- Who are we?
- Why are we here?
- What is the purpose of life?
- What is good and evil?
- Why is there something rather than nothing?
- Is our universe real?
- Do we have free will?
- Does God exist?
- Is there life after death?
- Can you really experience anything objectively?
- What is the best moral system?
Yes. Philosophy, when taken down to its Greek roots, means “love of wisdom.” Love and appreciation are closely tied to each other. But philosophy is more than just love of wise thoughts and wisdom. It is the analysis of answers to the basic questions of life:
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Socrates wasn’t a hedonist, but his student Aristippus of Cyrene, was what is known as an “ethical hedonist.” He stated that pleasure is the highest good.
Aristippus explained that hedonistic ethical egoism is the concept that everyone has the right to do everything they can to attain the greatest amount of pleasure possible to them. He also said that everyone's pleasure should far surpass their amount of pain. He came to these conclusions after sitting at Socrates’ feet and hearing his musings and stimulating questions. Socrates never made an explicit stand against hedonism itself. He stated that knowledge is virtue (which is what brings happiness and fulfillment). He was more interested in concepts such as, “Know Thyself” and “The unexamined life is not worth living.” This could be seen as the very opposite of unthinking hedonism, in which people satisfy their every whim and desire without anything else in mind besides having fun. Frolicking around in an endless party doesn’t always end well, though. Ultimately, the fun will go away, and then what will we be left with if we don’t know who we truly are in the depths of our heart, inner-mind, and Soul? Gorging on food and drink, sex and riotous living is actually the opposite of what Socrates was pointing to if we want inner peace and contentment. In a sense, we can determine that Socrates thought hedonism was self-defeating. If we are totally self-interested and seek nothing but pleasure, we are bound to fail because the appetite for pleasure is insatiable. It’s called the “paradox of hedonism.” So, although Socrates doesn’t think hedonism is bad, he just saw it as self-defeating and would never bring true happiness. The ego mind is never satisfied with what is. It always wants more, more, and more. It is like an empty hole that can never be filled. It is a hard-wired characteristic to never be satisfied with what it has and to seek something else.
On one level, this is a beneficial quality because it has spurred inventions and innovations. We aren’t satisfied with the dirt road and its muddy ruts when it rains. So we build a smooth paved road. Now we can travel longer and father, go more places, transport more goods, and build more traffic jams. This is the way we are driven by our sense that what we have is not enough. Otherwise we would all sit in perfect bliss and allow ourselves to starve to death if food wasn’t immediately available. I mean it all ends in death anyway, so why struggle and strive? But on another level this drive for more is the cause of endless restlessness, feverish activity, crowds, noise, pollution, personal and corporate greed, and despoiling the planet. Like so many things in life, in moderation the desire for more and more is beneficial. It brings with it new ideas and more creative ways of accomplishing goals. But when out of balance, the endless desire for more brings dissatisfaction and frustration. The brain can hold only one thought at a time. If we want to be happy, it makes sense then that we must focus on the happy thoughts. It is ridiculous to expect that we can go around complaining and being miserable and that will lead to a happy life. Yet the ego-mind, with its negative bias, goes around doing just that. As if railing against life’s upsets will change anything.
