Split Thread Scorpion's Spiritualism

[abaddon]

There you go again, dragging down my thread with horrible things.

I have never said we should cause people to suffer, I have said actions have karmic consequences.

But you have also said that actions having bad consequences may have good karmic consequences. You are simply trying to wriggle out from under your own consequences of faith.

Nobody is "dragging down my thread with horrible things." The "horrible things" are mere consequences of what you believe. Nobody asked you to like it. OTOH nobody asked you to dust it under the rug either.

 

[abaddon]

That's all you know about it. Nothing.

And you conveniently avoided the rest of my post. Here it is again...

At this point, YOU are concerned with my utter dismissive attitude. Likely you will go to the inevitable "you haven't tried it" style of kidney.

Well I have been that soldier and it is utter bollocks from start to finish.

You will inevitably claim that I have not checked it out and am dismissing it out of hand. And you would be flat out wrong.

I could...

Read your aura.
Perform Auric healing.
Read your Tarot.
Construct your natal astrological chart.
Dowse your soul.
Divine your daily life by means of tarot.
Divine your daily life by means of bible.
Divine your daily life by means of any random "New Age" author.
And so forth.

Want to know why I don't do it? Because I know it is utter rot and I happen to have ethics.

Unlike you.

Care to try again?

 

[Scorpion]

And you conveniently avoided the rest of my post. Here it is again...


Care to try again?

As it happens I don't believe in most of that stuff myself. Except for the aura
which in normal healthy people keeps out psychic energy. Especially negative energy which is disturbing. Most people are not exposed to such things so they have no reason to believe in it. But I was, and I could feel the energy.

I don't just believe in psychic energy and that it can penetrate the aura, I have felt it. Psychiatrists write that off as delusions and hallucinations and drug you. But I had spiritual healing, which I could often feel, and that helped me recover. I also learned to give myself healing and channel psychic energy through the minor chakras in my palms.

None of you atheists on this forum can take my experiences away from me just because you don't believe in it. I could feel the psychic energy in old churches, and, could feel the healing energy in the spiritualist associations healing sanctuary. I went for healing for a couple of years, and in the end I just sat in the next room, and I could feel the energy coming through the walls.

 

[Scorpion]

But you have also said that actions having bad consequences may have good karmic consequences. You are simply trying to wriggle out from under your own consequences of faith.

Nobody is "dragging down my thread with horrible things." The "horrible things" are mere consequences of what you believe. Nobody asked you to like it. OTOH nobody asked you to dust it under the rug either.

I can't answer for all the terrible things that happen in the world. and I don't even want to try. I just want to tell the story of positive psychic experience, and spiritual philosophy.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

Technically but not actually correct?

Your post is misleading in two ways: Because it makes it appear that Scorpion was wrong in attributing that view to Descartes; and it doesn't make it clear that "Ghost in the Machine" is NOT Ryle's POV.

Not in so many words? I'm afraid I don't get it.

Was "ghost in the machine" a phrase literally used by Descartes and Ryle was just repeating it?

No. He was paraphrasing, to lampoon, Descartes view.

"Ghost in the machine" is Descartes' POV even though he didn't use those words. Your post gave me the exact opposite impression about which positions Ryle and Descartes held.

Scorpion was correct that Descartes held that opinion, he was not correct that that was a direct quote of Descartes.

 

[Thor 2]

I recommend that schizophrenics take the modern medication. The modern drugs target the brains chemical deficiency and have little side effects.
The drugs I was on in the early 1970's were largely knock out drops that turned you into a zombie. I read that Largactil, which was one of the drugs I was on could cause opacity of the cornea, and I decided there and then to fight my way off that drug. It took years but I succeeded in the end.

I have had reservations about telling schizophrenics to get spiritual healing as although I know it can work on the secondary damage to the etheric body, and therefore reduce some of the strange experiences that causes. I do not think spiritual healing is likely to alter the brain chemistry and therefore it will not cure the underlying cause. In any case I would hate to cause a flood of schizophrenics descending on spiritualist churches and overwhelming them with unstable people.

