Jeff Lieberman, an #MIT-trained artist, #scientist and #engineer, makes a #scientific argument for #mystical #experience. He asks us to challenge our #perception of what we are, our relationship to the #universe, and our relationship to one another. Our #minds are thought-generating machines. What we would happen if we could turn off the machine? If we could transcend our individual experience of the world? ============== Excerpt: #Einstein said that thoughts suffer from an optical #illusion of #consciousness. This illusion that there is a separate person inside an environment, when in reality there’s just #energy in motion, everywhere. Just like an ocean is water in motion – we can call a certain part of that ocean a wave but that gives us the illusion that the wave is a separate entity in the ocean. A wave is not in the ocean, a wave is the ocean. Similarly we might not be waves, maybe we’re the ocean. Maybe all of us are energy and we can realize that directly. This experience could never be reduced to words – because it makes words, but it could be experienced. I think that is such an important experience that people have been trying to name it for thousands of years. They call it #spiritual #enlightenment. I think that the first human beings started realizing that they were fundamentally energy about 2500 years ago. All of them say the same thing – it is the complete ending of human suffering. Of course it’s the end of human suffering! All #suffering is based on the illusory separation that there’s an individual in the environment, that there’s a person that has to survive, that this specific collection of a thousand trillion trillion atoms has to hold itself together. However, if I realize directly that I am energy, and I realize that the body and the mind are a temporary manifestation of that energy, then I can fully accept that the death of the body and the mind was never something that happened to me, because I was always energy and I always will be. If I were to experience that directly, this voice in my head that tells me I have to do certain things in order to be fulfilled loses all of its power. At this very moment I never have to listen to that voice again. Everything in life becomes a game, for fun; a play. We’ve all experienced that, but it’s very hard to remember, because we were so young. Maybe we were at the beach building a sand castle and the entire world faded away because we were only building it to build it – and we weren’t trying to get somewhere else. We hadn’t even learned how to plan, so the only moment that mattered to us was right now. I think that this experience is so important and powerful that every religious tradition at its core has been trying to convince us of its importance, and if it’s true. – if the true end of all human psychological suffering is actually possible – it is the most important thing science could be studying. ~Jeff Lieberman #JeffLieberman https://youtube/watch?v=N0--_R6xThs
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 14:01:29 +0000