When we feel thankful, our thoughts are enveloped in joy. Endorphins and other feel-good hormones rule. It’s actually good for our health to be in a state of gratitude. But, again, the mind is negatively biased. It naturally moves towards “what’s wrong with this picture?” and revisits past hurts. So we have to train it or it will follow the path of least resistance—its natural tendency to fear and find fault. Soft, flabby muscles are the result of sitting around doing nothing. Training the muscles through beneficial activity can whip them into shape and produce strength and beauty. The brain follows the same principles. If you just let it pursue its negative bias, you will never be happy. Ever. But if you look around you and find even one thing you can be grateful for, you have just changed your inner climate and can be happy, no matter what the outer circumstances. What is our ‘lizard brain’ in action, and can you give a good example of when this kicks in for us?11/24/2019 The Lizard Brain is really the limbic system in the human brain. Lizards only have limbic systems and not much else, in terms of brain functions. The limbic system controls the six “Fs”:
Sometimes its necessary to fight to preserve our lives and sometimes it’s important to just get away from abuse. But if we spend our lives running away or getting into altercations, we are out of balance. It is also so important to eat. But if we are out of balance with that, the result is poor health, obesity, eating disorders, and lack of energy. Fear is probably the most destructive element of the lizard brain. If even slightly out of balance it can lead to neuroses, obsessive disorders, personality disorders, and other disruptive mental behaviors. The lizard brain’s propensity to freeze up has certain protective features, on a primitive level, but can be deadly when we need to make a presentation in front of a group or need to explain ourselves clearly in emotional situations. It is related to fear. Fear comes first, then freezing up. Both don’t serve a worthwhile purpose in humans. Fornication (or indiscriminate sexual activity) can be a legitimate survival strategy for reptiles. In the human species the results are not as wholesome when unwanted and uncared for children are the aftermath, sexually transmitted diseases, and lifestyle degradations. The lizard brain doesn’t care about the consequences of our actions. It is based on impulse alone. It is not based on planning, goal setting, concern for the common good, or any other moral concept. It wants what it wants now. It wants to survive at any cost. If it means fornicating wildly to ensure survival, it will compel us to do it. If it wants to feed and others are in the way, it will make sure it gets its share of the kill and push others aside. If it wants us to be at war and fight, run away and escape, or freeze in fear, it will drive us to do all of these things. Happily, humans are equipped with much more than the limbic system and its red zones. And the more we know about this subject the better our ability to avoid its unfortunate pitfalls. Every child has a pure soul. Moreover, every adult has a pure soul as well. The soul is that part of us that is eternal. It has nothing to do with value judgements of good or evil and it cannot perform any actions. It just is. Insofar as we can contact this part of us, we find peace. If we are distracted by our thoughts and other outer attention-grabbing devices, we are not at true peace. But this has nothing to do with the soul.
The soul is purity and perfection itself, for it is in union with the harmony of the Universe. Again, it has nothing to do with cultural ideas of right or wrong, good or bad, but its milieu is eternal peace. What the mind compels us to do once we have entered a body cannot affect the soul, which always remains perfect and spotless. But once we enter this body and become conditioned by all kinds of forces, including the mind’s hard-wired ego drives, we may think we are killing our souls. No. We are obscuring our souls. Our souls can never be killed. It is always there and we are covering it over with a lot of tape. Some people use masking tape, some duct tape, some super 88 electrical tape. But it is all a substance that obscures the soul. Sometimes we see people with black auras. That still does not relate to the purity of their souls. It relates to the karma they have accrued through harmful and deadly actions based on deliberate cruelty. Their souls remain pure and when they find their way to their souls one day, their harmful actions will cease. Eckhart Tolle’s teachings showed me, through historical examples, how insane the ego mind is. He points out the 100 million people killed by ego-minds behind a regime such as Communism alone. But not just killed. Beaten, imprisoned and tortured, brutalized beyond what any other animal on earth would do to another. And that’s just one ideology that has caused huge suffering on this planet. He points out others.
