[Potemkin]

@Tainari88

Local brain regions go offline one after another. The mind, whose substrate is whichever neurons remain intact, then does what it always does: it tells a story shaped by a person’s experience, memory, and cultural expectations.

— C. Koch, Tales of the Dying Brain, Scientific American 322, 6, 70-75 (June 2020)

You have an academic reference for everything, @ingliz.

But how much of that paper consists of a scientific explanation for the phenomenon of NDEs, and how much of it consists of a handwaving explaining away of the phenomenon? As you are certainly aware, it’s easy to explain anything away, with very little effort. Is the author simply saying, ‘I don’t find this plausible’? If so, then fine. But then why pretend to have scientifically refuted it?

[Godstud]

@Rich You started with petty insults. Your sanctimony is hilarious given your vast ignorance. You didn't even argue a point, you just attacked without thought, as per your typical "style".

One of the greatest minds in history and you attack him because of a culture 1,800 years ago, that he even speaks out against? You're as bad as those woke people(that you love so much) who seek to judge people from the past on how things are now.

The rules of religion are rules that societies value because you can't have a successful society without out them. You have to have societies where killing, stealing, cheating and lying are condemned. The civilizations that fell, forgot this.

[Potemkin]

@Potemkin :

Sublime. And I reminder to myself of what is meant when I say: " Beauty will save the world".

Somebody once said that Ligeti’s music makes the rest of classical music sound like an ice-cream van. I can sort of see (or rather hear) what they meant.

When I was younger, like a child, I imagined that everything was just a piece of " stopped" or " frozen" Light. I don't know exactly what I meant and kind of still don't know, but it seems an apt metaphor.

The ancient Chinese believed that matter is just congealed qi, and that qi is just rarified matter. And of course modern Western science eventually caught up with them when Einstein wrote down the equation E=mc^2. Matter is just congealed energy, congealed light….

How would we act, would we act differently if we just saw each other's glory, much less saw the Angels and Saints, and Him?

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” - Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:12

[ingliz]

how much of that paper consists of...

You can decide.

Tales of the Dying Brain

[annatar1914]

Somebody once said that Ligeti’s music makes the rest of classical music sound like an ice-cream van. I can sort of see (or rather hear) what they meant.


The ancient Chinese believed that matter is just congealed qi, and that qi is just rarified matter. And of course modern Western science eventually caught up with them when Einstein wrote down the equation E=mc^2. Matter is just congealed energy, congealed light….


“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” - Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:12

@Potemkin :

Well said on all points! Ligeti was downloading something else than the usual to be sure, retaining the original meaning and essence of "'Genius".

Yes, I suppose that the natural insights of Qi/Prana in some cultures retained the spiritual truth of the Energies of God.

St Dionysus had a master in St Paul, who was caught up alive into the Third Heaven, the Heaven of the Heavens, and was taught there ..

Happy are those who have seen the Glory, the Uncreated Light of Mount Tabor!

[Tainari88]

@Rich You started with petty insults. Your sanctimony is hilarious given your vast ignorance. You didn't even argue a point, you just attacked without thought, as per your typical "style".

One of the greatest minds in history and you attack him because of a culture 1,800 years ago, that he even speaks out against? You're as bad as those woke people(that you love so much) who seek to judge people from the past on how things are now.

The rules of religion are rules that societies value because you can't have a successful society without out them. You have to have societies where killing, stealing, cheating and lying are condemned. The civilizations that fell, forgot this.

Have you read the Holy Bible from cover to cover and studied it?

The Bible I was given to read by my grandmothers. Both were highly religious. My paternal grandmother was a Protestant and quoted the Holy Bible all the time. My father in his youth graduated from Bible school. El Instituto Biblico Mizpa in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, and I do believe they still are around. Let me see their website?

https://www.mizpa.edu/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw4b ... gfEALw_wcB

Yes they still are a theological school. My father was talented at oration. So they sent him out as a preacher in the Spanish and English language to states like Texas. Lol. He did well as a preacher but would be on his knees praying five hours a day and fasting and believed in equality for women, for all races and creeds, and to get rid of pursuing wealth. Be poor like Christ and give away any riches you may have to the poor. Total dedication to a Christian life with sharing power with all members. He did not believe in hierarchy or getting rich. He got into big trouble with the higher ups in these Protestant churches. They were in it for the money and to keep women cooking, cleaning and pregnant and silent with no power. There was a real hatred of him telling them to their faces that they were not following the scripture. Cherry picking what was easy to do for them and avoiding the really hardcore stuff that was for dedicated Christians to accomplish.

