it's possible to see how Darwin's evolution could be at work in the secret world of ideas. But how do they all come together to create the grand patterns that Darwin found in the biosphere? Can we discern a cultural 'tree of life'?
I reckon I've found one branch a radiation of tepees equivalent to the radiation of Darwin's finches. Every one of the 20-plus Indian tribes on the Great Plains has a unique tepee. They vary in their arrangement of poles, their doorways, the design of their cover, the shape of their smoke flaps, and a dozen other ways. But this variation is different to the variation in American barns. The differing traits of the 20-plus tepees never intermingle there are no mongrel tepees they are all separate 'species'. The obvious question is, "Why so many varieties?" and "Is there no such thing as the perfect tepee?".
Again, it's tempting to suggest that, for whatever reason, the tepees were designed to be different by the Indians themselves that human ingenuity was in the driving seat. But if ideas do evolve like living things, the isolation of the tribes alone would account for much of this radiation. Separated from each other by language, geography or distrust, the Plains tribes were scattered like an archipelago of cultural islands. As Darwin discovered, a foundation species will radiate into a cluster of daughter species in such circumstances, and so it is here.
Which is why, towards the end of my trip, I could wander the pop-up town of the Tepee Festival at Crow Reservation in Montana, spotting the tepees of different tribes. The Crow tepees reached skyward with flailing poles, their foliage intact. The Sioux tepees were squat and trim, with special pockets for their smoke flap poles. The Blackfoot tepees were broad and proud, decorated in wild dyes and flashy iconography.
And standing there in front of these remarkable manifestations of culture, I flipped back from focusing on the vase to again focusing on the human faces. The Plains Indians wandering the festival, proud, happy, rightly celebrating their culture they, as we, are the perfect idea machines: huge memories for storage, equipped with scintillating communication tools and an insatiable desire to share ideas. If the countless species of living ideas were to get together to design a creature to help them propagate, they couldn't build a better one. And maybe that's no coincidence. We are all idea junkies. Perhaps the ideas, which have inhabited our minds since those early days in East Africa, have made sure of that. (Just an idea.)
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 9:02 am
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 9:15 am
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 9:25 am
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 9:33 am
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Joined: 04 Mar 2010
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 1:14 pm
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Earth is demolished, for good! There is no God! But YOU are saved if you are aware! Or was it not aware?
Shit in those that don't think like you. They are doomed anyway!
Be happy, don't worry,
In your next life you may drive a lorry,
Or act in a porr-storry,
So dont you worry, it will be fixed in a horry!
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Joined: 19 Mar 2011
Posts: 49
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 2:11 pm
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Peace Warrior wrote:
Alienred wrote:
Only a nonachieving mind can be at peace.
But ..... so what are you trying to achieve with your posts here then?
What would OSHO say about that?
Why do you think I am trying to achieve something? Cant't you do something without achieving? I am just sharing their message, that's all. And i only ask you to read it once, with all your reasoning - that's all. If you think it's bullshit - if YOU personally think - not that you read some comments of users here and made your decision - that's OK. But only if you decided for yourself, instead of blindly repeating what others say without actually reading.
Jiddu Krishnamurti -
Happiness does not come when you are striving for it - and that is the greatest secret,
though it is very easily said. I can put it in a few simple words; but, by merely listening to me and repeating what you have heard, you are not going to be happy. Happiness is strange;
it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy,
then unexpectedly, mysteriously happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being. But that requires a great deal of understanding - not joining an organization or trying to become somebody.
AAAAAAAAAA wrote:
Actually it was a semi-diplomatic way to ask you to stop posting bullshit- it was not intended to trigger another rant. I somehow believe your overzealous preaching is linked to sexual frustration. I suggest you masturbate more regularly (I will PM you some porn websites of interest).
While you are posting your porn websites of interest, the
in the world (which is not really in the World ) continues!!! So i am going to ask you not to post bullshit.
it was a semi-diplomatic way to ask you
Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti -
The change must begin with the human being, not with the outward structure.
The human being is confused, the human being is conditioned. He believes, and therefore there is a contradiction in himself.
He is really, deeply confused and if he wants to change the social structure, the change from confusion only breeds more confusion. Whereas, if he could
bring about clarity within himself,
and from that clarity act, then such an action is really a deep psychological revolution. That revolution is absolutely necessary.
mayhem-for-all wrote:
I bet you didn't even read my post
I read your post. I appreciate that you have taken time to read and even answer. I understand how you think.
Thank you.
I would suggest you the following book [/b]
MOST OF US realize, when we dare look at it, that we are terribly lonely, isolated human beings.
