This journey I have been on, learning about the nature of reality and, more importantly, the nature of the mind, using divination and dream interpretation to communicate with the Quew, has led me to some new insights today.

In essence, I have learned to see my mind as a garden, and that the best way to ‘treat’ it is the same way as I deal with gardens these days: basically, let them do what they want to do; let them run wild. Well, I do not actually let them run completely wild, but I practice a very, very low maintenance gardening, and the result is that the garden is next best thing to a wilderness.

The good things about this are: first, and best, that it actually creates the kind of garden that I find most attractive. Things appear, things happen and it is not by my instigation, so I am always being surprised. Wildlife loves it. It is very low maintenance. It encourages ‘play’ rather than ‘work’. It is imperfect, chaotic and alive, as opposed to perfect, organised and dead, which is what those highly maintained gardens really are.

Transfer this to the mind and you have a very low maintenance mind, and one which encourages one to play, one which is most productive and creative when one plays in a random and chaotic manner rather than when one ‘works’ and studies and trains etc. LOVELY!!!!

So all my student and school years wasting time reading novels and listening to the radio and classical music and partying and going back-packing and NOT working and always failing my exams were well spent, and PROBABLY THE REASON MY MIND WAS ABLE TO DEVELOP SUFFICIENTLY TO BE ABLE TO WORK OUT ALL THE STUFF ABOUT THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE AND THE MIND AND THE QUEW etc etc. That has just GOT to be a better world than the world of ‘work’, the world of studying and practicing and devoting oneself to the pursuit of excellence in some one sphere. It is discovering that you never should have ‘put away childish things’; it is discovering that the state of ‘childhood’ is the state one should stay in.

I have often been asked when I am rubbishing science as debasing the mind etc, what I would replace it with. Well, here is the answer: SCIENCE SHOULD BE SUPERCEDED BY PLAY. And not just science: art and gardening and running a business and governing a country and running an army and whatever else you can think of should be replace by playing. That is, you should not ‘work’ at government; you should PLAY at government. And the same thing goes for all the rest.

Imagine a world in which everyone spends all their time playing…… can you imagine a better world? Well, if you are a power addict you probably think you can, but that is just the drug talking.

I can imagine people’s minds boggling at the suggestion that one should take nothing seriously, that everything should be light and playful, and they will think about all the problems of the world and how we need to think about global warming and fending of the predations of other countries, and planning the economy and planning for one’s retirement and looking after the kids and the parents, if they are old, and helping the sick and disabled etc etc etc.

The thing is, what you have to realise is that, first, all these problems are due to the fact that people’s minds have been degraded, that they are not running their minds properly, that they are, in fact, ABUSING their minds with the way they treat them and what they demand of them, and, secondly, that if you allow your mind to do its own thing, allow it to be natural, allow yourself to play, then your mind will develop way, way beyond its current level, will become unimaginably productive and rich and creative, and so all those insurmountable problems will become trivial and will be solved in no time!

Is it not ironic that an effortless, playful existence is the answer to all the problems of the world?!!!!

And to all the problems of the individuals that make up the world. In fact, it is the individual first and the world second; i.e. mend all the individual minds, heal all the individual people of the world, and the world will mend itself.

And after the world has been put to rights we can all go off and spend our lives in endless play, and our mind will go on growing and developing and life and the world will open up and become full of possibilities which are currently unimaginable. There will be no sickness, no boredom, no work, no fighting, no self-sacrifice just all fun and games.

When I talk about endless possibilities, you have to see the mind as a ‘dreamscape’, or, to start with, as a world, a natural environment. What I mean is that thoughts and ideas and abilities and senses and such all exist in the mind like plants and animals in the natural environment. So, when one talks of ‘planting an idea’ in a person’s mind, that is EXACTLY what one is doing, and that idea will grow, or not, depending on the ‘climate’ of the person’s mind, and if it grows it might seed and evolve and develop into new ideas which will later surface, possibly a ‘eureka’ moment, or possible something quieter. One might not even notice, but, like the evolution of insects and plants in the natural world, some things develop which are not important in themselves, as it were, but which function to keep the whole environment healthy, like, say, dung beetles, which keep the African savannah clean.

A natural world works far, far better than a human controlled world, that is obvious, and works without maintenance from humans --- the perfect system.

