“You’re living in a dream world, a simulation, nothing is real.”
Can’t really change anything (see: Novikov Self-Consistency Principle) and I don’t believe people can enact wisdom until they are ready (i.e. whispering wise words in the ear will not make a wiser person,) and so I’m left with fucking with ourself.
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
Mark Twain
Recognize that your experience of the world is not the world, itself. You have tremendous (potentially complete) control over the former, but virtually no control over the latter. #SakshiBhava
I must say the “actually” in this prompt feels a bit accusatory and judgmental — as though, as a matter of practice, the answerer is generally unreliable. It also sounds like a question for someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder — otherwise who is making promises to whom? I am either one being or I contain multitudes, there being two seems at once too crowded and too lonely.
Is a salad lettuce or is it tomato? [It’s both, yet it’s neither. It’s an amalgam that cannot be spun out into component parts any more than one can pluck a solitary fart out of a football stadium — i.e. the fart, the whole fart, and nothing but the fart.]
It sounds like this is meant to be a restatement of the nature versus nurture question, though I’m not sure I understand the question. I would argue that it presents a false dichotomy. Who is one (if not an experience-having machine?) I can’t answer because I think the question assumes a simplification that doesn’t exist in the real world.
I’ve just been reading David Brooks’ book, How to Know a Person, in which he offers a relevant quote from Aldous Huxley: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.” I can’t say whether Huxley was entirely correct, but I believe that how one experiences what happens to one is inseparable from who one is. (Also instructive is Brooks’ definition of a person as a point of view.)
Four Quartets by T.S. EliotI have them all the time. When I was actively working on lucid dreaming / dream yoga, I was particularly attuned to them (as the practice necessitates.) The most common instance is when one sees something in one’s environs that one has never noticed before. It would happen all the time when I was living in Bangalore because it was such a visually chaotic and rapidly changing place that I could walk down a street ten times and not notice an unusual sign or building facade, and then — POW! — the moment I saw it I was in utter disbelief that it could have been their all the time.
I haven’t discounted (nor accepted) the simulation hypothesis, and I suspect whatever the world is, it’s not precisely any of the things we’ve thought it to be.
Nothing is what it seems,
or as it feels it should be.
The world is full of
smoke & mirrors --
neither here nor there...
And yet everywhere...
& everywhen.
The capacity to decrease entropy in an isolated system.
Do you need time?
I suppose I do. Without it, instead of life being one thing after the other, it would be everything all at once. The latter seems chaotic. But maybe one could get used to being timeless. I have no basis for comparison. I’ve always been just in time. Come to think of it, it would be nice not to have to conjugate verbs.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 