Whether we are consciously or unconsciously aware of it, we want to escape from it, because we do not know what lies behind and beyond it; being frightened, we run away from it through attachment, through activity and every form of religious or worldly entertainment.
This is fairly obvious when one observes it in oneself. We isolate ourselves by our everyday activities, by our attitude and our way of thinking; although we may have an intimate relationship with somebody, we are always thinking about ourselves. The result of this is more isolation, more loneliness, a greater dependence on outward things, greater attachments and the resultant suffering which arises from it. I do not know if you are aware of all this
Perhaps as we are sitting here, we could become aware of this thing called loneliness and of the isolation, dependency and suffering it brings. This is going on in ourselves all the time. If one is observant one can see that our whole activity is self-centred.
We are thinking about ourselves endlessly: about our health, that we must meditate, that we must change; we want a better job with more money, a better relationship. `I want to attain enlightenment; "I must achieve something in this life" - "me" and "my life", my worries, my problems.
This eternal preoccupation with oneself is going on all the time; we are devoted to ourselves. That is an obvious fact. And whether we go to an office or to a factory, do social work or are concerned with the welfare of the world, our self-concern motivates all our activities; it is always "me" first. This self preoccupation which operates in daily life and relationship does bring about isolation. This again is fairly obvious, and if one goes into it very deeply one discovers that
this isolation is an awareness of being completely alone, cut off, not having a relationship with anybody or anything.
You may be amongst a crowd, or sitting with a friend, when suddenly this sense of utter isolation, of being completely cut off from everybody comes upon you.
I do not know if you have noticed this or if it is something you have never experienced.
When we become aware of this loneliness, then we try to escape by being occupied through domestic strife, or various forms of entertainment, by trying to mediate, and so on.
Surely, all this indicates that the mind, whether it is shallow or deep, superficial or merely caught in technological knowledge, must cut itself off from every form of relationship if it is constantly occupied with itself.
Relationship is the most important thing in life, because if you don't have a right relationship with the one, you cannot possibly have it with any other human being. You can imagine that you will have a better relationship with another, but it is merely at the verbal level and therefore illusory. [b]If you understand that relationship between two human beings is the same as relationship with the rest of the world, then isolation, loneliness, has quite a different meaning. So what is relationship?
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Joined: 19 Mar 2011
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 2:33 pm
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mayhem-for-all wrote:
Oh now I get it. It doesn't exist.
Oh but sure you can explain how that is. Beyond time and space is usually something that does not exist.
Only when the mind is completely silent not only on the upper level but fundamentally, right through, on both the superficial and the deeper levels of consciousness - only then can the unknown come into being. The unknown is not something to be experienced by the mind; silence alone can be experienced, nothing but silence.
Therefore God or truth or what you will is a thing that comes into being from moment to moment, and it happens only in a state of freedom and spontaneity, not when the mind is disciplined according to a pattern.
God is not a thing of the mind, it does not come through self-projection, it comes only when there is virtue, which is freedom. Virtue is facing the fact of what is and the facing of the fact is a state of bliss. Only when the mind is blissful, quiet, without any movement of its own, without the projection of thought, conscious or unconscious - only then does the eternal come into being.
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 3:01 pm
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Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 3:50 pm
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Peace Warrior
Joined: 31 Jul 2010
Posts: 106
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 6:39 pm
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Alienred wrote:
Peace Warrior wrote:
Alienred wrote:
Only a nonachieving mind can be at peace.
But ..... so what are you trying to achieve with your posts here then?
What would OSHO say about that?
Why do you think I am trying to achieve something?
Why?? Makine 30 posts about the exactly same stuff in a few days gives it away . You cant deny it!
Buddha would be very disappointed . Your mind is too focus on worldly things like convincing people in internet forums.
BUTT!! OSHO probally would approved !!
When he called himself Bhagwan , he was addicided to valium, ripped many peoples off and founding a sex commune with young girls . Wiretapping, fraud, ending with a bioterror attack and then thrwon out of the USA. OSHO would have fit right in at stratoforum!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Bhagwan_Shree_Rajneesh#1984_Bioterror_at tack
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Peace Warrior
Joined: 31 Jul 2010
Posts: 106
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 7:23 pm
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Alienred wrote:
one is to die richly, the other is to live richly. Osho
Here is other osho bagwan quotes, this one goes out to the americans out there
BHAGWAN OSHO wrote:
it was going to be necessary to kill people to stay in Oregon. And that actually killing people wasn't such a bad thing. And actually Hitler was a great man, although he could not say that publicly because nobody would understand that.
Hitler had great vision
the world must put the monster America in its place
"Either America must be hushed up or America will be the end of the world."
You can be a Christ: Why be a Christian?
