Yesterday, a random thought came into my mind as I drove to Home Depot about an experience years ago with a woman where I saw an eyelash on her cheek and told her “oh, you have an eyelash” and she let me take it away. Later, I had regrets, thinking that might have been too intimate a gesture for a casual friendship. So, I tossed that around again for no good reason yesterday. What made me think that? I needed to think about what I needed to get at Home Depot so I wouldn’t have to go back again in an hour. Not some random person and their random eyelash from years ago.
Several hours later, I decided to try some Spam and eggs for dinner since I had forgotten to thaw anything and too lazy to go to the store. I was a little amazed how retro the can looked when I broke into my stash but.. whatever. I tried it. Not great, not bad. Definitely needs more texture if you add it to eggs. It was OK.
Amused yet? Lol, I am sorry for dragging you into this.
Then I watched “Operation Mincemeat.” Have you seen it? Recommended! Anyway, the first scene shows a formal dining table and there are cans of SPAM oddly sitting at each place setting. This was minutes after eating mine. Way too informal of a food to be sitting on a fancy dinner table and absolutely no point in it but there it is.
Spam?? I know that isn’t a big deal, but I had to see if I was really awake.. Just too much Spam in a short period of time.
Later in the movie, there was the whole “main character picks eyelash off of a woman” scene... and it seemed a bit intimate of a gesture for their platonic relationship and it’s integral to the operation. If you’re following me, I had that same incident in my head just hours ago.
There are no coincidences. What if we are IN the movie? Mind control, showing us what they want us to see, causing random memories to resurface, causing us to change our behavior and perhaps, contact that person we thought about? Why was the woman I thought about important? It was during my military years. Is she important to the story? Did the listening devices in my home know I was having Spam? Is that why Netflix suggested it, because I was just surfing. Is the spying and mind control THAT intricate? It just seemed a little matrix glitchy to me.
But then, the whole point of the movie is about the lengths our military and govt go to deceive. The false flags, military operations, coups and what we’ve been living lately? Highly intricate, complicated acts of planning and deception, with people so caught up in the lies that they start to believe their own characters are real.
“In any story, if it's a good story, there is that which is seen and that which is hidden. This is especially true in stories of war. There is the war we see, a contest of bombs and bullets, courage, sacrifice, and brute force. As we count the winners, the losers, and the dead. But alongside this war, another war is waged. A battleground in shades of gray, played out in deception, seduction, and bad faith. The participants are strange. They are seldom what they seem, and fiction and reality blur. This war is a wilderness of mirrors in which the truth is protected by a bodyguard of lies.”
operation-mincemeat
The brain is hardware, the mind is software.
I'm using "software" in the most general sense, as a collection of data and instructions that can be made to perform some function. A word processor is software; a music file is software, an operating system, the hardwired instructions in a BIOS chip, and (the words in) a book on your shelf are all software. The OS, the type of hardware, the language that data and instructions are written in don't matter in the least in regards its categorization as software.
Lacking any scientific data to describe the mind with, we've used "soul" to mean the mind, and not ONLY the mind but a healthy mind including the nerves of the body, which bring information from the organs and muscles and bones, and the lower levels of the brain (the brainstem and other structures below the cortex). An unhealthy mind is a corrupted soul. A psyochpathic mind lacks the ability to form a connection and bond with others (frontal lobe damage or defect) which creates a life of emotional solitary confinement and for obvious reasons usually leads to internal rage and often to mistreatment of others.
There's a delicate, easily missed or misunderstood difference between awareness and consciousness -- both are of mind, but awareness is in general upper-brain; consciousness (full consciousness at any rate) involves a fluid interconnection between lower brain activity and the cortex. Neurotic repression can lock lower memories and feelings (as from childhood or infancy) away from conscious knowledge, but of course any serious or threatening event MUST come to full consciousness; evolution insures that such memories don't just fade away like, say, what you had for breakfast 26 years ago. One can be completely unconscious of old traumatic events or one can be AWARE of them -- know they happened and even describe them in detail -- without having access to the FEELINGS involved. If trauma threatens behavior enough to be maladaptive, neurosis (blocked feeling) is the result.
-- Oops. Just noticed how far I've run on here. Enough on that.
As for your comment that "It may be that consciousness is the entire purpose of the universe" -- I believe, tentatively, that it's probably true. Indeed, Kastrup's theory of Idealism is that matter is formed from (universal) consciousness, not the other way around. He sees our soul -- the EXPERIENCE of the action and memories our brains and bodies produce -- as existing in the form of a disassociated bit of the universal consciousness (i.e., of the universe as a whole) locked in our brains, focused on what happens in the brain instead of experiencing, far more vaguely, the entire universe outside ourselves.
Kastrup isn't wrong.
Careful though, gents, as sci-fi is ideology codified into fiction.
Predictive programming even.
One man's 'science' is another's tool of control and if in contention, it's science that will get the boot as the plandemic demonstrates.
Besides...........science will always fail the subject because measurement changes the object measured, and the part can't contain the All.
That said, I'm not being negative or critical about the conversation and theories. I would like to say that it has all been taken care of in the past in mythology as symbol and in the highest study of both Hindu and Buddhist literature. From there, it degraded into psychology with 'causation' a wedge between giants like Freud and Jung.
These studies are like rungs of a ladder. You might be able to skip one or two but the ascent wouldn't be a smooth one and one might mis-step.