But the mind is more than the natural world. I called it a dreamscape, and that is correct. Bizarre, surreal things happen, just as in dreams, but, interestingly, when one gets one’s mind sorted out, one’s dreams become much less bizarre; the truth is, that much of what is bizarre in dreams is actually reflecting the bizarre things that go on in people’s minds, the bizarre ways in which they see and understand the world and other people, reflects, in fact, the working of sick minds, the minds of power addicts, the minds of drug abusers.

In a nutshell, our world of power addicts, of science and the other religions, of work, of training and of education (which is no more than brain-washing), is a world full of people who have lost their grip on reality, and that is why their dreams are so bizarre.

When you look at your dreams and they are full of your parent, who may be long dead, and your friends, and your boss and colleagues, and they are all affecting you in one way or another, may be trying to kill you, or just get you to do things, or telling you things, then you are looking at things that are present in your mind, and are affecting you, often exercising some control over you. It is like the way Shaffer portrays Mozart as a man who was haunted and adversely influenced by his father even after the father had died. Yes, that is how it is, and it is not just Mozart, it is everyone.

A staple of horror films is the psychopathic killer who is often suffering from some sort of mental illness, is often experiencing psychotic symptoms, eg hallucinations, voices, delusions. It may be he is hearing a voice in his head, or it could be coming from the TV, or somewhere else, it does not matter, but the voice might be telling him to kill other people. It might, quite likely, be telling him to kill other people BEFORE THEY KILL HIM. Ie the voice is telling him that the killing of other people is by way of self-protection.

That voice would be a voice from the subconscious, from the dreamscape, and it would be advising him correctly: the truth is that he really does need to kill all those other people before they kill him. The problem only arises when the man takes the dream voice literally --- literalness being a vice to which the people of this world have succumbed on their downward spiral through apocalypse, which being the case, it is hard to punish a man for doing the bidding of the subconscious, which is only advising him the he must kill them BEFORE THEY KILL HIM, and his only real fault then being that he took the voice too literally.

In such a case, the voice MUST be obeyed --- if you want to save your life. But the people that need to be killed are the people in the dreamscape. What that man needs to do is what Mozart needed to do, and that is get rid of the ‘presence’ and influence of other people in the mind. Mozart should have ‘killed’ his father long before the man actually died. To ‘kill’ a person means to kill the influence they have on you. If a person is dead, they cannot affect you physically, and if a person is dead in the psychological sense, they cannot affect you in your feelings, thoughts, emotions etc. To achieve this you need to heap abuse on them in your mind, tell yourself the person is a b-----d, and tell yourself that you do not care what they say or do, and you do not care if they are alive or dead etc. You have to do this in an unemotional way, so, when you are calling them a b-----d, you really want to be more specific, want to home in on real faults, and dwell on them. You are trying to discredit the person in your mind, and turn them from someone you might feel you ought to heed into someone you do not trust and would not heed if they were the last person in the world.

If you understand the dreamscape nature of the mind and how it works you can deal with all these things and protect yourself against them happening again, and if you do not understand the dreamscape nature of the mind you will ‘die’ from these things.

These sorts of things, and much else that is equally damaging, is going on in people’s minds and destroying their lives because they are addicted to power. Being addicted to power means people are competitive and want to be in control, in control of their world and the people in it, and that very desire, and the things they do to achieve it, rebounds on themselves in that they actually open themselves to the influence of other people and become susceptible to the power games being played by other people.

If you kick the habit, give up power, then you become immune to all these effects, and your heath and well-being and the quality of your life reflects that.

pantodragon wrote:...
A staple of horror films is the psychopathic killer who is often suffering from some sort of mental illness, is often experiencing psychotic symptoms, eg hallucinations, voices, delusions. It may be he is hearing a voice in his head, or it could be coming from the TV, or somewhere else, it does not matter, but the voice might be telling him to kill other people. It might, quite likely, be telling him to kill other people BEFORE THEY KILL HIM. Ie the voice is telling him that the killing of other people is by way of self-protection.

...

In other words, such a person should not be seen as "evil", IMO, any more than a lion killing a human should be. That does not mean that he is not dangerous, or that the public does not need protection from him.

There's plenty of psychopaths out there who live relatively normal lives and may never even know they're a psychopath. It's just a condition of having little or no empathy. Murdering people may simply not be in their interest.

