What Are We Familiar With? I Mean Really, Do We Know Anything? Do We Really Know Anything?!

well, i have been thinking and remembering and also watching nature documentaries and it seems clear to me that the very fabric of this place is woven with deep darkness. paradoxes and illusions, trickery and blood lust, all covered by the thin veil of 'survival'. the beauty and seeming necessity of it all may well be part of the illusion itself. humans involve themselves in it, ignore it (the darkness), explain it away the best they can; or, they learn to accept it. there is however, also something inside our hearts that is not from this place, it is in the 'hearts' of all living things. this thing in our hearts when we witness the suffering in this world or are subjected to it; this thing in our hearts that i believe we truly are - it calls out, it cries in pain and it does not understand the pain, sorrow and suffering in this world. there is something past this world however, this universe, this home away from home, and it will save us. the thing in our hearts is a small piece of it.

Yep, I remember my first beer.

It's sort of funny to provoke a discussion on how we know nothing and then propose your own personal beliefs as if they are concrete truths.

  On 8/12/2014 at 3:17 AM, DerWaschbar said:

It's sort of funny to provoke a discussion on how we know nothing and then propose your own personal beliefs as if they are concrete truths.

you've been TROONED

  Quote

you don’t know how it felt to be in the womb but it must have been at least a little warmer than this.

you don’t know how intimately they’re recording your every move on closed-circuit cameras until you see your face reflected back at you through through the pulp.

you don’t know how to stop picking at your fingers.

you don’t know how little you’ve been paying attention until you look down at your legs again.

you don’t know how many times you can say you’re coming until they just stop believing you.

you don’t know how orgasmic the act of taking in a lungful of oxygen is until they hold your head under the water.

you don’t know how many vietnamese soft rolls to order.

you don’t know how convinced your parents were that having children would be, absolutely, without question, the correct thing to do.

you don’t know how precious your iphone battery time was until you’re hiding in the bottom of the boat.

you don’t know how to get away from your fucking parents.

you don’t know how it’s possible to feel total compassion in one moment and total disconnection in the next moment.

you don’t know how things could change so incredibly fast.

you don’t know how to make something, but the instructions are on the internet.

you don’t know how to make sense of this massive parade.

you don’t know how to believe anyone anymore.

you don’t know how to tell the girl in the chair next to you that you’ve been peeking at her dissertation draft and there’s a grammatical typo in the actual file name.

you don’t know how to explain yourself.

you don’t want two percent but it’s all they have.

you don’t know how claustrophobic your house is until you can’t leave it.

you don’t know why you let that guy go without shooting him dead and stuffing him in some bushes between cambridge and watertown.

you don’t know where your friends went.

you don’t know how to dance but you give it a shot anyway.

you don’t know how your life managed to move twenty six miles forward and twenty eight miles back.

you don’t know how to pay your debts.

you don’t know how to separate from this partnership to escape and finally breathe.

you don’t know how come people run their goddamn knees into the ground anyway.

you don’t know how to measure the value of the twenty dollar bill clutched in your hurting hand.

you don’t know how you walked into this trap so obliviously.

you don’t know how to adjust the rearview mirror.

you don’t know how to mourn your dead brother.

you don’t know how to drive this car.

you don’t know the way to new york.

you don’t know the way to new york.

you don’t know the way to new york.

you don’t know the way to new york.

You've misspelt "New York". The correct spelling is: "A knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork."

Also, this thread makes me proud to be a cosmic soldier; but also relieved, as your lives will be spared and filled with raving, during the coming cosmic cleansing. (And this is 95+% non-killing I'm referring to, but when the ones perpetuating greed and hate are filled with Love, they will willingly destroy their own lifestyles and have to re-invent themselves.)

  On 8/12/2014 at 3:17 AM, DerWaschbar said:

It's sort of funny to provoke a discussion on how we know nothing and then propose your own personal beliefs as if they are concrete truths.

try it. admit that you know nothing. then look round at the world and the universe and everything and observe with the love in your heart what is going on, i mean really scrutinize it with the love in your heart and look in the details. then slowly try and put your findings into words as i have.

  On 8/12/2014 at 4:03 AM, Redruth said:

 

  On 8/12/2014 at 3:17 AM, DerWaschbar said:

It's sort of funny to provoke a discussion on how we know nothing and then propose your own personal beliefs as if they are concrete truths.

try it. admit that you know nothing. then look round at the world and the universe and everything and observe with the love in your heart what is going on, i mean really scrutinize it with the love in your heart and look in the details. then slowly try and put your findings into words as i have.