Let me be your death and resurrection.
And more opypasta
http://www.equip.org/articles/the- rajneesh-cult/
Rajneeshs appeal stemmed partly from his use of tantric yoga (involving nudity and free sex) in his ashram, and partly from his incorporation of a wide variety of popular psychospiritual therapies and techniques.
The organization understood long ago
what powerful energy money is
. Rajneesh, who owns two Rolls Royces and two airplanes, believes that
spirituality is the luxury and privilege of the rich.
http://www.weeklyblitz.net/1091/sex- rackets-and-swamis-in-india
Disciples of Bhagwan Rajnish were taught to experience mental please through sex with multiple men and women inside the ashram during days and nights. Special rooms were built to house the visiting 'devotees' of Bhagwan Rajnish, where they would have sexual experience by paying certain amount of 'donation' to the ashram. Cocaine, Marijuana and other types of drugs were also in use in this center.
http://forum.rickross.com/read.php? 12,55236,55293
Seems there have been a number of cases recently where sannyasin kids, now grown up, have said they were neglected or sexually abused in Osho communes (incl. Ko Hsuan school).
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this guy sounds abit like TOLKKI but 100 times more of everything!
cause more is more
so much for spirittual guru.
more like drug addict, money grabbing asshole and horny old bastard
Happiness is that state of being which is timeless.
no, happyness is fistfull of rupees cocaine and blow job from young brainwashed be;liefers
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Joined: 19 Mar 2011
Posts: 49
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 8:08 pm
Post subject:
Peace Warrior wrote:
Alienred wrote:
Peace Warrior wrote:
Alienred wrote:
Only a nonachieving mind can be at peace.
But ..... so what are you trying to achieve with your posts here then?
What would OSHO say about that?
Why do you think I am trying to achieve something?
Why?? Makine 30 posts about the exactly same stuff in a few days gives it away . You cant deny it!
Buddha would be very disappointed . Your mind is too focus on worldly things like convincing people in internet forums.
BUTT!! OSHO probally would approved !!
When he called himself Bhagwan , he was addicided to valium, ripped many peoples off and founding a sex commune with young girls . Wiretapping, fraud, ending with a bioterror attack and then thrwon out of the USA. OSHO would have fit right in at stratoforum!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Bhagwan_Shree_Rajneesh#1984_Bioterror_at tack
That's just a tiny little bit of rumors that they were spreading about him. If you only knew what Christians were talking about him
It's really funny -
ripped many peoples off
Most of the time he lived outside the city of his followers and they saw him only when he talked (for 3 hours everyday in the morning) - all the remaining time he was just sitting in his room doing nothing. If you are really interested in
what others say about Osho
instead of reading at least one of his own books - i suggest the following book by one of his closest disciples:
http://www.satrakshita.com/ diamond_days.htm
Osho had always liked to live with gardens and beautiful birds and animals. He wanted a deer park to be created at Rajneeshpuram, and we were to grow "alfa-alfa" for the deer, to attract them away from the hunters. He told a story of a place in India. He used to visit near a waterfall where there were hundreds of deer. At night they would come to the lake to drink, "and their eyes would shine like a thousand flames, dancing in the dark."
At the bottom of the garden, before Basho Pond, where black swans resided on one side of the bridge, and white on the other, there was the garage in which were the famous ninety-six Rolls Royces. In India Oshos one Mercedes created an uproar, but in America it took almost a hundred Rolls Royces to achieve the same effect.
For many people these cars were a barrier between them and Osho. They could not see past the cars.
It is said that Sufi masters create disguises so that they may go about their business unrecognized and do not have to waste time with people who are not seekers.
"There was no need for ninety-six Rolls Royces. I could not use ninety-six Rolls Royces simultaneously - the same model, the same car. But I wanted to make it clear to you that you would be ready to drop all your desires for truth, for love, for spiritual growth to have a Rolls Royce. I was knowingly creating a situation in which you would feel jealous.
"The function of a master is very strange. He has to help you come to an understanding of your inner structure of consciousness: it is full of jealousy.
"Those cars fulfilled their purpose. They created jealousy in the whole of America, in all the super-rich people. If they were intelligent enough, then rather than being my enemies they would have come to me to find a way to get rid of their jealousy, because it is their problem. Jealousy is a fire that burns you, and burns you badly."
"Everything that I have done in my life has a purpose. It is a device to bring out something in you of which you are not aware." (Osho in Beyond Psychology)
Why read false rumors over the internet? Try reading his books.
Just as suddenly as he had stopped, in October Osho began speaking again. He spoke about love, meditation, and the human predicament in a mad, heavily conditioned world. He targeted priests and politicians as corrupters of the human soul, as destroyers of human freedom, and called God the first and biggest lie.
