An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
dansmind86 /
anxiety, brain, consciousness, media, mind, numb, numbness, perception, psychology, technology
#3081
The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition.
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dansmind86 /
autonomic, awareness, consciousness, meditation, mind, placebo, psychology, reality, words
#3079
In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honored. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware o the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored. A catalogue, a bibliography, a definitive edition of a third-rate versifier’s ipsissima verba, a stupendous index to end all indexes-any genuinely Alexandrian project is sure of approval and financial support. But when it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our out autonomic nervous system–when it comes to any form of non-verbal education more fundamental (and more likely to be of some practical use) than Swedish drill, no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do anything about it. Verbalists are suspicious of the non-verbal; rationalists fear the given, non-rational fact; intellectuals feel that “what we perceive by the eye (or in any other way) is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply.” Besides, this matter of education in the non-verbal humanities will not fit into any of the established pigeonholes. It is not religion, not neurology, not gymnastics, not morality or civics, not even experimental psychology. This being so the subject is, for academic and ecclesiastical purposes, non-existent and may safely be ignored altogether or left, with a patronizing smile, to those whom the Pharisees of verbal orthodoxy call cranks, quacks, charlatans and unqualified amateurs.
Book: Doors of Perception, 76-77, Paperback edition (1990) published by Perennial
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen
Poem: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
Hail to you psychoneurotics, for you perceive sensibility in the insensibilities of the world, uncertainty in its certainty. For you are often as conscious of others as of yourself. For you feel the anxiety of the world, its limits and its false unlimited assurance… For your fear of the absurdity of existence. For your awkwardness, for your transcendental realism and your lack of daily realism… For your creativity and your ecstasy, for your maladjustment to what is and your adjustment to what ought to be. For your immense possibilities not yet actualized…For what is unique, original, intuitive and infinite in you. For the solitude and the oddness of your paths. Hail to you.
I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still there. Do I believe the world’s still there? Is it still out there?… Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I’m no different.
Movie: memento
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.
Science will create new levels of meaning. The Internet already is made of one quintillion transistors, a trillion links, a million emails per second, 20 exabytes of memory. It is approaching the level of the human brain and is doubling every year, while the brain is not. It is all becoming effectively one machine. And we are the machine.
The question remains: should we take the reductionist view, and look at all religious ideas as merely misunderstandings based on schizophrenic-like delusions and hallucinations? Or should we take the view that God, who in times past spoke to us in fire and plague and audible voices (and later in dreams and visions) has now become one with humanity and speaks to us in the silence of our own hearts?
Amazon review of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness… Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.
Copernicus put us in our place, so to to speak, by showing that our planet is not at the center of universe; advances in biology are putting us further in our place by showing that our brains are as much a product of biology as any other part of our body, and by showing that our (human) brains are built by the very same processes as other creatures. Just as the earth is just one planet among many, from the perspective of the toolkit of developmental biology, our brain is just one more arrangement of molecules.
[In traditional science, there is] the usual assumption that the “normal” state [of consciousness] is the only, or best, state in which science can be done.
Book: Consciousness: An Introduction
A few weeks ago some friends of mine and I went to a ranch in South Texas and took what Terence McKenna called a heroic dose—5 dried grams [of magic mushrooms]… my third eye was squeegeed quite cleanly…
It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware of any of these things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside world.
She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful or uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of penguins, which surprised her. Insofar as she recognised at all that she was dreaming, she realised that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine-tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.
She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful or uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of penguins, which surprised her. Insofar as she recognised at all that she was dreaming, she realised that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine-tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.
Book: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
I think what truly is an open mind is being prepared to change your views in light of the evidence. It means not that you have an open mind like a trash can that anybody can throw their rubbish in. Not that you don’t have any opinions… you may even have very strong opinions but you must be prepared to change those opinions if the evidence proves you’re wrong. Now that is actually psychologically and emotionally hard work. I found as I went on with it I had to change my mind many times in my life, academically and intellectually. Then it gets easier and you kind of get used to it and you realize that actually it’s fine, I can drop my entire theory, it was wrong. Let go.
I spend so much time standing in front of a mirror, leaning into it, opening my eyelids with my fingers, looking into my own pupils, trying to see past the reflection on my glassy eyes, I think an incredibly powerful experience for anyone, would be to be able to see past the glossy outer covering of the pupil, to see in to your own eye and see nothing but a piece of flesh, the retina.
Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
You are anything but primitive, Samantha. What your mind doesn’t know, your heart fills in.
TV: Stargate: SG-1, episode 1x16 “Enigma”
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
Quiet minds cannot be perlexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
The highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.
Your minds have all gone to mush.
speaking to us about forgetting math over the summer
We’re using technology to extend the human nervous system. The Internet is a kind of global prosthetic extension of human consciousness. It wasn’t consciously intended as one but it amounts to one.
Movie: “No Maps For These Territories” a Documentary
Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.
Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
When any fit of anxiety or gloominess or perversion of the mind lays hold upon you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaints but exert your whole care to hide it. By endeavoring to hide it, you will drive it away.
Mind can be compared to an ocean, and momentary mental events such as happiness, irritation, fantasies and boredom to the waves that rise and fall on its surface. Just as the waves can subside to reveal the stillness of the ocean’s depths, so too is it possible to calm the turbulence of our mind to reveal its natural pristine clarity.
Whenever my brain receives information, it spiders out into all of the possibilities.
The hacker’s mind sees group dynamics as damage and routes around it.
I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You have to open it.
Movie: The Matrix
We do not ask for what purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens.
Most of us simply deaden the mind in order to relax. We rent mindless videos, read pulp fiction, drink, smoke and eat until we’re foggy and bloated. The problem with this form of relaxation is that it dulls our creativity and makes it hard to come back to consciousness.
Book: “100 Ways to Motivate Yourself” by Steve Chandler
Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.
Book: “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card
You must cultivate your mind if you wish to achieve enduring happiness, for an empty mind grows bored and cannot endure itself. An empty mind seeks pleasure as a substitute for happiness.
What happens when you let your mind wander? Studies have shown when a human mind has nothing specific to think about, it becomes chaotic, flitting from one thought to another in a random way. That’s why studies show that people are more often in a good mood while working than they are in their free time.
The way in which ideas are formed is what gives character to the human mind. The mind which forms its ideas on realities is a solid mind; that which is satisfied with appearances is superficial; that which sees things as they are is a just mind; that which appreciates them badly is a false mind; that which invents imaginary relationships having neither reality nor appearance, is a foolish one; that which does not compare is an imbecile. The attitude, more or less great, of comparing ideas, and of finding a rapport and relationship is that which gives more or less character to the mind of man.
It is only by the love of reading that the evil resulting from the association with little minds can be counteracted.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
Once you place yourself in that proper frame of mind, it’s a snap to live in America and get excited, even if it’s cheap irony, over the daily distractions of unnecessary celebrities, unnecessary TV shows, unnecessary “news you can use,” unnecessary electronic gizmos, unnecessarily large vehicles and the rest of the [crap] culture we gleefully produce, consume and export around the world.
If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.
Cherish your vision; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes from your purest thought. If you remain true to them, your world will at last be built.