He analyzes the dysfunction of the individual ego-mind and how when it encounters other ego-minds becomes poisonous, violent, and rabid in a collective way. Then he shows how automatic this ego mind is. It starts as soon as we wake up. It runs in its channels—endlessly repetitive. It is automatic and repetitive. Like other organs—it does its own thing, but this time it is to our detriment. This made me see how, if we don’t control this thing, this ego-mind, it will control us. The pancreas is automatic and repetitive but it will not do us harm unless it is sick. The ego-mind is sick from start to finish. Other functions of the mind work well for us, allow us to perform tasks and take care of business and create. But the ego part is like a spreading cancer and its only destiny is to destroy. This is what Eckart Tolle brought out so very clearly to me. Like the hidden part of an iceberg, the collective unconscious is something that all of us have but we don’t really know about. It rules our lives and shapes our decisions but this part of our psyche is not by choice. It is something we inherit. It depends on our ancestors, who they were and what their predispositions were. It is genetic. It has nothing to do with our current experiences and what we have learned from them
Jung proposed that the collective unconscious is common to all human beings and is responsible for a number of deep-seated beliefs and instincts involving spirituality, sexual behavior, and personality traits. Sometimes it is called the “objective psyche” because it is not in our control. Whereas Freud believed that the unconscious was the product of personal experiences, Jung believed that the unconscious was the product of collective experiences inherited in the genes. It is composed of a collection of knowledge and mental pictures that every person is born with and is shared by all human beings because of ancestral experience. As individuals, we really don’t know what thoughts and pictures are in our collective unconscious, but once in a while someone breaks through due to trauma, paying attention to our dreams, or psychoactive drugs. Jung felt that the reason all the world religions share common characteristics is the deep-seated collective unconscious. He also thought that morals, ethics, and concepts of fairness or right and wrong could be explained, not as the product of reasoning, but at least the collective unconscious is partially responsible. He also explained phobias, such as the fear of snakes and spiders in children who never had trauma from these creatures. It is genetic memory that is responsible for their fears. Even seeing a picture of a snake or spider can cause fear, though the child has never seen a spider or snake in real life. Other fears that Jung imputed to the collective unconscious are social anxieties, fear of the dark, fear of loud sounds, phobias about bridges, or horror of blood may all stem from in this collective unconscious. Thoughts count, but if we don’t back them up with action, they fizzle into nothing. So we must have thoughts and then action, otherwise they are just general, unreal, illusory bubble rising in our brains.
We can have a thought that we really need to get fit and work out with more energy. That’s a thought. Many people have that thought. But when it comes to actually doing something about it, they get other thoughts: “My knee hurts, it’s raining, it’s boring, I’ll run into ____ and they annoy me, I’m too old for this, I’m not cut out for this. . . .“ And so we stay home and play on the computer or binge watch something that will get our mind off of the thought of getting fit. So I don’t put too much credence in thoughts. I need to see what a person does. However, on a deeper level, all action originates in thought. First we see the dirt path. We imagine how good it would look paved. Then we set the whole road-building activity in motion. In this sense the thought does count, but only as an initiator for action. It all began with a thought but it would have died if no one carried it out. The road would remain rocky and unpaved. We can also have destructive thoughts and act on them, so acting on our thoughts alone is not always a good thing. People whose fears cause them to hate others because they belong to a certain group think its a good idea to act out their thoughts. They are the ones who righteously kill and enslave others base on a thought that they were superior or that others need to be stamped out. It does seem that society is pushing us to fit into a mould but actually we are the ones who unconsciously try to conform to its dimensions.
Societies in which we grew up had certain rules that evolved for the smooth functioning of groups of people living together. Human sacrifice during the time of the Aztecs and Mayans was thought to be a good way to conduct their societies’ rituals. At the time, everyone thought it was a great idea. It was the best thing a person could do to repay the gods, whom the believed had also sacrificed their lives to keep the Universe running. Of course, we see this as completely absurd now, as did the Spanish conquerers of the Aztecs. The Spanish had their own absurd practices, which they imposed on the the Aztecs, but they were the ones who prevailed on the Aztecs to stop killing people to appease the gods. As children, we are taught rules and beliefs of the society we were born into. If we want to be loved and accepted, we conform to them. Then, when we grow up, we mindlessly pursue those values, unless we are part of the few who question them. But usually, people just go along with them. They will be accepted and even rewarded, while those who buck the system will be considered outsiders. Being alone and friendless in the world is a very unhappy state. So we fit into whatever mould our society presents. If it is a materialistic society, we will be a success if we amass lots of money and possessions. If it is a society that values sharing the wealth, we will be unselfish and giving. If it is a society that values spirituality, as in Tibet, the highest attainment is uniting with Divine Consciousness. Society is just made up of lots of people who go along with the program. The problem is when a society aggressively imposes its belief system on others. It punishes people, imprisons them, or kills them. So that is why so many just fit into it. It is easier not to question the values and just try to get by on a daily basis. |
AuthorAs a spiritual guide, healer, and lecturer, I have had the privilege to touch the lives of people who long to understand their higher selves. Please leave questions and comments for me. Hope to see you often here! Categories
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