Would these things still be impossible for us?


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Diana_P is offline Diana_P Post #1  November 1,2011, 4:07pm
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This question is for those of you who dance on the perimeter where the impossible and possible get blurred.

I was reading a book while sitting in the lobby of the car dealership waiting for an oil change and getting quite annoyed because the volume on the big-screen TV was up so loud I couldn’t concentrate. The show was some dumb Sci-Fi flick with a tired plot about aliens taking over the earth. The lead character was just an average guy whom fate had thrust into the unfortunate if not impossible task of saving the world.

Conventional methods of ridding the planet of the invading threat were ineffectual so the lead character was consulting with his older Native American friend to find a solution.

“So how can you be so certain that transmogrification is only a myth?” the Native American gentleman asked.

“Because there is no scientific basis behind it; the instantaneous transformation of living matter from one form to another just isn’t possible,” the lead character and reluctant hero explained.

“Can a man who is unkind change and become kind?” the gentleman asked.

“Yes, of course,” the hero answered.

“Can a man who is selfish change and become unselfish?” the gentleman asked.

“Sure,” the hero answered.

“How?” the gentleman asked.

“Because once a man sees how caring about others also makes his own life better he can never go back to being selfish and unkind again,” the hero explained.

“That is what motivates him, but what is it that enables him to change?” the gentleman asked.

“You have an answer, so why don’t you tell me?” the hero asked.

“A man can change because being unkind and being selfish are just ideas. They are just behaviors or ways to be. All he has to do is think differently and he will become a new man,” the gentleman explained. “Is this not true?”

“Maybe,” the hero said.

“Have you considered that the human body is just an idea to our consciousness? It too is just a set of behaviors or ways to be. If the body is just an idea then all it takes for our consciousness to experience a life in a different form is for us to learn how to think differently enough,” the gentleman explained.

As fate would have it the shop was done with my car just as the movie was starting to get interesting so I had to leave but the dialogue left me quite unsettled and was all I could think about on my drive home.

What if the human form is just an idea to our consciousness and our minds really are capable of experiencing what it is like to be something else like an eagle, a wolf, or a bear? Fascinating!

Our Western culture is very negative in that it defines our reality in terms of what we can’t do. I wonder if these things would still be impossible for us if our culture was constructed on the basis that we can do anything we can conceive.

Thoughts?
 
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harnomygirl is offline harnomygirl Post #2  November 1,2011, 4:30pm
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Yes, they would still be impossible. Not even Native Americans can turn into eagles.
 
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Diana_P is offline Diana_P Post #3  November 1,2011, 4:47pm
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harnomygirl wrote :
Yes, they would still be impossible. Not even Native Americans can turn into eagles.
It may appear impossible on the surface if you think in terms of altering the physical laws of the universe. What if our consciousness has provided us a way around that? In much the same way we used our consciousness to defy gravity without breaking any laws of physics.

I find the notion that the human body is just an idea to our consciousness devastatingly interesting. I think it is in fact the most compelling and profound piece of spirituality or metaphysics I have heard in a very long time.

When you think about it about 90% of what our bodies do is automatic: breathing, digesting, circulating blood, etc. These things require no conscious thought and are controlled by our autonomic system (brainstem). So the notion that our bodies are more of an “idea” than a living thing to our consciousness isn’t really that farfetched.

We think in terms of ourselves as being flesh, blood, and bone. What if that is just an illusion? What if, like the Native American gentleman said, our bodies are just a set of rules imposed upon our consciousness that we experience life through? One of these self imposed rules is the belief that our consciousness can not separate from the body. It certainly opens up a whole new window in the life after death argument. I find this pretty darn fascinating. Not sure this has really soaked in yet so I’ll need to let it percolate for a while.
 
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harnomygirl is offline harnomygirl Post #4  November 1,2011, 5:50pm
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Too many of these ideas sound similar to insanity. I am sure there are many people in padded cells who think they are eagles.

That is not my goal.
 
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harnomygirl is offline harnomygirl Post #5  November 1,2011, 5:57pm
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I think that belief requires that someone chew on (or smoke) a hallucinogenic in order for it to manifest.