I've spent a lifetime deep-diving into these subjects and even caused a name change in a known theory about cognition after a discussion with a team of psychological theorists, yet was unable to get them to understand what was actually being said, because they had an agenda they thought it fit, when it didn't, so they 'stole' the idea and used it anyway. Holy cow.
Cut to the chase. I've pretty much heard it all by now. I don't have the energy to pump out the 3 zillion word diatribe it would take to touch the hem of the garment............but..........
If you'd like to hear the foremost authority in the west about the deep understanding of cognition/self.......using east, west, and science all at once...
Check out Theoria Apophasis vids on YouTube. Bring your dictionary, it's worth it.
Enjoyed the conversation and thank you.
Yes, and the modern leftist bent of much SciFi isn't new, of course; Star Trek was a socialist paradise that somehow "worked" (everything can work in the movies!) and H.G. Wells was also a socialist.
Hell, Einstein was a socialist, which goes to show that feelings are often stronger than intellect -- a general principle, actually. Feeling is far more ancient and a deeper, more central part of life than is upper-brain intelligence.
As for science: in times of widespread corruption or emotional damage, science, like everything else, degrades.
That's quite true. Still, if the goal of science is an ever-deeper and more accurate understanding of reality, then science can at least be very useful even when it the understanding is clearly incomplete. Newtonian physics is so useful that engineers and others still often use it instead of quantum or relativity, at least for the many intermediate-scale situations where Newton's results are so close to experimental results as makes no difference for the situation at hand.
There's another reason science will, in some fashion, always fail: I don't believe the human brain is anywhere near adequate to grok the whole of reality. An ant will never understand Shakespeare. A dog will never fully appreciate music despite having excellent hearing: no spindle cells in the brain to supply the output of hearing-related brain areas directly to certain feeling-related areas, so the deep feeling that music creates in humans (and to a lesser extent in a few other primates and in some cetaceans, and perhaps a few other animals) is never generated in a dog. Music theory wouldn't help, even if the dog could learn and understand it.
The universe is too big, too multi-layered, too multi-dimensional (including perhaps literally) for humans to fully grasp, or so I believe. Kastrup and the reports of some near-death survivors suggest the merging of one's self (of That Which Experiences) with the universe may change that. I'm not yet on board with the idea, but open to it.
I will, and thank you for that, and for the conversation.
Thanks for the great reply.
Engineers and Imagineers are at war right now.
The Truth is always somehow in 'the middle'.
That is exemplary of a "high energy" post, thank you, anon. I too think that the mind and soul are interchangeable terms for the same thing. I further think that the mind is, like you say, the software and the brain the hardware. I've also heard the analogy of the brain being a TV or radio receiver, and the mind is the broadcaster, the will that animates the brain to cause the body to do (or not do) an action.
But further, the mind (or soul, if you will) is an entity that has accompanied us all our lives but is not necessarily located IN the body. The mind is sometimes free to wander, such as in REM sleep and in out-of-body experiences. I've never, to my knowledge, had an out-of-body that I can remember, but I know credible people who have.
From reading about peoples' near-death experiences, where they were clinically "dead" but resuscitated, describe the experience of finally shedding their physical bodies and go to another realm of existence. Their stories are almost universally the same... enough so that I have come to no longer fear that thing we the living call "death." It is just another state of existence, but a higher and better state, and quite possibly eternal.
Sometimes when I think about all this, it makes the problems of this world seem petty and distant. But still, this is the age we were born in, and these things are what we were born to struggle with. I think this knowledge (that death is an illusion and that this is not my eternal home) is what gets me through the daily grind of living in this age with some degree of equanimity.
Yes, we are engaged in battles between good and evil, and it's a play or movie that has been playing out for millennia, this is just the most recent chapter, so we are all called to bear witness and participate on the side of good.... God wins in the end.
The struggle has even found a front here in my east Tennessee remote place that I call home, and I know it must be more intense beyond these mountains, in crowded cities across the land.
This has been a most refreshing discussion, thank you, fren.
I've enjoyed our discussion also, anon. Kastrup (in The Idea of the World) describes his view that Idealism implies an immortal soul, although he uses the odd-sounding term That Which Experiences (which he abbreviates to TWE) for the small bit of universal consciousness within the human (or animal) brain that takes the DATA supplied to the brain by the eyes, ears, somatic nerves, etc and EXPERIENCES that data. That includes the MEMORY stored in the brain -- which brings up another topic; brain damage of certain types destroys memory. After death, with the brain soon completely dysfunctional and sooner or later rotted away or otherwise demolished, how does the soul carry any memory? Before death (but after the brain damage), the soul cannot access the missing memory. -- just one of many questions we may never know the answer to in our lifetimes.
How true. Without any proof to back this up, I am of the opinion that the mind carries ALL of our memories intact, unspoiled, and the knowledge of why we are here, but the brain cannot usually access all of that flood of information. Not to belabor the point of near-death experiences, but some people experiencing that have reported that the "reality" they experience "there" is more real than the physical lives they were leading here in the physical realm, and further, that they were whole "over there".... all physical and mental impairments were gone.
Also very telling, at least to me, is that a goodly number of near-death experiencers reported that they wanted to stay there and NOT come back, and were quite angry when they were resuscitated. That land must be quite wonderful.