He had a falling out with organized religion. Later he studied many different religions and I wound up debating comparative religions at our dinner table with him, and also in college.

It was a great experience. He practiced meditation, yoga, prayer and a lot of spiritual practices to try to find a form of balance in life. But he thought that religion was and could be divisive since so many religions do believe that they were the true word of God and that the other ones were false religions who they had a duty to get rid of and attack the other members of said religions. Only secular laws and separation of church and state could sort that out.

In truth real spirituality has to do with letting control go over other people whom you do not agree with. You need to find something you love about their common humanity and respect that difference. Serve them and be gentle with them in terms of judgment. Be harsh on yourself and work on your own defects as human. Because ultimately you only really can control yourself well. Not others. If you have a real spirituality? You do not need to demand change in others or get upset because they are true believers in something you find false. In the end? We are all living a lot of lies in our own ways.

To believe that the truth is something you know and all others do not? That is the ultimate hubris. Pride and false ego is the big sin that leads to all other sins. Sleigh that? And you have done a great job in this life.

Mizpa.

https://www.mizpa.edu/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw4b ... gfEALw_wcB

BTW, my other maternal grandmother was also a Christian and a Protestant convert. She used to be Roman Catholic and baptized my mother as an RC. But she became a Protestant. A Pentecostal. A lot of Pentecostals in Puerto Rico. I still remember her taking me to church. They would have Puerto Rican Christian salsa bands and singing and dancing and shouting and so on in church.

My maternal grandmother was very hard working and very rural. Her lifetime was about the land. She grew up one of 21 children on a big coffee plantation in the center of the island. She avoided getting married because she liked her personal freedom and as a woman in 1930s Puerto Rico unmarried and in her thrities she wound up marrying my maternal grandfather who was 19 years old and wanted a practical, hard working wife that could be sensible and so on. Haha. She was about 16 years older than he was. They had four children together.

Religion is only an avenue for morality and values if you pay attention to what is very difficult to do. Which is to serve people, do not judge those very different than you, love deeply and give a lot, and always discipline well yourself before you even dare to tell others what to do with their lives. Humility, and service and loving deeply with all your might is the ticket to tremendous influence in this world. Religiously and politically and morally.

It just is challenging for us mere mortals to accomplish.

The Holy Bible has the 10 commandments. It also has a lot of horrible stuff, incest, torture, smiting and judgments, killing the enemy, adultery, exploitation, and slavery and even really unspiritual behavior. I find it is a text that should be read like a work of art. Not like a scientific non fiction text. it is not science. It never will be. Why people must make it the ultimate book for all of humanity to obey blindly is very wrong. It is not for that purpose. It was also written centuries after the death of Christ.

[Potemkin]

You can decide.

Tales of the Dying Brain

Thanks for that. He seems to use what John von Neumann called ‘the principle of psycho-physical parallelism’ as the basis for asserting that these experiences have a neurological rather than a spiritual basis. In other words, he doesn’t offer a scientific explanation (because at this present stage of neuroscience it’s not possible to do so), but instead just asserts that there must be such an explanation, and that we just don’t know what it is yet. Which is a reasonable position to take. But it’s hardly a refutation of the idea that these NDEs have a spiritual basis to them. After all, the principle of psycho-physical parallelism is an assumption rather than a fact, as von Neumann cheerfully admitted, and the problem of drawing one-to-one correspondences between neurological events and subjective experiences has been notoriously intractable. Some philosophers even think it’s fundamentally misguided, a category error.

[annatar1914]

Thanks for that. He seems to use what John von Neumann called ‘the principle of psycho-physical parallelism’ as the basis for asserting that these experiences have a neurological rather than a spiritual basis. In other words, he doesn’t offer a scientific explanation (because at this present stage of neuroscience it’s not possible to do so), but instead just asserts that there must be such an explanation, and that we just don’t know what it is yet. Which is a reasonable position to take. But it’s hardly a refutation of the idea that these NDEs have a spiritual basis to them. After all, the principle of psycho-physical parallelism is an assumption rather than a fact, as von Neumann cheerfully admitted, and the problem of drawing one-to-one correspondences between neurological events and subjective experiences has been notoriously intractable. Some philosophers even think it’s fundamentally misguided, a category error.

@Potemkin :

But entirely necessary to the naturalistic and materialistic point of view, albeit one that gazes at the horizon from the bottom of a well. Cartesian thinking continues, an immortal mind " superfluous" and thought is probably somehow excreted by the body like bile.

Stupid.

[Godstud]

@Tainari88 I can see the value in religion even if I am an agnostic atheist. I can see that because I am who I am today because of that moral and principled upbringing.