From the very beginning of the communal experiment, federal, state, and local governments strove to destroy it in any way possible. Documentation later revealed that this effort involved the White House.
Charles Turner, the U. S. attorney in Portland who was the governments instrument in this process, stated in a private interview in February, 1989, that at the time Rajneeshpuram was becoming established, the government was saying: What are we going to do with these people? How are we going to get them out of here? Theyre totally entrenched. Theyre a political entity. They have money, they have power, they have organization. Theyre sophisticated, they have people who are absolutely, completely, totally commited to what they are doing, zealous beyond anything that Ive ever encountered before in my life. So what are we going to do about it? Lets use the U. S. attorneys office to charge them with immigration fraud.. He added: We were using the criminal process to solve, I suppose [what] was really a political problem..
In October the U. S. government accused Osho of immigration violations. Without any arrest warrant being produced or rights being read, Osho was taken into custody at gunpoint. Handcuffed and shacked in chains wherever he went, Osho was denied bail and kept in confinement for twelve days. He was transported cross-country to Portland, Oregon. A journey which normally takes five hours took eight days.
During Oshos time in jail, he was physically mistreated by federal officers. According to subsequent medical evidence, while in Oklahoma County Jail he was exposed to life-threatening doses of radiation, and poisoned with thallium. In Multnomah Jail in Portland he was subjected to an attempted bombing.
Fearing for Oshos life in the hands of U. S. agents, his lawyers agreed to a deal proposed by government attorneys. Under the deal, Osho could maintain his innocence on the charges through an Alford Plea, but be sentenced on two of them. The government had what it wanted: apparent guilt of Osho and justification for all the actions it had taken and would take against him and his commune.
Osho left America on November 14. In the wake of this massive government assault, the commune was disbanded.
Perhaps M. V. Kamath, the noted Indian literary figure, speaks for millions of Oshos admires around the world when he says: There has never been anyone like him before. It is doubtful whether there will be anyone like him again. Anyone who can turn over two dozen governments against him must have something in him. One suspects it is intellectual honesty of a rare kind.
He took the locket of Osho in his hand and he touched it to his forehead and then said: He is the greatest incarnation since Buddha in India he is a living Buddha!
Lama Karmapa
" Osho is an enlightened master who is working with all possibilities to help humanity overcome a difficult phase in developing consciousness. "
The Dalai Lama
On February 16, Osho flies to Greece with a four-week tourist visa and stays in a villa on the island of Crete. Three days later he begins giving talks outdoors on the grounds of the villa, under a huge spreading tree. Within days, many of his sannyasins begin to arrive from nearby European countries
The local Greek Orthodox bishop speaks against Osho in his sermons to his congregation, distributes a pamphlet in which he accuses Osho of corrupting the morals of young people, and threatens to bring a protest march to the villa.
On March 5, the police arrive while Osho is taking his afternoon nap, to arrest and deport him. When Osho's legal secretary asks them to show a warrant, the police arrest her and proceed to break down doors and windows to enter the house and take Osho into custody.
From Greece we moved to Geneva, just for an overnight rest, and the moment they came to know my name they said,
"No way! We cannot allow him into our country." I was not even allowed to get out of the plane. We moved to Sweden, thinking that people go on saying that Sweden is far more progressive than any country in Europe or in the world, that Sweden has been giving refuge to many terrorists, revolutionaries, expelled politicians, that it is very generous. We reached Sweden.
We wanted to stay overnight because the pilots were running out of time. They could not go on anymore; otherwise it would become illegal. And we were happy because we had asked only for an overnight stay, but the man at the airport gave seven-day visas to everybody. But immediately the police came and canceled the visas and told us to leave:
"This man we cannot allow in our country." They can allow terrorists, they can allow murderers, they can allow Mafia people and they can give them refugebut they cannot allow me. And I was not asking for refuge or permanent residence, just an overnight stay.
We turned to London, because it was simply a question of our basic right. And we made it twice-legalwe purchased first-class tickets for the next day. Our own jet was there, but still we purchased the tickets in case they started saying, "You don't have tickets for tomorrow, so we won't allow you to stay in the first-class lounge."
We purchased tickets for everybody just so that we could stay in the lounge, and we told them, "We have our own jet, and we also have tickets." But they came upon a bylaw of the airport that nobody can interfere with: "It is our discretionand this man we won't allow in the lounge."
I wondered: "How can I destroy their morality, their religion, by staying in the lounge? In the first place I will be sleeping, and by the morning we will be gone." But no, these so-called civilized countries are as primitive and barbarous as you can conceive.