 

Not that which the eye can see, but that whereby the eye can see: know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore;
Not that which the ear can hear, but that whereby the ear can hear: know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore;
Not that which speech can illuminate, but that by which speech can be illuminated: know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore;
Not that which the mind can think, but that whereby the mind can think: know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore.

  On 8/12/2014 at 4:03 AM, Redruth said:

 

  On 8/12/2014 at 3:17 AM, DerWaschbar said:

It's sort of funny to provoke a discussion on how we know nothing and then propose your own personal beliefs as if they are concrete truths.

 

try it. admit that you know nothing. then look round at the world and the universe and everything and observe with the love in your heart what is going on, i mean really scrutinize it with the love in your heart and look in the details. then slowly try and put your findings into words as i have.

 

Dude I wanna be nice, but you're really talking a lot of trash.

I don't think scientists would have made much progress if they would have just sat in the corner and cried about how little they know. I think for an unsignificant little species like us, we have made tremendous progress. A lot of the mysteries of the universe have been unveiled, even if those led to even more unexplainable things, we can at least explain a big chunk of our surroundings, at least from a macro viewpoint. Now we still don't know if any of this is real, but at least we know that billions of us share the same reality and we can try to make the best of it. No matter how insignifcant we are, it's irrelevant, as long as we are able to achieve some sort of happiness. I don't see your fucking problem, you should be thankful for existing at all, the odds of which are unbelievably tiny, but not only do you exist, or think you do, but you also belong to the most intelligent species on the planet, you're able to ask questions about the world and have them answered, you can expand your mind, you can listen to music, you can talk to people about your emotions, isn't that a fucking gift?

I'm not saying that the world is easy to comprehend to me, that isn't true.

I'm baffeled by all its mysteries just like you, but I also think there's a lot that we do know, at least within this reality, may it be artificial or not.

Concentrating on the things you don't know is pointless. It's like trying to explore the ocean by jumping out of your boat.

  On 8/12/2014 at 12:20 AM, Redruth said:

well, i have been thinking and remembering and also watching nature documentaries and it seems clear to me that the very fabric of this place is woven with deep darkness. paradoxes and illusions, trickery and blood lust, all covered by the thin veil of 'survival'. the beauty and seeming necessity of it all may well be part of the illusion itself. humans involve themselves in it, ignore it (the darkness), explain it away the best they can; or, they learn to accept it. there is however, also something inside our hearts that is not from this place, it is in the 'hearts' of all living things. this thing in our hearts when we witness the suffering in this world or are subjected to it; this thing in our hearts that i believe we truly are - it calls out, it cries in pain and it does not understand the pain, sorrow and suffering in this world. there is something past this world however, this universe, this home away from home, and it will save us. the thing in our hearts is a small piece of it.

This is really nicely worded. Actually pretty close to my own inner musings

if you are still and quiet for awhile, nature will come out of hiding. if my computers mouse could read my skins conductance and my monitor could work like a two way mirror then whoever has that data could figure out what i'm really made of. the fear that technology could/did become a hyper-rorschach test gives me some drive to understand myself better. if someone else is someday gonna have the power to know the real me, i should get there first.

  On 8/12/2014 at 4:03 AM, Redruth said:

 

  On 8/12/2014 at 3:17 AM, DerWaschbar said:

It's sort of funny to provoke a discussion on how we know nothing and then propose your own personal beliefs as if they are concrete truths.

 

try it. admit that you know nothing. then look round at the world and the universe and everything and observe with the love in your heart what is going on, i mean really scrutinize it with the love in your heart and look in the details. then slowly try and put your findings into words as i have.

 

i'm just observing that you are being dishonest in how you present this discussion. a more apt title would be:

'You Aren't Familiar With Anything! I Mean Really, You Do Not Know Anything. You Do Not Know Anything! But I Do And Now I'm Going To Tell You What You Should Believe.'

Is this one of those things where it makes sense if you're high

I think Sebastian, therefore I am.

  On 8/13/2014 at 1:54 PM, MadameChaos said:

I think Sebastian, therefore I am.