Religions teach morality and those things we need in a nice civilized modern society. The further we get away from it, the worse we seem to be.

[Tainari88]

@Tainari88 I can see the value in religion even if I am an agnostic atheist. I can see that because I am who I am today because of that moral and principled upbringing.

Religions teach morality and those things we need in a nice civilized modern society. The further we get away from it, the worse we seem to be.

I hope that you realize differences are innate to all of us. And that we are different for a higher purpose. Not to bring strife to the world eh?

เมื่อไหร่คุณจะเรียนอ่านเขียนและพูดภาษาไทยได้อย่างคล่องแคล่ว Godstud?
Meụ̄̀x h̄ịr̀ khuṇ ca reīyn x̀ān k̄heīyn læa phūd p̣hās̄ʹā thịy dị̂ xỳāng khl̀xngkhæl̀w Godstud?

Profit above all else is a capitalist thing. It does not teach morality or civilized behavior. It is about greed. Greed is a mortal sin in almost every religious doctrine in the world. Why? Because it is innately about selfishness and lack of restraint.

We see an economic system accepted widely as the one that makes sense, when it is really an immoral system that should be scrapped. Especially by the highly pious and religious that are serious and disciplined. It is not.

That is why religious hypocrisy is a tremendously bad influence in the world. And far too common.

[Godstud]

I am not going to read and write Thai any time soon.

I know we all have differences, but we all have more things alike than we have differences. All societies and cultures have similar basics. We only differ in the details. We all say things we should do, and then not do them. That's not limited to religion.

If only we could all just be happy with what we have, the world would be a peaceful place.

I really like the Buddhist saying: Happiness is a choice.

[annatar1914]

@Godstud , @Tainari88 , @Potemkin , @Verv , @Political Interest :

I feel compelled again, while still focusing on the themes of this thread, to speak about recent events.

Israel versus Hamas.

Here we have a secular Western ideology of blood -and-soil nation state ethnonationalism set against an religious Islamic and Eastern grouping which only recognizes ultimately the " Umma" of the Muslim believers and the Sharia of a total Islamic way of life.

Yet even more so: the Western Civilization versus the Iranian Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors. Netanyahu may be a lot of things but unaware as to the greatest threat to the Israeli project is not one of those things. I keep that in mind when I watch him in action and hear him and the Israeli Right speak.

And Sunni Arab peace and cooperation with Iran is thus even more unsettling to the Israelis
and their Zionist supporters. The Palestinians as exemplified by Hamas have a champion in Iran and it's constellation of Shia militias throughout the Middle East like Hezbollah and the Houthis, despite the Shia/Sunni religious schism. In fact, I think that it will lead to conversion of many to Twelver Shia Islam.

I also see an Israel that is increasingly divided in contrast to the Muslims, and those divisions aren't going to go away. One camp is secular and much like the rest of the West, mainly Ashkenazi and left/liberal. The other is ironically much like the Muslims in their own way, only adherents to the Eastern religion of Judaism.

Caught in the middle are the middle east Christians although many are very much Palestinian in allegiance and sympathies, sharply in dichotomy to the only seemingly peculiar and grotesquely slavish Zionism of organized Western religious bodies.

This is not going to end the way anybody wants or fears that it will turn out.

[annatar1914]

@Godstud , @Tainari88 , @Potemkin , @Verv , @Political Interest :

I feel compelled again, while still focusing on the themes of this thread, to speak about recent events.

Israel versus Hamas.

Here we have a secular Western ideology of blood -and-soil nation state ethnonationalism set against an religious Islamic and Eastern grouping which only recognizes ultimately the " Umma" of the Muslim believers and the Sharia of a total Islamic way of life.

Yet even more so: the Western Civilization versus the Iranian Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors. Netanyahu may be a lot of things but unaware as to the greatest threat to the Israeli project is not one of those things. I keep that in mind when I watch him in action and hear him and the Israeli Right speak.

And Sunni Arab peace and cooperation with Iran is thus even more unsettling to the Israelis
and their Zionist supporters. The Palestinians as exemplified by Hamas have a champion in Iran and it's constellation of Shia militias throughout the Middle East like Hezbollah and the Houthis, despite the Shia/Sunni religious schism. In fact, I think that it will lead to conversion of many to Twelver Shia Islam.

I also see an Israel that is increasingly divided in contrast to the Muslims, and those divisions aren't going to go away. One camp is secular and much like the rest of the West, mainly Ashkenazi and left/liberal. The other is ironically much like the Muslims in their own way, only adherents to the Eastern religion of Judaism.