Being a psychopath doesn't mean you have to go around murdering people. But it helps.

pantodragon wrote:This journey I have been on, learning about the nature of reality and, more importantly, the nature of the mind, using divination and dream interpretation to communicate with the Quew, has led me to some new insights today.

Divination and dream interpretation might be a good way to get some new perspectives on the reality of navel fluff, anyway. If you manage to bend any spoons with your insights, let us know.

In essence, I have learned to see my mind as a garden, and that the best way to ‘treat’ it is the same way as I deal with gardens these days: basically, let them do what they want to do; let them run wild. Well, I do not actually let them run completely wild, but I practice a very, very low maintenance gardening, and the result is that the garden is next best thing to a wilderness.

I'd be worried that, in treating my mind like an unmanaged garden, the weeds of woo might grow unchecked. I might begin spouting nonsense about gaining mystical insights into reality by doing too much magical "thinking". But, y'know... each to his own.

The good things about this are: first, and best, that it actually creates the kind of garden that I find most attractive. Things appear, things happen and it is not by my instigation, so I am always being surprised. Wildlife loves it. It is very low maintenance. It encourages ‘play’ rather than ‘work’. It is imperfect, chaotic and alive, as opposed to perfect, organised and dead, which is what those highly maintained gardens really are.

With gardens, you might have a point. With minds, well, one can take the analogy too far. There's a balance one can strike between extremes - fanaticism and indolence, let's say, or constipation and incontinence. If I'm reading you right, the extreme you seem to be offering is a kind of all-out and permanent infantilism:

Transfer this to the mind and you have a very low maintenance mind, and one which encourages one to play, one which is most productive and creative when one plays in a random and chaotic manner rather than when one ‘works’ and studies and trains etc. LOVELY!!!!

So all my student and school years wasting time reading novels and listening to the radio and classical music and partying and going back-packing and NOT working and always failing my exams were well spent, and PROBABLY THE REASON MY MIND WAS ABLE TO DEVELOP SUFFICIENTLY TO BE ABLE TO WORK OUT ALL THE STUFF ABOUT THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE AND THE MIND AND THE QUEW etc etc. That has just GOT to be a better world than the world of ‘work’, the world of studying and practicing and devoting oneself to the pursuit of excellence in some one sphere. It is discovering that you never should have ‘put away childish things’; it is discovering that the state of ‘childhood’ is the state one should stay in.

I have often been asked when I am rubbishing science as debasing the mind etc, what I would replace it with. Well, here is the answer: SCIENCE SHOULD BE SUPERCEDED BY PLAY. And not just science: art and gardening and running a business and governing a country and running an army and whatever else you can think of should be replace by playing. That is, you should not ‘work’ at government; you should PLAY at government. And the same thing goes for all the rest.

Imagine a world in which everyone spends all their time playing…… can you imagine a better world? Well, if you are a power addict you probably think you can, but that is just the drug talking.

I can imagine people’s minds boggling at the suggestion that one should take nothing seriously, that everything should be light and playful, and they will think about all the problems of the world and how we need to think about global warming and fending of the predations of other countries, and planning the economy and planning for one’s retirement and looking after the kids and the parents, if they are old, and helping the sick and disabled etc etc etc.

The thing is, what you have to realise is that, first, all these problems are due to the fact that people’s minds have been degraded, that they are not running their minds properly, that they are, in fact, ABUSING their minds with the way they treat them and what they demand of them, and, secondly, that if you allow your mind to do its own thing, allow it to be natural, allow yourself to play, then your mind will develop way, way beyond its current level, will become unimaginably productive and rich and creative, and so all those insurmountable problems will become trivial and will be solved in no time!

Is it not ironic that an effortless, playful existence is the answer to all the problems of the world?!!!!

And to all the problems of the individuals that make up the world. In fact, it is the individual first and the world second; i.e. mend all the individual minds, heal all the individual people of the world, and the world will mend itself.

And after the world has been put to rights we can all go off and spend our lives in endless play, and our mind will go on growing and developing and life and the world will open up and become full of possibilities which are currently unimaginable. There will be no sickness, no boredom, no work, no fighting, no self-sacrifice just all fun and games.

Remember, here, you are cheerleading for an aesthetic that appeals to you. It would be quite fascistic, and not fun, to declare that your personal aesthetic is simply RIGHT, right for everybody.

By the way, you fail to really explain how this fun and games philosophy would banish all sickness. Pancreatic cancer, for example.

