10-30-2018, 05:59 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-30-2018, 06:00 AM by Bill the Piper.)
(10-29-2018, 07:11 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Intellect is only one means of describing reality, and is so superficial that it misses most of it.
Name some things the intellect cannot describe.
Quote:My above descriptions of actual, real experiences are not beliefs.
Show me one anatomy or physiology handbook which mentions a thing called chakras. They are only mediaeval Hindu nonsense.
Quote:I don't think you can pinpoint a location for any feeling or awareness. We experience reality with our full bodies, and beyond; not just with neurons in our brains. That is not magic or myth; it's just common sense experience.
We need our full bodies to experience reality, but our senses only collect information which is processed in the brain. This is basic physiology, not any transhumanist speculation.
Quote:Great frontiers of knowledge beckon on this inner journey. Joseph Campbell aroused a lot more sense of adventure than Carl Sagan did. See The Power of Myth.
A book can raise a sense of adventure while being completely fictional. I suppose more people enjoyed Arabian Nights than Joseph Campbell. Enjoying a work of fiction doesn't require believing in it.
Quote:We do indeed need to revive and update the deeper traditions within western civilization, as well as eastern civilization, that lie beyond the purview of so-called post-Enlightenment intellect. These western esoteric traditions were in fact a highlight of the Renaissance, and were only suppressed later on, in the 18th century. Renaissance artists and intellectuals were well aware of the soul centers.
They were wrong about many other things, too. For example, even Shakespeare believed that some parts of Africa are populated by headless people with faces on chests.
Quote:The more people peer into the nature of what they call "matter," which is just a description of a feeling of resistance we experience with our senses, the more empty space they find. Even within protons is more empty space. The most elementary particles are just impressions on a screen in a particle accelerator. String theory says these small constituents of reality are massless. Since we know that matter really is energy anyway, why carry around this delusion that the world is made of "matter," and call those who question this myth, the ones who are like Papuan hunters? No, a better description of the universe is that it is music. When you peer into yourself, instead of into a microscope or through your own senses to look outside yourself, or even at yourself from the outside, you don't experience any matter anyway. You are only pure consciousness.
The above doesn't change the fact that the materialist paradigm has resulted in glorious achievements in medicine and engineering, which resulted in more human well-being than any mediaeval mystic ever dreamed.