Even the most devout shaman can't fly without drugs.
 
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hermes01 is offline hermes01 Post #6  November 2,2011, 12:00am
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This about studying the mind.....ourselves.

We simply observe.....and after a while we may begin to realise that what the Observer observes is not the ...................OBSERVER.

The thoughts........the feelings...................the impulses to actions...................are NOT the observer

Does the observer die?

Thoughts feelings etc...come and go...yet they affect our actions...they affect those around us....they affect the people WE have affected...

What is possible and impossible may ONLY be in the mind......(MAYBE)
 
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Diana_P is offline Diana_P Post #7  November 2,2011, 3:20pm
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harnomygirl wrote :
I think that belief requires that someone chew on (or smoke) a hallucinogenic in order for it to manifest.

Even the most devout shaman can't fly without drugs.
Harnomygirl,

I agree that this is something that most people probably would not want to do. Why project your consciousness in such a way that you experience what it is like to be another species when we can barely deal with the reality of the species we already occupy? Likewise, most people have no interest in surviving death outside the confines of popular religion. Most people seem to think the human equation is pretty two-dimensional: after death there is either an afterlife as described by religion or oblivion as asserted by atheists and that is all! I don’t agree with this limited view. I find the concept of the body being just an idea to our consciousness very intriguing and I’m interested in learning more about it.

Since this post is already orbiting in the twilight zone let’s go even further out there. Whether you believe in a creator, some kind of intelligent design or evolution have you ever thought about why we only have two arms, two legs, and one head? Our consciousness experiences life as it is presented to us by our physical bodies, right? What if our bodies were a lot different than they are now? We would still experience life only it would just be very different. So why is it such a leap to imagine experiencing life with wings or four legs instead of two? These two little girls are conjoined twins that share brain tissue and appear to experience each other’s consciousness. This video will tug on your heartstrings and is not for the faint of heart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWDsXa5nNbI&feature=related

Now I also agree that the instantaneous transformation of living matter from one form to another is beyond our current understanding but that doesn’t mean it is impossible. Are you a Star Trek fan? Roddenberry proposed transporting living tissue from one place to another by converting it to energy and then back into matter. Later he suggested that living beings could be created simply by rearranging energy. As it pertains to how the Native Americans accomplished transmogrification perhaps it was done on a more rudimentary level. What if there was no transformation of matter at all and the experience of becoming another species was performed merely by shifting consciousness?

Okay, here’s my last morsel on the topic for the evening. Have you considered why our consciousness appears to be “connected” to our bodies? Did you know that every molecule in our bodies is replaced every seven years? That is, you lose every single atom in your body once every seven years! If our consciousness is a consequence of the matter we are composed of shouldn’t we be a new person every seven years? No, because the “pattern” remains unchanged, right? So if we are not our molecules does that mean that our sense of self is only a pattern? I don’t think so.

In The Secret You by the BBC Horizon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Biv_8xjj8E a mathematician goes searching for the illusive “I” we call consciousness. The video is an hour long and proposes some very unsettling concepts so be advised. At the end of his search he has succeeded in convincing himself that our consciousness is just a trick of our brain, but more importantly he asserts that there is no soul or spirit. I don’t agree with his conclusion, of course, but one experiment I find particularly interesting is how he used special goggles to juxtapose his “consciousness” into another person’s body. There were no chemicals (peyote) or 25th Century matter to energy converters employed. It was actually quite a very simple task to trick the mind into thinking it was in a different body. Perhaps the only thing that attaches our consciousness to our present body is that we currently allow our body to consume all our attention. Fascinating!
 
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j0hn8andy is offline j0hn8andy Post #8  November 2,2011, 3:44pm
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Did you ever read Carlos Castaneda?

j8a
 
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Diana_P is offline Diana_P Post #9  November 2,2011, 4:15pm
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j0hn8andy wrote :
Did you ever read Carlos Castaneda?

j8a
No I have not but I just googled him and his book A Separate Reality sounds interesting.
 
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harnomygirl is offline harnomygirl Post #10  November 3,2011, 3:01am
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nvm
Last edited by harnomygirl; November 3,2011 at 3:16pm.
 
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