I feel it only fair to say that in the following years after stopping all medication I came to rely on alcohol to relax my nerves. This ended up making me a drunk , and I decided to go back on drugs for a period of time until I could stop drinking. I went on abilify a few years ago and succeeded in stopping drink. I have now been sober for five years, and I never want to be drunk again. I intended to stop the medication when I got off drink and last year I did. but I soon discovered my brain has become dependent on abilify and I suffered a lot of stress without it. So I went back on it and I am on it now. I may attempt to gradually wean myself from it one pill at a time, but I am not keen to go through the with drawl symptoms again any time soon.

You really don't fill me with confidence about you being on top of this disorder of yours from what you have written here. How you blend these notions of schizophrenics having chemical deficiency, simultaneous with defective auras and haywire chakras, is a hard one for someone like me to follow.

Being someone with a more than lay persons grasp of physics, I wince when I hear alternative medicine type folk talk of energy in the vague way they do. Now I hear you doing the same thing in spades. Doesn't impress me so much.

 

[Scorpion]

You really don't fill me with confidence about you being on top of this disorder of yours from what you have written here. How you blend these notions of schizophrenics having chemical deficiency, simultaneous with defective auras and haywire chakras, is a hard one for someone like me to follow.

Being someone with a more than lay persons grasp of physics, I wince when I hear alternative medicine type folk talk of energy in the vague way they do. Now I hear you doing the same thing in spades. Doesn't impress me so much.

Acute mental suffering resulting from mental illness causes damage to the etheric body, and the chakras. It also weakens the defensive shield of the aura and allows in all kinds of negative psychic forces. I could feel all that, and it played hell with my nerves.
Never the less after extensive healing I was able to stop all the medication.
I stayed off medication for over thirty years, and worked as an electronics engineer.

I do not know what else to call psychic forces than energy, but it is obviously not any kind of measurable physical energy. Only the nervous system is sensitive enough to feel it.

 

[Humots]

Your post is misleading in two ways: Because it makes it appear that Scorpion was wrong in attributing that view to Descartes; and it doesn't make it clear that "Ghost in the Machine" is NOT Ryle's POV.

No. He was paraphrasing, to lampoon, Descartes view.

"Ghost in the machine" is Descartes' POV even though he didn't use those words. Your post gave me the exact opposite impression about which positions Ryle and Descartes held.

Scorpion was correct that Descartes held that opinion, he was not correct that that was a direct quote of Descartes.

My post was intended to say that Scorpion was wrong in attributing the statement "ghost in the machine", not the view, to Descartes.

I don't see how my post was not making it clear that "ghost in the machine" was a term intended (by Ryle) as criticism of Descartes' view, and linked to that criticism:

"Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as "the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine." I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category mistake."

 

[Pixel42]

I do not know what else to call psychic forces than energy, but it is obviously not any kind of measurable physical energy. Only the nervous system is sensitive enough to feel it.

If Qi existed it would be detectable. The concept was debunked a long time ago, it's entirely unnecessary There is no mysterious "energy" that suddenly appears at some arbitrary point where organic molecules become complex enough to be called living things, there are no unexplained phenomena which require it. I can understand why primitive people believed there was such a thing, as I can understand why they believed there was a god living inside the volcano, but no-one who has access to the knowledge and understanding contained in an average town library has any excuse to share either primitive belief.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi#Scientific_view

 

[Scorpion]

If Qi existed it would be detectable. The concept was debunked a long time ago, it's entirely unnecessary There is no mysterious "energy" that suddenly appears at some arbitrary point where organic molecules become complex enough to be called living things, there are no unexplained phenomena which require it. I can understand why primitive people believed there was such a thing, as I can understand why they believed there was a god living inside the volcano, but no-one who has access to the knowledge and understanding contained in an average town library has any excuse to share either primitive belief.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi#Scientific_view

You are telling me I can't feel what I feel, but I still feel it.

The web site says-
"There are no properties attributable to the mysterious field she describes, thus it cannot be authoritatively said to exist"

Just because it cannot be authoritatively said to exist does not mean it does not exist. I am only one of many people who claim to have felt such 'energy'.