They said, "All that we can do is, we can put you in jail for the night." IN IRELAND, WE SIMPLY WANTED ONE DAY'S STAY TO GIVE A REST TO the pilotsthe man at the airport gave us seven days. He did not bother who we were, what the purpose was. He must have been really drunk! We reached a hotel, and in the morning the police came, asked for the passports, and canceled those seven days. We said, "You have given us seven days and now you have canceled them without giving any reason. None of our people has gone out of the hotel; they have not committed any crime. You cannot do this." They were caught in a dilemma. They had given seven days; now they had canceled them and they didn't have any reason to show why.
So they said, "You can stay as long as you want, but don't go outside the hotel." We remained there for fifteen days because we needed some time.
Our people were working in Spain, and the Spanish government was willing to give me permanent residence. So we just wanted time: if Spain was ready we could move from Ireland to Spain. We stayed in Ireland for fifteen days without any visa.
And the day we left Ireland, a minister informed the members of the parliament that we had never been in Ireland. Cultured people, educated people and flatly lying, saying I had never been in Ireland! And he knew, his government knew, the chief of police knew.
I am thinking that once I get settled somewhere then I will start. . . one by one each country had to be dragged into court for their lies, for calling me "dangerous," for saying yes and then refusing after one hour.
I am going to expose it to the world for the simple understanding that there is no democracy anywhere.
ON MARCH 14, OSHO AND HIS PARTY ARE PROMISED VISAS TO SPAIN, but three days later they are refused on the basis of dossiers supplied by the American and German governments. On March 18, Osho's jet lands in Madrid and is surrounded by Guardia Civil while the Uruguayan consul stamps Uruguayan visas in the passports of Osho and his attendants. The next stop is in Dacca, Senegal, for an overnight stay in a hotel before traveling on to Uruguay.
On the same day, the European Parliament discusses a motion to prevent Osho from entering any European Commonwealth country. You will be surprised: I am being discussed in parliaments of countries where I have never been, even in countries where not a single sannyasin exists, as if I am the biggest world problem to them. They are facing a nuclear third world war, but their worry is about me! It is significant that they have recognized that if I am allowed to go on teaching, their rotten societies will start collapsing.
And I am going to continue no matter what; they cannot prevent me. I will find my ways. And now more than ever I am going to sharpen every argument against them and expose every government that has been preventing me from reaching my own people.
THE URUGUAYAN GOVERNMENT HAD ORIGINALLY ISSUED A ONE-year residency permit for Osho, with the intention of extending it to three years and eventually granting him citizenship. By early June, however, the government is under pressure from the Americans not to allow Osho to settle.
In mid-June the American government delivers an ultimatum to the Uruguayan president: deport Osho from the country or risk losing billions of dollars of U.S. aid.
Reluctantly, he complies. On June 19, 1986, Osho flies from Uruguay to Jamaica, where he has a two-week visa, but the following morning the police tell him to leave by that evening. On June 20, he flies to Lisbon, Portugal, where he stays quietly in a rented villa for a few weeks. Police surround his villa, and on July 30, he flies to Bombay.
The president of Uruguay said, "It is unfortunate that I have to do it. I am doing it against my own conscience.
The Americans were not even willing to concede that I should simply leave the country. My plane was waiting at the airport. ... I said, "There is no problem; I can leave the country. I will not put your country into such jeopardy."
He said,
"The American president insists that you should be deported;
you should not leave the country without being deported. I am forced to commit crimes: first, to tell you for no reason to leave the country; you have done nothing. Second, to deport you. But I am absolutely helpless. Still, I want one thing: that on your passport there should be no stamp of deportation from Uruguay. We have a small airportso move your airplane to that airport, and in the evening leave without informing us so we can say, "He left without informing us. There was no time to deport him." But he was wrong. As my jet moved to the small airport, an American representative was there with all the stamps and the official whose business it is to deport people.
I was delayed there, because they had to fill in all the forms, and as I left the country, I said, "It doesn't matter. In fact, my passport has become a historical document! I have been deported from so many countries without any reason."
When I left Uruguay the president was invited to America immediately, and Ronald Reagan gave him thirty-six million dollars as a "gesture of friendship." That was a reward because I was thrown out within thirty-six hours: exactly thirty-six million dollars, one million dollars per hour.
In fact, I should start asking these governments for my percentage! You are getting billions of dollars because of meI should get at least two percent.
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Peace Warrior
Joined: 31 Jul 2010
Posts: 106
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 8:40 pm
Post subject:
Alienred wrote:
Osho had always liked to live with gardens and beautiful birds and animals....
