Awake: Chapter 11 Notes
the movie Revolver
Highlighted so I'd remember to check out the movie. The internet says it's pretty shit but these are decent quotes.
free of suffering
…but not free of pain
Something discrete and short-lived, such that we feel we are always at risk and need to constantly protect ourselves.
Highlighted without note.
This is our lived experience courtesy of a monkey brain that's smart enough to understand the nature of life and dumb enough to pretend it's not so.
we feel compelled to defend its integrity
, this is me always explaining to myself why I'm doing things.
deeper selves
👅
Might be unintentional but many people will read woo into this statement and that makes it wooshit.
By adulthood
START_HERE I flagged the page and a couple more.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
FINISH_HERE End of the flagged pages.
Quite simply, we’re wired for it. The complexity of the human nervous system is such that rudimentary thoughts begin to form at a young age and develop in complexity as we mature. By young adulthood, we have built a complex thought-based identity in which we have taken up residence.
No… but yes. This is corretish but if you didn't have languarge would you still have thoughts? You'd have something but it wouldn't be the stories that we use to create.
Expanding: So what about a wolf boy, raised by animals and never learned to speak. I don't believe he's enlightened. He's just an animal. He's neither concious nor unconscious, but is that “better” than being a sleep walker? No, it just is.
Language gives us stories which let us dream amazing dreams. But those same stories can, and almost always do, trap us. Maybe we're like a wolf with a leg caught in a trap, but this wolf is able to live a full life and do all the wolfy things, but it's leg hurts. Not a good analogy but sort of and I'm not going to take time to make it better.
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.
— Brian Aldiss
It knows
I don't think it knows anything. It just makes suggestions and we run with them.
knows better
No it doesn't, it's not a person. It's an automatic process.
Still another assumption is that the realization of presence will be “not now.”
What? This feels mangled to me. If not now when are you going realize presence? It's always now so it can't be “not now”.
Can you walk into that memory?
Not physically, but your brain makes those stories feel pretty damned real. And why not, it's making up large chunks of reality anyway.
magician of the mind
Anthro. It's not a person in your head, stop talking about it as if it makes decisions to decieve you. It's just doing what it does and it probably does it because in some way it's been useful for human survival.
illusion of time
I think he means the idea of the past and present. That's not illusion, it's more like foreign lands that we don't have direct access to.
The past is a now that already happened and the future is a story about a now that might happen. We can't go to either of them so effectively they don't exist, except that they did or will. But the future that becomes now won't have anything to do with our story, although it might be influenced by our actions which might be influenced by the story.
any situation where our competency has been called into question
Fear, insecurity.
Highlighted because my recent thinking is that almost all human actions originate from fear.
the mind has to invoke time
The mind isn't an autonomous individual trying to fuck with you. It's you, trying to avoid the terror of existence by lying to yourself.
illusion of control
Truth.
The world is terrifying in part because we have no control and precious little influence. We make it less terrifying by pretending we have control over things.
Do you see how the magician of the mind has plucked you out of the peace and connection with your environment (that is always available in the present) and shot you experientially into the past and then experientially into the future?
Responsibility dodge. There's no magician, you did it to yourself.
You're the magician and you do the trick so neatly that you fool yourself.
led by this magician
THERE IS NO MAGICIAN. It's YOU, all the way down.
A thought has two jobs: to get your attention, then to redirect your attention to the next thought.
A thought has no jobs. It's just a thing that happens and WE run with it, mostly out of ignorance and habit.
Understanding and knowing how these mechanisms function is not the same as disentangling our identity from them.
TRUTH
Just because you know something doesn't mean you can do anything about it. Sometimes the thing is an elephant and all you can do it ride along and hope for the best… and continue to train the thing so that maybe next time…
unsettling, disturbing, and occasionally terrifying thoughts. Here are some examples:
NO. The real fear is the truth. We are meaningless and inconsequential. Nothing we do matters. (It matters to this one!) We will die and be forgotten and it will not matter that we lived.
This is the great terror that drives humanity. We know this is true and we flee in terror before it. But “fear is the mindkiller”, and we should turn and face our fear to find what remains.