 

[Pixel42]

Once again: the placebo effect is not evidence of a spirit world.

I'm not denying your feelings. The placebo effect undeniably exists. I am just pointing out that there is not a scrap of objective evidence that those feelings are indicative of the existence of a spirit world - or anything else - outside your head.

 

[Darat]

Oh come on, anyone could miss read the sentence Dennett wrote about the ghost in the machine. I just assumed it was Descartes that said it.



As for joining you in the real world. What world would that be ? The world and the universe as I see it is a planned and meaningful place of experience for the immortal soul. For you I suppose it is some big chaotic accident.



I will stick to my world, which is what my experience tells me is the true one.



As for Dennett, I tweeted him saying he should have called his book 'consciousness explored', not 'explained'. Then I could have ignored it. I told him he should study the occult for his next book, then it might be approaching the truth.

The world you claim exists is one in which the baby with 32 bone fractures in its first and only week of life should be thankful for the experience of pain and terror before it died. The parents holding their 6 month old baby dying in their arms because they cannot afford medicine should be thankful that they have suffered this “planned“ experience.

Your universe is a terrifying, vicious, cruel and fearful place where the worst imaginable human suffering is to be celebrated.

We should all be thankful it only exists in your imagination, whilst of course being sorry for you believing you live in such a cruel universe.

 

[Darat]

I can't answer for all the terrible things that happen in the world. and I don't even want to try. I just want to tell the story of positive psychic experience, and spiritual philosophy.

The things you say are terrible are your spiritual philosophy.

 

[Pixel42]

The world you claim exists is one in which the baby with 32 bone fractures in its first and only week of life should be thankful for the experience of pain and terror before it died. The parents holding their 6 month old baby dying in their arms because they cannot afford medicine should be thankful that they have suffered this “planned“ experience.

Your universe is a terrifying, vicious, cruel and fearful place where the worst imaginable human suffering is to be celebrated.

We should all be thankful it only exists in your imagination, whilst of course being sorry for you believing you live in such a cruel universe.

A friend of mine once told me about her cousin, whose daughter was born brain damaged, blind and deaf. She lived until she was 22, and the only time she stopped crying was when someone held her. My friend's cousin cared for her alone from the age of five, after her husband left because he couldn't cope with it. Anyone who suggests that any of those three people got anything from this experience to be thankful for deserves a punch in the mouth IMO.

 

[Scorpion]

The things you say are terrible are your spiritual philosophy.

Have you ever considered you might be a pessimist?

 

[Pixel42]

It's difficult to be optimistic when so many people choose to wallow in so much wilful ignorance.

 

[Scorpion]

I have had my share of mental suffering, but I do not seem to have as bleak a view of life as some of you. I believe that although there are injustices and tragedies in this world, the overall plan is working and we are progressing ever onward and upward.
Injustices and unwarranted suffering are compensated for in the countless lifetimes we incarnate into in the future. Ultimately everything works out for the good.

 

[Darat]

Have you ever considered you might be a pessimist?

No idea what that has to do with the price of fish.

Have you often said to people at spiritualist churches, don't be sad your 2 year old dying was planned so you can evolve?

 

[Darat]

I have had my share of mental suffering, but I do not seem to have as bleak a view of life as some of you. I believe that although there are injustices and tragedies in this world, the overall plan is working and we are progressing ever onward and upward.

Injustices and unwarranted suffering are compensated for in the countless lifetimes we incarnate into in the future. Ultimately everything works out for the good.

We've been through this before, the overall plan that you exalt in requires all the suffering in the world. According to you the plan isn't working unless we are suffering.

Whereas I suspect for many of us herebwe see no higher plan and purpose in the child being raped by soilders. It is something that has no purpose.

 

[Scorpion]

Richard Dawkins just said on twitter.
"natural selection is indifferent to pain and suffering, but pain and suffering are inevitable consequences of natural selection: Discuss"

My answer to him
"Individual animals are predated and die, but the struggle to survive forces evolution in both predator and prey. The result is all the wonderful animal species we see in the world today. Suffering and pain is forgotten, but life goes on to greater heights."