-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 2:14 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: The Dalai Lama's Ski Trip
On 16 Mar 2014, at 09:13, Chris de Morsella wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] > [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal > Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 12:31 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: The Dalai Lama's Ski Trip > > > On 15 Mar 2014, at 18:48, Chris de Morsella wrote: > >> >>>> You know I love the french (a bit cynical) poem: >> >> 'man had the good, >> but he sought the best, >> he found the bad, >> and kept it, >> by fear of the worst.' >> >> Kind regards, >> >> Bruno >> >> Nice... I mean bad :) >> Fear becomes, within the hidden unexamined recesses of mind, a self- >> driving psychological mechanism, where our fear of something becomes >> the thing we fear and begins to take over more and more of the mind >> -- >> if not faced that is. >> Facing one's own primal visceral fears is the very hardest thing for >> a person to ever do -- IMO -- the mind will try any trick and throw >> up its best rationalizations why the fear should remain buried within >> and not be faced. To face one's fears is a painful terrifying >> process, but is also the only means of escaping the fate of being >> driven by them. >> A mind can never awaken as long as it remains primarily driven by its >> unconscious (preconscious maybe is a better word) zombie processes. >> Often, >> even just recognizing that these exist within us is the hardest part. >> Once recognized, for being what they are, at least the mind becomes >> aware of them and can begin to act upon that awareness and in a more >> self-aware manner. > > > Fears can be natural, and usually protect us. It can also become > pathological and obsessive, or (and that is often the case) exploited > by unscrupulous people, like fear of drugs, fear on terror, or the > quasi traditional fear of hells, that humans imitates easily in jails > and camps, during war or peace. > > >>> Not entirely sure "self-awareness" is always working in this >>> setting, > although it could in many cases, but it can also lead to obsession, > and sometimes the inverse of self-awareness can help, like in zen > technic to forget yourself when acting, notably on a battle field. It > is complicated. > > Agreed -- fear is often a healthy protective mechanism. Was referring, > to the cyclic, mental entrapment that we can fall into when we become > afraid of our fears themselves. Fear can grow to fearsome size [I > apologize for the cheap pun] and paralyze the mind in an electric > frenzy of neural panic. When people become paralyzed by fear; their > fear becomes their phobia. Fear can be an embarrassing friend. It can eat you. > > A meditated quiet mind state that has learned to see through its > phobias and hidden fears, is far more adept in the moment... and > synchronized with the flow of time and unfolding experienced reality.. > than the unexamined mind, self-consumed in, elaborate mental > acrobatics to conceal, distract and explain away, and that has buried > large swaths of mind in memory holes, driven to this twisted, weakened > state of being, by sub-conscious zombie phobias that are the > manifestations of our unexamined fear. > > Beginning, of course, with the fear of death... of our very personal > death of the self. This is the mother lode of unexamined fears IMO :) > But for those who manage to see past these fears there is much wonder > in the moment... in the moment that life has given us to experience. The fear of death is often a fear of life in disguise. Which pills would you choose between those two pills? - the first one makes you immortal. - the second one makes your fear of death disappearing completely. Salvia is a bit like taking the two pills at once. Unfortunately, or fortunately (?), you forget the main part of the experience. Yet the fear of death can vanish, at least on some subject. Similar "cures" can come with magic mushrooms and other hallucinogens (or entheogen). There have been some convincing experiences made on dying subjects. But with salvia, the contrary can happen, as some people makes something like a bad NDE. They understand/hallucinate somehow that they are immortal, but without any assurance that the afterlife will be easy, and sometimes with the strong feeling that it will not been easy at all. They got new fears. Like comp, salvia seems to promise a hell of difficulties to some people. There are many possible difficulties, like in the Tibetan bardo-thodol, and intermediates states or realm between reincarnations, and liberations, if that exists. After salvia, some people get the feeling that "death" is in fact a form of wishful thinking. Like Otto Rossler said: consciousness is a prison, and you can't escape it. I have been curious about Salvia for a while.... and have stepped through the doors of perception on a few occasions myself, by other alkaloidal means. I know a person, who hit a tormenting, bad place with Salvia and who has become obsessed since with visions of trans-dimensional soul devouring lizard demons, for whom, he now fervently believes our souls are food.... like chicken nuggets. He has in fact -- at least in my opinion, not his of course -- gone stark raving mad... and I have not heard from him in years.. so who knows if his thread of being even remains in what is we could say our shared sub-branch in the MWI multiverse. Not trying to make sweeping statements about the effects of Salvia; this is that one man's tormented outcome. I have always had excellent outcomes from all my trips, even on the two occasions where I found myself needing to become the existential spirit guide for friends who were experiencing very bad trips... and doing so from a most altered state myself of peaking experience... Looking back, very funny, in the moment it was a matter of life and death for the person I was helping through their trip. It interests me, how complex alkaloids (and other blood brain barrier transiting psycho-effective compounds) produce such a varying range of outcomes for different people, as they interact with wet brain chemistry, inducing, by their interactions with complex environment of brain chemistry, electrical activity (and feedbacks) in the neural networks and even more subtly on the dynamic transient waves of synchronous neural activity.. that we experience as mind, being and in fact reality itself.... or at least our reified models of reality. The emergent mental model... dynamically forming up, out from the incessant crackling electric noise of a hundred billion neurons -- all being little loud mouthed micro-brains.... a meta process of transient dynamic pattern sequences (the tapestry of unfolding being). All this on vast scale and computational depth, with massive parallelism etc. on a hundred trillion plus vertex network. Going to watch the reboot of Cosmos on the TV... with my daughter and wife... within the envelope of our planets magnetosphere. Enjoying it, as it emerges... in the moments I manage to experience. Ciao, Chris Bruno > > Chris > > Bruno > > > > > >> Chris >> >> >> >> >> >>> >>> Kim >>> >>> -- >>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >>> Groups "Everything List" group. >>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, >>> send an email to [email protected]. >>> To post to this group, send email to everything- >>> [email protected]. >>> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. >>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> >> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ >> >> >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >> Groups "Everything List" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, >> send an email to [email protected]. >> To post to this group, send email to everything- >> [email protected]. >> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >> Groups "Everything List" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, >> send an email to [email protected]. >> To post to this group, send email to everything- >> [email protected]. >> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send > an email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send > an email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
