Subjectivity

Is the brain capable of understanding itself?

So I say, we are conscious beings, and I can't imagine a universe without consciousness. Is this because I am a conscious being? Maybe being a conscious being isn't all that great, it just seems great because I am a conscious being.

We have to look with a subjective eye. If we look at planets and say, that isn't ugly, or that isn't pretty, because it is all objective, what do we have? Is that how the universe is?

Subjectivity comes from human or animal experience, through pleasure and pain. So we say, something is good, because it brings us pleasure. But things that bring us pleasure, they just bring us pleasure because of our biological evolutionary development. We like the sun, because it allows us to see, and it is warm, and warm is nice, because when we are warm are body doesn't have to work as hard to keep the right temperature.

But we all evolve differently and grow up differently, so what we like all depends on the wonderful chemical dopamine.

If we didn't have consciousness, we wouldn't understand what fun or pain is. What does it mean to experience something, but not hate the experience? Or to like the experience? It comes down to free will. Given the choice between two experiences, we choose the fun experience. Understanding this comes down to choices.

Except that if you are not conscious, you cannot understand much of anything.

Is the universe objective?

What is the point of the universe?

The universe is about teaching. Through evolution, pleasure and pain evolved, and your connection to fellow souls is weakened. So, the point is to bring about unity, while still being separate. To go for the well-being of the many over the well-being of just you.

The Invisible Hard Drive

So I got distracted today in kickboxing because I started thinking about the universe, and the existence, or absence, of God.

I get annoyed with atheists. Some of them have this attitude like, if you would just use your brain, you would see that there is no God.

It depends how you define God. I say, the essence of the universe is spiritual, not physical. The universe is not physical space. You have to free your mind and realize that physical space does not exist. Sort of like in a computer game. You are a character, moving across some terrain, but that terrain doesn't really exist. It is just data in a computer. What is the purpose of this data? To create an experience for the user.

I remember my math teacher in high school saying once: What is beyond the boundaries of the universe? That should blow your mind. Well it used to. It does if you are thinking like a human. But it really doesn't blow my mind. It is just a subscript out of bounds error. It is an error of your brain to think that space goes on and on.

But, if you realize that space doesn't exist, that it is just data on a computer, like in a computer game, it doesn't blow your mind anymore. At least, it doesn't mine.

So the universe is just data, like on a hard drive, but that hard drive takes up space. Or does it? No, it doesn't. I'm telling you, that hard drive doesn't take up space.

Do your thoughts take up space? Does experience take up space? Does consciousness take up space?

It exists in the non-physical, mental/spiritual realm. The realm of mind. There is mind, body, spirit. Spirit is experience. Mind is a map, a map of concepts, which explains how experiences relate to each other.

For example, there is the experience of sadness. What does sadness in itself feel like? Does it have thoughts associated with it? Well it does, but you can separate the thoughts from the experience. So the mind, the map, would explain what kind of situations would lead to you experiencing this emotion, sadness.

There are way more emotions than there are words to explain them.

But anyway, back to the question of God. I believe in God because I think the essence of the universe is spiritual, and not physical. I believe that a physical world, with the absence of awareness, and consciousness, is the equivalent of nothing. What is something, if there is nothing to experience it? Like the question of the tree falling in the forest.

One thing I wonder about atheists is, do they really think? I mean really, do atheists think? Do they think about things like consciousness. Because you think about it, and it is like the most amazing thing ever, yet so simple. What is it? I don't know. But I can't imagine a universe without it.

Whatever it is, it is the greatest thing in the universe.

In our dense, physical state, we need brains to experience.

Does consciousness ever stop? No, consciousness never stops. You are always experiencing consciousness.

You take a drug and black out, or pass out, and wake up later. Did consciousness stop? No, because time for you is different.

Consciousness didn't stop. You jumped forward in time, and your brain inserted a feeling of passage of time. But that's all that is, a feeling.

Schrodinger's Cat and the Law of Attraction

So I figured out the universe. One of the things about the universe is that reality isn't fixed, and reality is not the same for everyone. Truth is not the same for everyone.

So in my world, you need to accept Jesus as your savior to avoid hell. And in my world, this is a fundamental fact of the universe that everyone needs to do this. At the same time, if your reality is different then mine, and you don't do this, you won't go to hell. Because that's not true for you.

Except, that in my world, everyone needs to do this. But this is just my world. Not your world.

In my world, my copy of you will be in hell after you die if you don't. But that's just my copy of you and that's not really you.

We all exist in our own realities, and our realities interact with each other. So if you know me, my reality touches your reality. But the laws your reality are defined by aren't the same as the laws my reality are defined by.

So, the reason the law of attraction works. I only experience my own consciousness and life, not yours. When I don't know what's going on in other peoples' lives, that opens up infinite possibilities of what it could be. It's like Schrodinger's cat, when you don't know, you haven't manifested a reality yet so the possibilities are open. So in my world, and infinite amount of things could be happening in your life. So when you decide one day, to tell me about something in your life, or something in your life somehow collides with my life, a reality is manifested. So before the reality is manifested, you could be doing any number of things in your life, and in my reality, all those possibilites are true simultaneously. But then, the day I find your needles for shooting up, the reality is then manifested that all this time you were shooting up on heroine. So that becomes true in my reality.