....and his rolls royces, a pile of cocaine and young girls to fuck
Alienred wrote:
Why read false rumors over the internet? Try reading his books.
Is he gonna admit to ripping off people in his books??
And Lemme guess, the books cost money.
Oh yes of course they do. More money for rolls royces and running whore houses in india ......
No thanks!
According to subsequent medical evidence, while in Oklahoma County Jail he was exposed to life-threatening doses of radiation, and poisoned with thallium. In Multnomah Jail in Portland he was subjected to an attempted bombing.
right ..
Osho Rashnees = coke head pimp fraud + pedophile
If you continte to deny it in this forum i am afraid its sign of your neurosis , you really must try to empty your mind !
hey just empty your mind man .... just let it go
Remember the more you can enjoy things which are purposeless, the more innocent and blissful you will be. When you dont need any purpose you simply celebrate your being.
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Jr. Member
Joined: 19 Mar 2011
Posts: 49
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 8:59 pm
Post subject:
Peace Warrior wrote:
Disciples of Bhagwan Rajnish were taught to experience mental please through sex with multiple men and women inside the ashram during days and nights. Special rooms were built to house the visiting 'devotees' of Bhagwan Rajnish, where they would have sexual experience by paying certain amount of 'donation' to the ashram. Cocaine, Marijuana and other types of drugs were also in use in this center.
Seems there have been a number of cases recently where sannyasin kids, now grown up, have said they were neglected or sexually abused in Osho communes (incl. Ko Hsuan school).
this guy sounds abit like TOLKKI but 100 times more of everything!
cause more is more
so much for spirittual guru.
more like drug addict, money grabbing asshole and horny old bastard
Happiness is that state of being which is timeless.
no, happyness is fistfull of rupees cocaine and blow job from young brainwashed be;liefers
My friend - you have fallen into a trap - continue spreading false rumors.
If you were a little bit more intelligent, you would have read his books, instead of posting his quotes that were
taken out of context by his haters.
So tell me
Peace Warrior
- what my 30 posts are all about? What is that i am trying to achieve? What am i trying to convince you in?
Am i?
The society is neurotic.
It exists on neurotic foundations. Its whole history is a history of
madness, of violence, war, destruction. Somebody says, "My country is the greatest country in
the world" -- now this is neurosis. Somebody says, "My religion is the greatest and the highest
religion in the world" -- now this is neurosis. And this neurosis has gone to the very blood and
to the bones, and people have become very, very dull, insensitive. They had to become,
otherwise life would be impossible.
You have to become insensitive to cope with this dull life around you; otherwise you start
falling out of tune.
If you start falling out of tune with the society, the society declares you
mad. The society is mad, but if you are not in adjustment with it, it declares you mad.
either you have to go mad, or you have to find a way out of the society; that's what suicide is.
Life becomes intolerable. It seems impossible to cope with so many people around you -- and
they are all insane. What will you do if you are thrown into an insane asylum?
But the society forces you to become part of a big army. The society never likes a person
who goes in his own way.
The society wants you to be part of the crowd:
be a Hindu, be a
Christian, be a Jew, be an American, be an Indian -- but be part of a crowd; any crowd, but be
part of a crowd. Never be yourself.
And those who want to be themselves... and those are the
salt of the earth, those people who want to be themselves. They are the most valuable people
on the earth. The earth has a little dignity and fragrance because of these people.
Society gives the feeling to every person that he is worthless.
It is a political strategy. Once a person gets the idea that he is worthless, he cannot be rebellious, he cannot be independent, he cannot go outside the fold. He cannot choose a path of his own, he will follow the crowd.
Once the idea sinks deep into your unconscious that you are worthless you cannot trust yourself; you will have to trust the priest, the politician, the teacher, the parents all kinds of authorities.
And you will seek them, you will cling to them because the ground underneath your feet has been taken away. You are afraid to be left alone on your own because then you know you cannot decide, all that you decide is wrong; you cannot act, whatsoever you do is wrong. Then it is better to follow the mob; let them decide, you just be an imitator.
To create imitators and slaves each childs trust in himself is being destroyed all over the world, in all kinds of societies and cultures, in all countries.
My effort here is to give you again the feeling of worth, a self-trust and that is possible only through meditation, because meditation can help you get rid of all conditionings. And it is only a matter of conditioning. Others have told you things again and again, they have hypnotised you. That hypnosis has to be destroyed, you have to be dehypnotised.
Thats what meditation is: a process of dehypnotisation. Once you are dehypnotised you wake up for the first time, then suddenly you know that you are immensely valuable, as everybody else is. Then one feels tremendous respect for oneself also. And it is not ego, because you feel the same respect for others. You are not higher, you are not holier than others; suddenly you have known that everyone is esteemed by nature itself, by the universe itself.