Or suppose you told a starving family in an African village to just lighten up and look to the fun in life. It suddenly doesn't seem such a robust answer-to-everything.

When I talk about endless possibilities, you have to see the mind as a ‘dreamscape’, or, to start with, as a world, a natural environment. What I mean is that thoughts and ideas and abilities and senses and such all exist in the mind like plants and animals in the natural environment. So, when one talks of ‘planting an idea’ in a person’s mind, that is EXACTLY what one is doing, and that idea will grow, or not, depending on the ‘climate’ of the person’s mind, and if it grows it might seed and evolve and develop into new ideas which will later surface, possibly a ‘eureka’ moment, or possible something quieter. One might not even notice, but, like the evolution of insects and plants in the natural world, some things develop which are not important in themselves, as it were, but which function to keep the whole environment healthy, like, say, dung beetles, which keep the African savannah clean.

A natural world works far, far better than a human controlled world, that is obvious, and works without maintenance from humans --- the perfect system.

By what standard is nature a perfect system? By yours, I take it. Nature is actually rather brutal and, in terms of the process of biological evolution, incredibly wasteful. Think of the countless billions of organisms that expired before breeding, having no concept of fun in the meantime.

But the mind is more than the natural world. I called it a dreamscape, and that is correct. Bizarre, surreal things happen, just as in dreams, but, interestingly, when one gets one’s mind sorted out, one’s dreams become much less bizarre; the truth is, that much of what is bizarre in dreams is actually reflecting the bizarre things that go on in people’s minds, the bizarre ways in which they see and understand the world and other people, reflects, in fact, the working of sick minds, the minds of power addicts, the minds of drug abusers.

In a nutshell, our world of power addicts, of science and the other religions,

To call science a religion betrays an ignorance of science. But, hey, like you said, reading up on it and actually putting some serious thought into it - that would be a distraction from "play", right? That would be a waste of time.

Well, that's a novel way to excuse yourself from not knowing what you're taking about.

of work, of training and of education (which is no more than brain-washing), is a world full of people who have lost their grip on reality, and that is why their dreams are so bizarre.

When you look at your dreams and they are full of your parent, who may be long dead, and your friends, and your boss and colleagues, and they are all affecting you in one way or another, may be trying to kill you, or just get you to do things, or telling you things, then you are looking at things that are present in your mind, and are affecting you, often exercising some control over you. It is like the way Shaffer portrays Mozart as a man who was haunted and adversely influenced by his father even after the father had died. Yes, that is how it is, and it is not just Mozart, it is everyone.

A staple of horror films is the psychopathic killer who is often suffering from some sort of mental illness, is often experiencing psychotic symptoms, eg hallucinations, voices, delusions. It may be he is hearing a voice in his head, or it could be coming from the TV, or somewhere else, it does not matter, but the voice might be telling him to kill other people. It might, quite likely, be telling him to kill other people BEFORE THEY KILL HIM. Ie the voice is telling him that the killing of other people is by way of self-protection.

That voice would be a voice from the subconscious, from the dreamscape, and it would be advising him correctly: the truth is that he really does need to kill all those other people before they kill him. The problem only arises when the man takes the dream voice literally --- literalness being a vice to which the people of this world have succumbed on their downward spiral through apocalypse, which being the case, it is hard to punish a man for doing the bidding of the subconscious, which is only advising him the he must kill them BEFORE THEY KILL HIM, and his only real fault then being that he took the voice too literally.

In such a case, the voice MUST be obeyed --- if you want to save your life. But the people that need to be killed are the people in the dreamscape. What that man needs to do is what Mozart needed to do, and that is get rid of the ‘presence’ and influence of other people in the mind. Mozart should have ‘killed’ his father long before the man actually died. To ‘kill’ a person means to kill the influence they have on you. If a person is dead, they cannot affect you physically, and if a person is dead in the psychological sense, they cannot affect you in your feelings, thoughts, emotions etc. To achieve this you need to heap abuse on them in your mind, tell yourself the person is a b-----d, and tell yourself that you do not care what they say or do, and you do not care if they are alive or dead etc. You have to do this in an unemotional way, so, when you are calling them a b-----d, you really want to be more specific, want to home in on real faults, and dwell on them. You are trying to discredit the person in your mind, and turn them from someone you might feel you ought to heed into someone you do not trust and would not heed if they were the last person in the world.