We're all Sebastian, deep in our hearts, in our minds, in our souls

Damn that sexy rock

this is fascinating and relevant:

"Hippocrates is the earliest recorded physician and medical philosopher, and we credit him with founding Western medicine. He practiced and philosophized over two thousand years ago. He was a holistic healer, which means he treated patients as a whole and not as a collection of parts, where each part could be treated as though it were separate from the others. Holism suggests the body cannot be separated from the mind and spirit. In general, the ancient healers, including aboriginal Americans, Africans, and others, were holistic. Science took a turn away from holism during the seventeenth century, when René Descartes, often regarded as the father of modern philosophy, published a treatise endorsing dualism. It is perhaps no coincidence that this new attitude toward medicine was directly in line with church doctrine of the time — the church had severe ways of influencing scientific philosophers. In any case, Descartes’s ideas pushed science down the path of a mind-body split. This left the mind and spirit in the unchallenged domain of the church while allowing medical science to investigate the de-spirited body. This focus on the physical body led to countless useful discoveries. During the time after Descartes, we learned a lot about anatomy, physiology, the heart, and circulation. These were important discoveries that gave us the foundation for our understanding of the human body. But the human is more than the sum of the body’s physical parts, just as music is more than the sum of the instruments used to play it. Since Descartes, allopathic medicine has focused almost exclusively on the physical body, and the interconnection between the mind and body has been only rarely discussed. Looking at the body as a machine has limited our ability to understand some of the complex workings of our system. Dualism has kept us from seeing that all conditions affect both mind and body. Over the past forty years, scientific discoveries have pushed medicine back toward holism. New research studies have shown us that the mind and the body use the same system of communication. Holism has been reborn as mind-body medicine. To better understand the body-mind, let’s review some of the scientific evidence for a body-wide communication system. The gut has 100 million neurons, or nerve cells — enough for a small brain. It produces 80 percent of our melatonin, which we used to think came only from the pineal gland in the brain, and it produces 80 percent of our serotonin, which is supposed to be the brain chemical that improves our mood. Why does our gut make chemicals associated with brain function? We don’t yet really know, but maybe it explains why we have “gut feelings.” The human heart is best known as the pump that circulates blood to every part of the body. It also has between forty thousand and ninety thousand nerve cells, puts out an electromagnetic field that spreads eight feet around us in all directions, and makes and releases both norepinephrine, which is a stress hormone and neurotransmitter, and dopamine, another brain chemical. This is fascinating because every language and culture has expressions involving emotions and instincts associated with the heart. It seems the heart is way more than just a sophisticated pump, but we have unanswered questions about the heart’s other functions. What can we perceive from the electromagnetic field of others? Is this what we refer to when we say someone has a real presence — an energy we like or don’t like? The neurotransmitters in the heart are the same ones known to create emotional responses in our brain. Are they responsible for the age-old words heartfelt, downhearted, and heartbreak, or the age-old saying “Follow your heart”? The immune system defends the body from foreign invaders, such as infections. Lymphocytes are types of immune cells called white blood cells. They can produce natural painkillers and the stress hormone ACTH. This hormone usually comes from the endocrine system, which is a system of several hormone-producing glands, including the thyroid and adrenal glands. Monocytes are another type of white blood cell, and they have receptors for every known neurotransmitter, the chemical messengers once thought to be mainly brain communication molecules. It turns out that when we are under stress, monocytes can even produce those same neurotransmitters! So it seems our immune cells are talking to the glands in our endocrine system using brain language. Most of the immune system is also closely connected with the gut. In fact, 70–80 percent of the immune system lies beside the small intestine. The gut also makes chemicals that talk to the brain and are associated with our thoughts, feelings, and moods. Of course, all the parts of our nervous system are connected to one another too. These connections allow our mind, our brain, and our body to each influence the function of the others. It turns out that there is a body-wide communication system that uses the same system of messengers, and all of our parts communicate with and influence all the other parts. It is not that we “think” ourselves into pain or out of it, or that we make up our problems. What we think can change how we experience the problems we have and how the body reacts. The reaction goes from mind to brain to body and back again. There is just one interconnected and complicated system that uses the same methods of communication throughout our mind, brain, and body. This information is useful in treating all forms of illness but is especially important in pain medicine. To live with less pain, we must learn how our body interacts with the rest of the bodymind and learn ways to help this complicated system help itself."

- heather tick, m.d.

Heather knew what made us tick

Live from Troon HQ

lol

lol, what is this?

Does anybody really know?