So if you focus on a particular outcome, that will make that particular outcome more likely to manifest.

Aligning Your Intentions With the Universe

Today I've been thinking about the events in my life and the lessons that accompanied them, and how they make up the curriculum of my current lifetime.

A week or so ago I had a status on facebook that was something like: "When you are in the right, and your intentions are pure, the universe will generally work in your favor. Maybe not right away, but in the end, you will end up on top." That's pretty much what it said.

And I've found this to be pretty much true. The times in my life where I have found it not to be true, I firmly believe things have yet to fully play themselves out. Actually, right now, I believe full well that the universe owes me, and I will be receiving my "payment" in due time. I don't mean that the world owes me in a monetary way. And in some ways, maybe I owe the universe. At any rate, things are set to change.

But back to the facebook status I mentioned. Now I'm not a mean person, but I have the tendency to joke around in kind of a rude way and I can be mean-spirited without really meaning to. I've noticed that in these situations, things don't go in my favor.

Also, there is an exception to this rule. When you are fully equipped to stick up for yourself and help yourself but you don't, then things won't go in your favor necessarily because it is up to you to get yourself out of that situation. Also, things might not go in your favor if going through a tough time is part of a learning experience for you.

So, you have a life curriculum. As part of their curriculum, some people need to learn to stick up for themselves and respect themselves. This was a part of mine. I believe I have made good progress with this in particular.

If you want things to go in your favor, you need to align your intentions with the will of the universe. Well how the heck do you do that? You need to use your own moral compass to look at life situations objectively and see which side would be favored by the universe. This is difficult and no human is probably fully capable of doing this. But you have to deeply consider the situation and both side's intentions and actions. And just because someone had good intentions, doesn't mean they are in the right necessarily, because they may have thought what they were doing was right, but they didn't fully grasp the situation. The universe shall judge accordingly.

The universe does not seek to punish. Just to teach. Through discipline, people learn.

These are the kind of things I think about as I ride around on the city bus system.

The Origins of the Universe

A couple days ago I was at the library with the people from one of the Innercept campuses. I ran out of time on my computer, and it wasn't time to go yet so I wandered over to the new books to take a look, not planning on checking any out, I just wanted to look. I ended up checking one out. It's called "Something Out of Nothing," or something like that. It's pretty much how atheists figure the universe was created, I guess. I checked out, being a theist, thinking there was nothing they could say to convince me that the universe is meaningless and just randomly came about. But hey, I'd give this guy a shot to convince me and I'd listen to his arguments. It has an afterward by Richard Dawkins, the guy who wrote "The God Delusion."

I started reading the book, but this guy kept texting me and it was distracting. In the preface, the author did address the problem that I had in my mind with his theory, he didn't present alternative viewpoint or explain why what I was thinking wasn't true though, so he didn't convince me otherwise, but I haven't read the book yet. See, the problem I was having is if you have a universe, or some sort of THING, that has a tendency to spontaneously create something out of nothing, then that's not really nothing now is it?

See, the idea of nothing is actually hard to comprehend. This is one of those things I would think about from time to time when I was younger because everytime I would think about it it would blow my mind a little bit and it felt cool to have my mind blown. If nothing at all existed, there wouldn't just be no matter or atoms or particles, there would be no empty space, there would be no consciousness, anything that you can think of that you could tie a word to would not be. Nothing ever was, nothing would ever be. Now, as a kid I was an atheist, so I didn't use God as the answer to the question of why there was something (I sort of do now though). But for reasons I could not comprehend, there was something instead of nothing.

Now, I was talking to my dad about stuff related to these matters, and about souls and shit. So my dad is an atheist, but I'm not sure he actually believes that spirituality in any of its forms is all bullshit. What I mean is, I think he believes there is a spiritual aspect to humanity, which some atheists don't believe in. But the difference between the way the both of us think comes down to the fact that I believe the spiritual element that exists in humanity was present before the universe was created, and I think what he believes is that it was just a byproduct of life forms coming about.

The spiritual element of humanity is what I call "God." Some people I've found don't like that word, but they believe in what I'm talking about. Anyway, so my dad seemed to think that what I believed was weird. He asked me why I believed that, and I said, "I don't know that's just what I believe." He told me I should examine that belief. So I'm examining it right now.

So what I believe is that spirituality isn't a byproduct of science, but science is a byproduct of spirituality. Spirituality not meaning religion but just plain spirit and awareness. So as I'm sitting here I'm thinking, the physical world isn't really real, the only thing that's real is spirit. And it all comes down to my worldview, but it's more than just a worldview, is a universeview or existenceview. The idea is that we live life to experience and grow in spirit (at this point I'm reminded that a lady at the holistic fair was telling me that we don't come to Earth to learn necessarily, unless we want to). My thoughts are kind of scattered right now, actually. For some reason I'm thinking that the nature of the Earth is to flow from primitive or evil to good. That seems like kind of a weird claim. I remember I took an online BYU class once and the teacher, who was probably Mormon, made that same claim. Anyway, the reason it does this is because of the innate spirituality of the universe, and the fact that it favors good.

For some reason though, this seems like a pretty weak argument. I may touch upon this subject again later, I have to go to class soon.