Illusions

The sun does not sink down behind the horizon.
It is the earth that is turning.
And rainbows do not exist
if no one is there to behold them.

Things are not what they seem to be.
You are not what you think you are.
We have misunderstood and misinterpreted most things in life.

I don’t write these words.
Scientists have discovered that the brain processes that trigger an action
for example, when I am pressing a key on a key board,
begin more than half a second before I consciously decide to act.

We have no free will according to modern brain science.
We have no Self that is responsible for our actions.
Nevertheless, you can see the rainbow clearly
and it goes without saying that you are accountable for your actions,
the whole of you, not just the imaginary part of you that you call your Self.

Of course we have a free will.
We can easily be deluded, yes,
and other people can stop us from doing what we want,
but the will is there and it is very real.

The Self does not exist in the same way that physical objects exist.
It cannot be weighed or measured.
Activity in certain brain centers can be measured, when we do something, 
think about something or look at something.
However, there are no particular brain cells
that gives rise to the sense of “I am here”.

The self is like a rainbow
and rainbows do exist.
The idea that the Self is an illusion, is a delusion
and the idea that the Self is something real and permanent
is also a delusion.

However, to ponder over these things is a waste of time.
The world is in total chaos and disorder,
war, pollution, exploitation, starvation, religious madness…

And you care only about your Self.
You should ask yourself if you have been fooled
or if you have fooled yourself.

You should ask yourself why you are fighting so hard to defend your delusions.
You should ask yourself why other people are fighting so hard
to defend their delusions.

Your religion is not the only religion here on this planet. 
Your political ideology is not the only one.

What if your religion or your political ideas are just mind stuff
that you have picked up from other people.

Animism

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with a diameter of 100 000 light-years.
400 billion stars, planets, boulders and gravel
rotating around a super massive black hole,
like a hurricane of rocks.

This hurricane of rocks
has in some mysterious way
given rise to us.
We are a hurricane of rocks that thinks and feel,
conscious rock that is dreaming strange dreams at night.

The four ignoble truths

1. Life consists of so much suffering, pain, misery, illness, hardship and injustice. Life can of course also contain many pleasant moments, but eventually we will all have to face suffering, old age, disease and death. Life is a struggle for survival but no one survives. It is not a matter of survival of the fittest. All life forms are a food source for other life forms, predators, parasites and saprophytes.

2. Suffering would not exist unless there was someone who suffered, a conscious being who tried to escape the suffering.

3. There are ways to escape suffering.

4. The different ways to escape suffering can support and reinforce each other, and they can be used in different stages of life. Alcohol, drugs and painkillers; career plans, hard work and life improvement programs; daydreams, stand up comedy and politics; philosophy, science and religion; physical training, meditation and art; shopping, interior decoration and gardening; soap operas, computer games and detective stories… You have to find a way that works for you.

Whatever you do, do not try to see all aspects of reality. To see the world as it is, is not helpful.

Are synchronicities illusions

Some phenomena are so rare that they cannot be studied scientifically. However, this does not mean that they do not occur.

For example, suppose you have experienced something very strange and want to tell about it. Maybe you have experienced an incredibly weird coincidence, a synchronicity. Those who have to listen to your story try to be polite, so they say, “How interesting,” Then they continue the conversation with another topic. They are clearly not interested in your story.

Other people react differently. They love synchronicities and experience them everyday. They explain to you what you have to do in order to experience paranormal phenomena more frequently. You can immediately hear that they don’t know much about synchronicities and that they have never had any such experiences. They have picked up what they know about it on the internet or in New Age books.

The internet and the New Age bookstores are teeming with information about synchronicities and paranormal phenomena. Most of this information is just nonsense. It is obviously very difficult for those who have never experienced any synchronicities to discriminate between true stories and delusions. It is therefore almost impossible to discuss these things with them.

Dean Radin and Russell Tarc have tried to prove scientifically that telepathy and remote viewing are not just fantasies. They used well-accepted scientific methods and advanced statistics to prove their case. They could show that most people have some kind of sixth sense and that some people have this sense more developed. I don’t know anything about scientific statistics and methods so I have to take their word for it. I am not able to judge if their mathematics and methods are flawed. However, those who know about mathematics and scientific methods seem to be in disagreement about their findings.

Synchronicities are even more difficult to study with scientific methods. My experience is that you cannot create them on demand. Such phenomenons cannot be reproduced in laboratories. Synchronicities are spontaneous and rare events and they are therefore impossible to study scientifically.

I know that synchronicities are real phenomena. I have experienced them myself, but I cannot prove that I am right. Of course, it’s possible that I have deceived myself, definitely. Illusions are common. But what if my synchronicity experiences are not illusions? And what if some of the many other synchronicity stories out there are also true stories? How shall we interpret these observations? How shall we sift the wheat from the chaff?

It’s a pity that there are so many nonsense discussions about these things in the so-called spiritual circles. It’s not possible to discuss synchronicity and telepathy with New Age people, not with religious people and of course not with scientifically minded people. It’s difficult to discuss these things with almost everybody.