No wonder, they created rumors and poisoned him:
The seconds are ticking and time's slowly slipping away, yeah
Th stakes getting higher, fight fire with fire again
Casting pearls before the swine
I know it's wrong, it's out of line
I would rather die than follow you
Yeah, I'd rather die
Try to poison my mind, had enough of your kind
You're all blind
So little you know, 'bout my heart and my soul and my pride
Get a life!
Yeah, I'd rather die
You're all blind, yeah
Yngwie Malmsteen
Osho on Adolf Hitler
It is said that Adolf Hitler wanted to become a painter, but he was refused admission. Just think: the whole world would have been totally different if he had been accepted in the academy. There would have been no Second World War. The whole humanity would have been totally different. But this man could not be creative. He wanted to be creative, he had the energy; certainly he had tremendous energy: he dragged the whole world towards destruction as no other man has ever been able to do. But it was the same energy; it could have become creative, but became uncreative.
Source - Osho Book "The Beloved, Vol2 "
- I would like to remind you that Germany is one of the most intellectual countries in the world. It has given to the world people like Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger -- great philosophers, great psychologists. And still a third-class crackpot, Adolf Hitler, managed to get all the intelligentsia of the country to follow him.
And I don't think humanity has learned anything out of it. If you don't learn, then history repeats. If you learn, then you can stop history repeating again.
Martin Heidegger was perhaps one of the most significant philosophers of the century, and he was a contemporary of Adolf Hitler. He supported Adolf Hitler -- inconceivable! The whole youth, which is the cream of the society, its intelligence, all the universities' vice-chancellors, professors -- they all supported Adolf Hitler, a man who was uneducated, a man who was refused from the school of art, who was refused from the school of architecture, because he had no intelligence.
This man became the leader of the most intelligent country in the world, and he created the greatest fascist regime. He killed almost ten million people, and still people were supporting him. It has to be psychoanalyzed.
What was the reason? The reason was, Germany was defeated in the first world war. And the intellectuals tend to fight among themselves. They argue, rationalize, philosophize; they are not physically active people. And they are egoists. They think they have found the secret of life, every one of them.
After its defeat in the first world war, Germany was in a chaos. The chaos created Adolf Hitler, because he promised, and he fulfilled the promise, "I can make this country again united, again strong, so strong that it can rule over the whole world."
It was something that was immensely needed. People were not working, people were not being creative. Somebody was needed to make the country again creative, disciplined. And Adolf Hitler filled the gap. Within ten years Germany was again a world power.
Strange -- if you give people freedom, they become lazy, they don't want to work. But if you give them a fascist order, they work to their very potential; they create, they are united, they become strong.
Germany went on winning for five years. That proved that the people of Germany had chosen the right person -- the whole world on one side, and he alone was enough. He gave the intelligentsia their ego as nobody had given them before. He said to them that the Nordic German race is the purest Aryan race, and it is its destiny to rule over the world, because all others are subhuman. It was tremendously gratifying. The intellectual ego was very much fulfilled, and even a man like Martin Heidegger fell into the trap.
Only after Hitler was defeated and Germany was almost destroyed, then people started looking back at what they had done, what kind of man they were supporting: a monster, a murderer who has killed millions of people -- perhaps the greatest murderer in the whole history.
So remember one thing: freedom is not license. Freedom is responsibility. And if you cannot take your responsibility yourself, then somebody is going to take the responsibility on your behalf. And then you are enslaved.
Source - Osho Book "From Bondage to Freedom"
- A man should live intelligently -- that's all. Then whatever he does is his responsibility. It happens that even great intellectuals are not living intelligently. Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest intellectuals of this age, was a follower of Adolf Hitler. And after Adolf Hitler's defeat and the exposure of his basic animality, brutality, murderousness, violence, even Martin Heidegger shrank back and said, "I was simply following the leader of the nation."
But a philosopher has no business to follow the leader of the nation. In fact a philosopher's basic duty is to guide the leaders of the nation, not to be guided by them, because he is out of active politics, his vision is more clear. He is standing aloof, he can see things which people who are involved in action cannot see. But it is easy to throw responsibility...
If Adolf Hitler had been victorious, I am certain Martin Heidegger would have said, "He is victorious because he followed my philosophy." And certainly he was a great intellectual compared to Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was just a retarded person. But power...
We have been brought up to follow the powerful -- the father, the mother, the teacher, the priest, the God. Essentially we have been told that whoever has the power is right: "Might is right." And you have to follow it. It is simple because it needs no intelligence. It is simple because you can never be told that it was your responsibility, that whatever happened was your responsibility.