If you understand the dreamscape nature of the mind and how it works you can deal with all these things and protect yourself against them happening again, and if you do not understand the dreamscape nature of the mind you will ‘die’ from these things.

These sorts of things, and much else that is equally damaging, is going on in people’s minds and destroying their lives because they are addicted to power. Being addicted to power means people are competitive and want to be in control, in control of their world and the people in it, and that very desire, and the things they do to achieve it, rebounds on themselves in that they actually open themselves to the influence of other people and become susceptible to the power games being played by other people.

If you kick the habit, give up power, then you become immune to all these effects, and your heath and well-being and the quality of your life reflects that.

The wibble is strong with this one.

Psychopaths are not "evil" but, as David said, that doesn't mean they're innocuous and no danger. However, so long as they live within the law, the law is bound to leave them unmolested.

1: "Really evil" or any other type of evil is subjective. There is no objective evil. The closest to an objective view of morality is the golden rule. But this is still a subjective guideline.

2: Psychopathy is a personality trait shared by a significant portion of the population; about 1% I believe is the current consensus. Depending on how they express this trait you would have to use your own objective view of evil to make this determination.

pantodragon wrote:Is it not ironic that an effortless, playful existence is the answer to all the problems of the world?!!!!

I wonder who's been reading Alan Watts? Maybe you were reading someone else; those guys are all the same.

http://findastillness.blogspot.de/2011/ ... watts.html

pantodragon wrote:his only real fault then being that he took the voice too literally.

The voice of the guru!

"Evil" is a subjective value judgement. What is considered evil by a given society in a given time period, is entirely dependent on what the majority of members of that society have agreed as being evil. The ancient Egyptians, the Mayas, the ancient Chinese, the medieval Christians etc. etc. all defined "Evil" in very different ways. Some societies considered it good and righteous to sacrifice their first-borns at the altar of their gods. Imagine a society where a majority of people were like what we currently consider "psychopaths". In such a society, these people won't be psychopaths and they won't be "evil".

I grow veggies in my garden, how do you get food, Panto?

Onyx8 wrote:I grow veggies in my garden, how do you get food, Panto?

Totally anecdotal!!

LIfe online is like a PacMan game. There are little energy pills scattered about.

Why is this in Sociology, when it's mostly about 'the reality TM' communicating with the Quew and other wibble?

what the hell is Quew?

I'm Interested, bookmarking.

Also, what's Quew?

?

pantodragon wrote:This journey I have been on, learning about the nature of reality and, more importantly, the nature of the mind, using divination and dream interpretation to communicate with the Quew, has led me to some new insights today.

That you will believe just about any magical nonsense that comes down the pike?

Cito di Pense wrote:

pantodragon wrote:Is it not ironic that an effortless, playful existence is the answer to all the problems of the world?!!!!

I wonder who's been reading Alan Watts? Maybe you were reading someone else; those guys are all the same.

I love Alan Watts. I wouldn't say he or his philosophy is the answer to all the problems of the world. But he does provide an excellent perspective on the world and life.

CdesignProponentsist wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

pantodragon wrote:Is it not ironic that an effortless, playful existence is the answer to all the problems of the world?!!!!

I wonder who's been reading Alan Watts? Maybe you were reading someone else; those guys are all the same.

I love Alan Watts. I wouldn't say he or his philosophy is the answer to all the problems of the world. But he does provide an excellent perspective on the world and life.

I once thought Alan Watts was hot shit, too. I read him now and realize my tastes have changed. The point here is that the physics I learned back when I was reading Watts still works for me.

So, this thread has been transported to the dustbin of barking bullshit, the pseudoscience section. This seems a natural home, where the thread can frolic about or gather weeds, depending on the level of maintenance.

Cito di Pense wrote:

CdesignProponentsist wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

pantodragon wrote:Is it not ironic that an effortless, playful existence is the answer to all the problems of the world?!!!!

I wonder who's been reading Alan Watts? Maybe you were reading someone else; those guys are all the same.

I love Alan Watts. I wouldn't say he or his philosophy is the answer to all the problems of the world. But he does provide an excellent perspective on the world and life.

I once thought Alan Watts was hot shit, too. I read him now and realize my tastes have changed. The point here is that the physics I learned back when I was reading Watts still works for me.

I would never appeal to Watts for physics insights ether.