Caught in the middle are the middle east Christians although many are very much Palestinian in allegiance and sympathies, sharply in dichotomy to the only seemingly peculiar and grotesquely slavish Zionism of organized Western religious bodies.

This is not going to end the way anybody wants or fears that it will turn out.

@Godstud , @Tainari88 , @Potemkin , @Verv , and @Political Interest :

And sure enough, the Black Flag has been raised indeed. Just not the one I had hoped that it would be. But the Day has come.

For the first time in history, the Black Flag of Jihad flies over the Imam Reza Mosque:



It's war, it's on:

https://nypost.com/2023/10/18/iran-warn ... srael/amp/

[annatar1914]

@Godstud ,@Potemkin , @Potemkin , @Verv , @Political Interest :


Well I was wrong. And not only wrong but pretty much made a categorical error. It's what happens: I can perhaps blame it on Modernity, " Westoxification" as Ali Shariati once put it if I remember correctly. I already think like the Enemy and because of my sins and ignorance, am half in his camp.

It's a reflex for Westerners or Western influenced persons to have sympathies with another Western outpost or colony, above and beyond the universal humanistic sympathies regarding all human suffering. It's even harder when you and the West share a feared Other. But Zionism is not Jewish, it's Western.

80 plus pages here should thus have reminded me of the association I made with Monotheistic " Magian" complex of culture versus the Western Romano-Germanic iteration of the Greco Roman Civilization.

The Magian complex of Monotheistic cultures (including Orthodox Christianity which I regard as true and universal) is the Orthodox and Islamic and Jewish, Iranian and Russian, Aryan and Semitic, Afro Asiatic and Tatar and so on peoples coming together today. We can sort out the differences later in the face of the fact that Western Faustian mankind certainly sees it as one struggle: " we're Gog and Magog" to them.

When an Enemy is pushing you together one should make the most of it. Remains to be seen if it will but there it is.

Peace is still possible and should be worked towards, of course. Most of mankind is not with them, even many in the West. This should give any warmongers pause.

I just quailed at the thought of being right, after all these pages. I've strived to be understanding and to be understood even as I critique systems and cultures and sins, I have tried not to attack people personally.

But, what I've read today, really changed my mind, reminded me that what I was really going on about here on this thread has practical ramifications on a number of levels, including military even.

One must resist Evil by force. It's not an option, it's a knightly duty that must be engaged in, that fight.

Everything false fails and falls away lifeless, detached from the Truth that, and Who, is the Life.

[annatar1914]

@Godstud , @Potemkin , @Verv , @Political Interest :

Gracelessness of the West. Collectively speaking. This is almost the Faustian Prime Symbol as Oswald Spengler called the descriptive banner of the meaning of a Civilization.

Dostoyevsky was very bothered by the painting, which was discussed by his characters of Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin in " the Idiot", as being the material sign of the triumph of death and evil over everything and everyone good in this world, even the Son of Man. Despite all the conscious qualifiers and excuses, looking at the painting as a thing in itself.

A civilization based on secret and then open betrayal and denial, so that people could live as if Christianity never existed.

Edit:

And yet, Christianity does exist and it isn't in the West anymore, which cut itself off from life centuries ago. The Person Jesus Christ is still alive and alive forevermore and conquered sin and death. In His Church, He continues to heal the human heart and promises to restore the human mind and soul and body. Society is different when beginning with that principle.

[annatar1914]

@Godstud , @Potemkin , @Verv , @Political Interest :

Two ways to look at Time are the linear and the eternal. But there is the third in which the eternal breaks through the linear, and thus then we have the apocalyptic, eschatological. This of course is the almost unsaid theme of the entire thread, appropriate to this subforum on PoFo.

The Jewish return to the Holy Land, and their formation of a Nation State of " Israel", is believed by many to be one of those apocalyptic events that occasionally break through the surface of mundane time.

I myself have always been dismissive of attaching any eschatological or merely teleological meaning to Israel's founding, perhaps in reaction to popular Western beliefs at a certain point in history. Even recently I voiced the opinion that Israel was more likely to end in a whimper not a bang.

But I'm not comfortable with my discomfort. Emotion is not a sufficient reason at all for accepting or rejection of something, although I do often trust my gut on matters.

So, it's not nothing that the Jews have returned to the Holy Land, in fact it is a sign of a closer point towards the end according to the Fathers of my Orthodox Faith.

