Hi Greta the Great!
Greta wrote:Push visuals and words out of your head, and reality seems very different - much more present moment oriented.
Yes, because it is the divisive nature of thought which creates the illusion of time. Time is a conceptual division, right? There is no actual real world place called "the past" or "the future". We believe deeply in these concepts because they feel so real to us, but the past and future are as devoid of concrete tangible substance as any god ever proclaimed.
The present moment for many people is awful, and it's no surprise that they often retreat into the mental world of religion.
Religion is just one of the mental worlds we retreat in to. There's no fundamental difference between the person who distracts themselves from personal pain with immersion in religion, and the person who distracts themselves from personal pain with immersion in anti-religion. The apparent great divide between these two groups is mostly an illusion.
In both cases, religious and secular, we suffer from the thought generated illusion of division. And in both cases we try to heal that wound by applying more thought, that which is causing the wound.
This theory explains why such conversations have been going round and round and round for endless centuries, and they never accomplish anything. It's like trying to cure alcoholism with cases of scotch. The more thought booze we consume, the deeper our addiction becomes, the more we suffer, and thus the more we reach for the next bottle.
Ormond wrote:Hopefully your Mac will work. I find that new appliances these days are often shonky out of the box.
It's funny that you should say this, as I find myself engaged in what may become an epic battle with MacOfAllTrades, a Mac vendor who shipped me
THREE broken Macs in a row. The story is told at the following link for those of sufficient nerdiness.
https://www.mac-help.com/threads/proof- ... st-1543934
I'm guessing that the idea is to cut costs in quality control.
Ha, ha! Me thinks you are a psychic. Yup, that's exactly what's happened in the case described above, MacOfAllTrades outsources quality control to it's customers.
If a consumer has a problem with a faulty product, then it's the buyer who effectively pays for that CQ with their time and effort.
Good God woman, you are a mind reader too!
Since consumer watchdogs everywhere have been de-fanged and de-barked, companies can play this game with impunity, effectively using their customer as unpaid employees.
Seriously, did you somehow discover the thread linked to above on your own? If not, this is really spooky!
From the start humans have been compelled to live in groups, "social animals", as they say. The bigger the group, the more power, then the better chance of surviving. So we gathered in greater and greater numbers. What gives us competitive advantages today gives us the existential threat of environmental system breakdowns.
Yes, the urbanization of humanity. As best I can tell, the next stage now beginning will be the digitization of humanity, going "in to the Matrix" so to speak.
Think about it. We select particular people as friends in order to better control our inner psychological experience. So for instance, if I yell too much, you'll dump me as a friend because I'm creating too much noise inside of your head. The key here is to see that friends are not really the issue, they are just a means to the end of managing our internal experience. And so the question arises...
How much longer are any of us going to be interested in real humans whom we have to compromise and negotiate with etc when...
Digital life forms can be anything we want them to be.
Once this forum is updated to the next software version, I'm going to click the button that turns all of you in to gorgeous 25 year redheads who think I'm the most handsome brilliant genius you have ever laid eyes on. The rest of the story is X rated, so go mind your own business...
If the things we want to hear could take us where we want to go, we'd already be there.