This is the reason why sincere people who have experienced synchronicities and paranormal phenomena often avoid talking about them.

Spiritual Atheism

The vast majority here on earth believe in God, or in a number of Gods. Those who believe that there is only one God are not unanimous over who he is, or how he is. They don’t agree on how he wants us to live and where he is hiding. Most people agree, though, that he is a man.

Some believe that he cares about all people and some believe that he only cares about their own particular group. Some believe that he resides somewhere far away, indifferent to our suffering and some believe that he is here with us somehow and hear our prayers. Millions of people have died through history in horrific religious wars and conflicts about the different perceptions of him and his demands on us. And these conflicts are still ongoing.

Many people say that they believe in God but they don’t. They simply say what they believe they should say. They follow the conventions in order not to differ from their group. Nevertheless, they eagerly go to war to defend the God they pretend to believe in.

One survey found that less than 3 % of all people here on earth are atheists. However, religious people can also be atheists. Some Buddhists and Taoists for example do not believe in any Gods, and some atheists pray to a God they don’t believe in, secretly.

Those who believe in God or a bunch of Gods have also many other beliefs that can’t be found in their original religious scriptures. Some believe that greed and competition are good. They believe that nothing is more important than to make a lot of money. Some are racists; some are right-wingers. Also atheists and scientists have beliefs. Everyone has beliefs.

Where do all these different beliefs and ideas come from? Do we simply create them in our heads? Are they just fantasies?

                                                         ***

Atheism is not necessarily a belief. Maybe you don’t care about Gods, in the same way as you don’t care about gnomes or fairies. Maybe your mind is busy with something else. This way of looking at things is sometimes called weak atheism. You don’t care about trying to prove that there are no gnomes or ghosts or gods.

I don’t believe in God and I am not religious. How can a good God let children die in gruesome diseases and starvation? It doesn’t make sense. This position is called strong atheism. To me are beliefs in Gods, ghosts and spirits superstition. However, I understand that I don’t understand almost anything about how life and the universe work. Life is a mystery to me, but this doesn’t make me an agnostic.

Those who say, “Maybe there is a God, maybe there isn’t, I don’t know.” are called agnostics. Well, maybe there really are gnomes and trolls in the woods, after all. Maybe there really are ghosts in old castles. What do I know? I can’t prove that ghosts and gnomes don’t exist. Agnosticism is a meaningless concept.

Moreover, I don’t believe in reincarnation. The belief in reincarnation is also a mental construct, as I see it. Those who have this belief have no memories from past lives. They base their beliefs on hearsay, imagination and speculations. The idea that people suffer in this life to atone for crimes in past lifetimes is a weird idea. If you suffer from a severe illness, it is not because a God planned this misery for you or because you have committed crimes in former lives.

However, I have experienced some very strange synchronicities in my life. Many other people that seem reliable can also tell stories about very strange coincidences. These experiences and stories are proof to me that there is also a mystic dimension.

I don’t have a name for the way I look at things. I am an atheist, yes, and I dislike claims and speculations that there are no evidence for. At least some kind of personal experience behind a claim is important to me if I am to listen. Almost all spiritual explanations I come across on the internet, in books or in the real world seem more or less wacky to me. Nonetheless, there is a mystic dimension. I know, because I have experiences of it.

It is possible that I have fooled myself. I know perfectly well how easy it is to fool oneself. I have tons of experiences of self-deception, but still, I would lie if I said that the mystic dimension is just an illusion.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/intro.html

The Grand Design

... common sense is based upon everyday experience, not upon the universe as it is revealed through the marvels of technologies such as those that allow us to gaze deep into the atom or back to the early universe. 

In the history of science, we have discovered a sequence of better and better theories and models, from Plato to the classical theory of Newton to modern quantum theories. It is natural to ask: Will this sequence eventually reach an end point, an ultimate theory of the universe… or will we continue forever finding better theories…? We do not yet have a definitive answer to this question, but we now have a candidate for the ultimate theory of everything… called M-theory.

M-theory is not a theory in the usual sense. It is a whole family of different theories, each of which is a good description of observations only in some range of physical observations. 

The different theories in the M-theory family may look very different, but they can all be regarded as aspects the same underlying theory. They are versions of the theory that are applicable only in limited ranges. 

The quantum model of nature encompasses principles that contradict not only our everyday experience but our intuitive concept of reality. Those who find those principles weird or difficult to believe are in good company, the company of great physicists such as Einstein and Feynman… In fact, Feynman once wrote, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

Regarding the laws that govern the universe, what we can say is this: There seems to be no single model or theory that can describe every aspect of the universe. 

From "The Grand Design" by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow


Physicists can‘t accept the idea that there is also a spiritual dimension, so they leave out this aspect from their theory constructions. They ignore this piece of the puzzle. I think that this is a shortcoming. There is a spiritual dimension and this dimension has nothing to do with religion.

The best evidence I know of, that a spiritual dimension actually exist, that it is not just a fantasy, is the strange phenomenon called synchronicity.

I think I can safely say that nobody understands life.

See “On meaningful coincidences” August 3 2008 in this blogg.