It's at this point though that it almost shuts down rational political discussion, as almost every religious belief system has a framework involving End Times belief. But Israel itself is a sign that defies political ratiocinations. I suspect that the time will come in which events will falsify or appear to falsify all manner of prophecies, or fulfill them. This leaves rational political discussion in the peculiar position of lagging behind the understanding of what turns out to be prophetic events as they happen.

An incredible thing for me to admit to after over 80 pages of talk here, on a spirituality thread. Unless I have been describing the End Times all along whether consciously or willingly or not.

Does this make me some sort of " Christian Zionist", along with so many others of certain sects? Not really. But they do have their errors hanging on one truth: that in the Christian New Testament, St Paul does prophecy in the Book of Romans that the Jews will be converted collectively speaking towards the End.

And so this triggers the Muslim understanding of a set of their own Islamic prophesies, with their own consequences.

[annatar1914]

Next set of discussions I'm wanting to delve a little deeper into the truths of this world and Modernity. Specifically about Money, and the meaning of the Modern economic system as a reversal of what life and personhood actually represent.

I recall the words of the Apostle: " the love of money is the root of all evil" .

Then I look at the symbolism of the dollar sign and the serpent raised on a pole. Money is the sacrament of the Serpent and the emblem and identifying signifier of his children, the unliving life of the material reality of death, the false concretization and fetishization of matter as an end unto itself. An Idol of the man of gold in place of the Son of Man.

Because what the economy really relies on and exists by is the labor of the working man, the sweat and blood and tears of the Poor. How can you put a price on that? Well, some people do, and certainly not for lack of trying either.

[annatar1914]

Next set of discussions I'm wanting to delve a little deeper into the truths of this world and Modernity. Specifically about Money, and the meaning of the Modern economic system as a reversal of what life and personhood actually represent.

I recall the words of the Apostle: " the love of money is the root of all evil" .

Then I look at the symbolism of the dollar sign and the serpent raised on a pole. Money is the sacrament of the Serpent and the emblem and identifying signifier of his children, the unliving life of the material reality of death, the false concretization and fetishization of matter as an end unto itself. An Idol of the man of gold in place of the Son of Man.

Because what the economy really relies on and exists by is the labor of the working man, the sweat and blood and tears of the Poor. How can you put a price on that? Well, some people do, and certainly not for lack of trying either.

So if Matter as discussed before is real but is contingent upon the perception and is not a self subsistant and eternal reality, what does Money have to do with it?

Money is a symbolic fetish that affirms the contrary error that matter is indeed self subsistant, eternal, and that which exists and always will, the medium of exchange by which intelligent self aware physical objects receive or exchange other physical objects out of some utility.

Slavery by the way, being the grossest affirmation of this error , that error of the raw materiality of things and denial of the spirit that there can be. Slavery and Money being the bonds of Materialist society, force and fraud. In pre-modern times slavery was merely accepted. In modern times it has been defended in its multitudinous forms.

[ingliz]

The Evil is Usury, neschek

the serpent

neschek whose name is known, the defiler,

beyond race and against race

the defiler

Τόκος hic mali medium est

Here is the core of evil, the burning hell without let-up,

The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm,

Syphilis of the State, of all kingdoms,

Wart of the common-weal,

Wenn-maker, corrupter of all things.

Darkness the defiler,

Twin evil of envy,

Snake of the seven heads, Hydra, entering all things,

Passing the doors of temples, defiling the Grove of Paphos,

neschek, the crawling evil,

slime, the corrupter of all things,

Poisoner of the fount,

of all fountains, neschek,

The serpent, evil against Nature’s increase,

Against beauty

Τὸ καλόν

formosus nec est nec decens

— Ezra Pound, Cantos Add/818

[annatar1914]

The Evil is Usury, neschek

the serpent

neschek whose name is known, the defiler,

beyond race and against race

the defiler

Τόκος hic mali medium est

Here is the core of evil, the burning hell without let-up,

The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm,

Syphilis of the State, of all kingdoms,

Wart of the common-weal,

Wenn-maker, corrupter of all things.

Darkness the defiler,

Twin evil of envy,

Snake of the seven heads, Hydra, entering all things,

Passing the doors of temples, defiling the Grove of Paphos,

neschek, the crawling evil,

slime, the corrupter of all things,

Poisoner of the fount,

of all fountains, neschek,

The serpent, evil against Nature’s increase,

Against beauty

Τὸ καλόν

formosus nec est nec decens

— Ezra Pound, Cantos Add/818

@ingliz :

Pound knew the very truth of what I'm talking about, it's a shame then that Pound had his fling with Fascism.

So yes, sterile money has a kind of identity, and even a kind of false productivity and self replication.