LIVING IN AN UNREAL WORLD EXISTING ONLY IN YOUR MIND
MISERY BASED ON FICTIONS
tba, very rough notes, but one can get the gist of them if one uses his/her higher brain
Buddha calls them "illusions". His alluding to illusions cause one to think that everything is an illusion, such as chairs or other real things. He is not saying that at all. He is referring to all the fictions we make up and then believe to be the truth, to be "reality" - that is what causes the suffering he refers to. And I totally agree, now mostly from my having corrected my being in the trap and having learned more.
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Unfortunately, but only seemingly, we are solely evolved mechanisms. We are just mechanics.
We think that emotions are significant, but we are only experiencing a mechanical event. All mechanical events happen because our entirely mechanical brain has evolved because of doing something that caused us to survive long enough to pass our genes on. We were lucky that we evolved to have a good enough body to last even longer than the required period of time (through raising our children to live long enough to have their genes continue)
We made up that some entity designed it, forgetting that the problem then is "who designed that entity."
We strictly have a machine and we are a machine. It is good at having us survive, basically. Anything that looks inconsistent to surviving or being able to survive causes a matching of pictures such that there is a pattern that causes us to move toward acting upon anything in the way (i.e. anything that "threatens" that survival or level of survival). The whole process is just mechanical.
In that mechanical process there were chemical set ups that we "interpreted" as negative (to get us to stop doing something that was not good for survival) or interpreted as positive feeling (to get us to procreate and take care of the next generation). They are just mechanical, period.
They don't really mean anything at all. Just mechanical. (We don't want to think that, as we want to think, in a weird quirk of nature, that we will survive forever, which seems to make sense since survival is what has caused us to think toward that direction.
However, we have evolved with a huge, powerful brain that allows us to conjure up meaning where there is no meaning at all. And, this is the hard part for most people to understand, we create a value (which is a meaning) of that meaning - which has us have a life full of value if we do certain things, often calling that a meaningful life.
But in truth, all we're having is an experience, which most likely is over, as we leave the movie theatre of life having enjoyed the movie. The screen goes blank. That's it.
So, was it worthwhile living? Sure, why not. We conjured up worth, therefore we had worth.
That's reality. Everything else that is not strictly mechanical and existing in a physical form or based on something physical is not real. Now, don't get me wrong, your experience is real to you as you felt the sensations and the chemicals and interpreted them (mechanically).
However, we, being so clever, have conjured up a few extra versions of what we call reality but which aren't at all reality. They are just made up in some way as to have us survive better, so they are added into our programming to have us use them. But they are not permanent and unchangeable like a rock or something that is real. They are not "reality", not a fixed thing.
We want them to be a fixed thing, so that we can rely on them and not have to hassle replacing them.
Man made up lots of stuff, like:
Sin is our nature. There is a "broken aspect of our nature."
"Sin is our nature" is a hugely false statement, held as a truth - but it is all within an invalid structure (it is consistent within that structure, so it "appears to be" valid.) (A conclusion is only valid even if logical if its premise is valid.
There is "a broken aspect of our nature." I respectfully disagree with one of my most admired individuals, David Brooks, who used those assertions in his talks at The Aspen Ideas Festival…. (See their free videos, excellent.). Man has only evolved as far as he has. He is not "broken" because he hasn't evolved further or because he can't do everything possible that we might want him to do (aka "unrealistic expectations", of which we always fall short!). Humans are limited, but that is not bad. Yes, we wish we had a "better nature" so that we'd all be wonderful and never "evil" (which is also a not valid, not reality); we are just limited.
Now, since man has evolved to not want to get kicked out of the tribe (and die in the jungle) and since all in the tribe want to survive, they made up things that would keep the other people in line so that they would be safer, etc. If you sin (strict ordinal definition "miss the mark"), that means you are not doing that which is best for the tribe, therefore you are "bad" (not behaving correctly) and you are threatening our safety - which means you are in danger of getting expelled or diminished in some way. From those who made up the system to those who conform to it, its workability is based on its protection from a threat. Over time, most of the threats have gone away and are no longer relevant, which means they are not actually threats - but we still hold them as so, and feel really upset and feel bad in order to get us to respond to the threats - which don't even exist, though we unthinkingly think they do. They are in our brain in a pattern that has not been altered and won't be unless we do it intentionally, a bit like writing new software for a computer to have it do some different things. If
Stuff made up is still just stuff made up even if we believe it is reality.
You are heartless. Of course, it is not real, as it is a metaphor, used in this case as a criticism.
But it is in a context of there is a threat here. If you are heartless, I can't trust you. You must have a heart…or you are a threat. I will get angry at you, attempt to control or cause you to do something (foolishly!).
Sin, "bad" (and its supercharged version "evil") are all made up. In the real world things just work as they work. People either know enough to do something effectively or, if they are not effective (make a mistake, fail), they simply do not know enough yet. The person (the computer that is programmed) is not "bad" or "flawed", it just has programming that doesn't work to get a particular result.
The particular result that we want is something that will have us survive better, which will cause us to have a better balance of positive versus negative chemicals, which will allow us to interpret that we are "happy", through some "logical" process.
As a child we program ourselves with information we receive and/or derive, all based on our best estimate of what will work, though our estimates are not so good since we don't know enough to make good estimates or even what to base those on. We devise a simple system with such things as if we do the right thing they will still love us and feed us and therefore I won't starve to death as I can't feed myself since I am powerless and accordingly dependent on those people loving me. Love = survival, to put it simply. That kind of works while a child.
But we hold onto it as an adult. We don't even question the ridiculous.
We still think love = survival. At least our emotional reaction is so strong that we must think there are some dire consequences (that whatever it is "means" that we are threatened significantly. We tie into it that "approval" = love. And so we seek to grab and hold for our security the approval of others, in the illusion that it will have us survive better - but the truth is that we do not need their approval, as we are no longer dependent on them for survival. There are some people, it is true, that we would benefit from their approval since they affect our paycheck or something else that directly benefits us, but we are not dependent on them because we have the ability to be reliable enough to assure our survival financially.
Anyway, those who think the reality of the world is that their survival is based on approval (or measuring up to some high standard so that there will be enough approval to rely on so that we don't die or come close to a living version of it) live hellish lives based on pure fiction, which they haven't examined enough to really see. ….
There is no "sin", good/bad and right wrong have been made up
now that you've debunked all of this into meaningless mechanic existence does that mean a bleak existence.
REDESIGN, ADD MEANINGS
Certainly not. We still have in place a mechanical system that produces certain results when we do certain things (like a software program). And we, of course, seek a "good experience" of life. But in this case, we are intentionally devising and determining and assigning the meaning to things in such a way that it raises our experience of life way above where it would have been otherwise had we passively lived what was invented by the culture and by a child..
How can we not consider what society believes? We don't have to believe it, but we can take into account what serves you in terms of having them react in a way that serves you.