In all the armies around the world only one thing is taught through years of training, and that is obedience. In Germany, in the second world war, there were good people, but they were heads of concentration camps. They were good fathers, good husbands, good friends. Nobody could have conceived -- watching them in their families, with their friends, in the club -- that these people are burning thousands of Jews every day.
And they were not feeling guilty at all, because it is only an order from above. And that is their whole training, that you have to follow the order. It has become part of their blood and their bones and their marrow. When the order comes, obedience is the only way. This is how man has lived up to now, and that's why I say obedience is one of the greatest crimes, because all other crimes are born out of it. It deprives you of intelligence, it deprives you of decisiveness, it deprives you of responsibility. It destroys you as an individual. It converts you into a robot.
Hence I am all for disobedience. But disobedience is not just against obedience. Disobedience is above obedience and the so-called disobedience described in the dictionaries. Disobedience is simply the assertion of your intelligence: "I take the responsibility, and I will do everything that feels right to my heart, to my being. And I will not do anything that goes against my intelligence."
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Peace Warrior
Joined: 31 Jul 2010
Posts: 106
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 9:00 pm
Post subject:
Alienred wrote:
"There was no need for ninety-six Rolls Royces. I could not use ninety-six Rolls Royces simultaneously - the same model, the same car. But I wanted to make it clear to you that you would be ready to drop all your desires for truth, for love, for spiritual growth to have a Rolls Royce. I was
knowingly creating a situation
in which you would feel jealous.
now I get it
Dude you totally fucking picked the wrong forum to troll ... you have no fucking idea!!
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Peace Warrior
Joined: 31 Jul 2010
Posts: 106
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 9:01 pm
Post subject:
Alienred wrote:
So tell me
Peace Warrior
- what my 30 posts are all about? What is that i am trying to achieve? What am i trying to convince you in?
I believe there once was a corrupt asshole called Rashneesh / OSHO. Thief criminal drug addict , dirty old man. Hiding behind psilosophy and holyness like any other fuckinmg corrupt preacher.
Youre trying to make me change my mind about that.
Not goint to happen
Dude ... just fill your mind with nothingness. It will feel better!
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Jr. Member
Joined: 19 Mar 2011
Posts: 49
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 9:09 pm
Post subject:
Peace Warrior wrote:
now I get it
Dude you totally fucking picked the wrong forum to troll ... you have no fucking idea!!
THAT'S WHAT I am TALKING ABOUT!!!!!!!!
You really just made a fool of yourself -
I was just a tourist there (USA - Oregon), and I made the whole of America disturbed. They had enough money; they could have purchased more Rolls Royces if they wanted. But they had no guts for that either. They were condemning me, saying that I am a materialist. And you will be surprised; one bishop who was continuously condemning me as a materialist, wrote me a letter, privately, saying, "It would be very compassionate of you if you could donate a Rolls Royce to my church. It won't make any difference to you -- ninety-three or ninety-two -- but it will make much difference to us." And every Sunday he was condemning me. His condemnation was not about my materialism; his condemnation was to hide his jealousy.
The politicians, the rich, could have managed it for themselves -- why were they worried? But the worry was that a tourist, who has not even a valid visa, has defeated all the super-rich; it hurts! If they were intelligent enough, they could have understood that there must be a purpose behind these Rolls Royces. It cannot be just the one-hour ride. For that, one Rolls Royce would have been enough. Everything that I have done in my life has a purpose. It is a device to bring out something in you of which you are not aware.
It is part of my whole device to change the very structure of human consciousness. The past has revered poverty, asceticism, masochistic attitudes. A man was respected if he was renouncing all that is pleasant, all that is comfortable. He was respected for torturing himself; the greater the torture, the greater the respect.
The whole human past is masochistic, and all the religions have contributed to this insanity. My effort is to change such a vast past and its influence. So it has been only a device. I have not been creating desires for materialistic things in people; they are there without anybody's creating them. Yes, they have been repressed so deeply that people have even forgotten that they had them. I am not creating them;
I simply want to remove the cover-up, the repression, and to make the person realize that he wants a Rolls Royce more than enlightenment.
This realization will be a basic step towards enlightenment, because it will make him aware of his own reality, his greed. There was no need for ninety-three Rolls Royces. I could not use ninety-three Rolls Royces simultaneously -- the same model, the same car. But I wanted to make it clear to you that you would be ready to drop all your desires for truth, for love, for spiritual growth to have a Rolls Royce. I was knowingly creating a situation in which you would feel jealous. The function of a master is very strange. He has to help you come to an understanding of your inner structure of consciousness:
Peace Warrior wrote:
it is full of jealousy.
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