- There is no such thing as an individual. Individuals are not
separate from other individuals, or from their environment.
There is no such thing as "me".
- The physical substance that makes up our bodies constantly
changes. We eat food, we excrete waste. The living
units that we are made from, cells, are constantly reborn.
- Our thoughts and emotions constantly change.
- As years go by, our personality changes as well.
- About other people. The extent to which we are able to
understand and perceive other people is usually limited and
incomplete.
-
"I thought about the idea that one person's mind is
accessible to another's is just a conversational illusion, just
a figure of speech, an assumption that makes some kind of
exchange between basically alien creatures feel plausible, and
that really the relationship of one person to another is
ultimately unknown"
- I first started thinking about this during my long cyber
relationship with Max from Sweden. Our relationship started
out in email, progressed to ICQ chats (conversations during which
we were able to see each others sentences' *as they were being
typed onto the screen*), and finally to phone conversations.
Every time the "interface", the method through which
communication took place changed, some new aspects of Max's
personality appeared, while others disappeared. The
Max-on-the-phone was almost a completely different Max from the
e-mail-Max.
- Our normal day to day interactions (as opposed to cyber
ones) are also not optimal, and could be much expanded and altered
if a better or a different interface through which communication
happens was developed. I realized this in a powerful way during my
first experience with MDMA. I felt that I was able to touch
the *core* of the other person's being. That I was able to
*listen* to what was spoken in a completely new way.
It appeared that all I ever did in the past when talking to others
was wait for my turn to speak, while having already set ideas
about my companion's points of view, and being basically
uninterested in where these points of view came from, and why they
made sense to the other person.
- In addition to lack of good listening skills and a lack of
interest in other people's opinions, another thing that impedes
more-effective communication is the inability of people to be
connected with their own selves. maybe mention that normally
what we think and feel is influenced by passion and
silliness... MDMA (and maybe other substances and methods as
well?) improve communication by making us more in touch with our
own feelings and thoughts. This is probably achieved, as a
friend of mine recently suggested, because certain
consciousness-altering substances and practices allow us to focus
better and with greater interest than we do normally. We are
then able to stick longer with one thought, to carry one thought
further than we would normally. We are therefore able to better
understand and connect with our own selves, which is an essential
ingredient for efficient communication of thoughts, ideas and
emotions.
- Human language is ambiguous, imprecise and imperfect.
Humans are familiar with different words, know different amounts
of words, and every very human being has a slightly different
definition for most words in a language. What one person
understands as "love" or "morality" or
"beautiful" is not quite the same as what another person
understands. When communicating people constantly find it
necessary to supplement words with pictures, diagrams and sounds,
but even then, they are not able to capture it all. There is
always lots of room left for understanding what is being
communicated in different ways. Even what may seem like a
simple and familiar statement, that we normally have no trouble
interpreting may mean something completely different to someone
else, and may be understood and misunderstood on many levels.
- For example: if someone says "You don't
appreciate me"... What makes you feel that I
don't? How do you expect appreciation to be
expressed? What do you expect to be appreciated about
you? Why is it important for you to be
appreciated? All of these questions are left partly
unanswered when the sentence "You don't appreciate
me" is spoken.
- We are only able to understand the world and others to the
extent that we are able to relate them (those things, concepts,
etc) to the ones we ourselves are familiar with. There is a famous
quote by Albert Einstein: "I want to know God's thoughts, the
rest are details." Since the experiences of God and
humans must differ significantly, for a human being to come to
understand the thoughts of God, or to be able to communicate
efficiently with God, in my opinion, would be an extremely difficult
if not impossible goal, since any being can only come to
understand another being by relating what he/she knows and had
experienced to what the other being had known and
experienced.
- Life can be perceived and experienced in many different
ways. I have come to believe that the world is
complex. There are many ways in which it can be conceptualized,
but there is no clear right answer or simple model that explains it
all about the world. Some people spend their lives gulping down
artistic inspiration, others fight for social justice, still others
take great interest in the progress of science and technology, while
others still patiently await the coming of the Messiah. Each one
of us is kind of stuck in his or her own cartoon, with his or her own
settings, colors, and characters. When watching Bjork in the
recent movie Dancer In The Dark, I was amazed beyond comprehension at
the way she was able to extract pure and almost naive joy out of
a life that would, no doubt, make me miserable beyond belief.
The way that character in the movie perceived reality was clearly very
different from the way I perceive it.
- Sometimes I have a strange desire to just unscrew my head and
throw it away. This may sound kind of crazy, but I think about it
because I get so sick of my own self, of the brackets of my own
personality. Most of the time being inside my brain (where I spend
all of my time) means seeing everything around as a tragedy of
sorts. So it gets kind of annoying.
- I don't think there is a clear purpose to human life, or to
human civilization. There are billions of purposes and
billions of paths. But somehow these billions all come
together, like pieces of a beautiful puzzle, to create the world
familiar to us.
- There is no such thing as sin, or *willful* turning away from
goodness. There is no such thing as an evil intention, or a bad
person. The root of negative actions is in *spiritual
ignorance*.
- As my friend Sarede has said once, a wise person would never do
anything sinful or bad because ultimately he or she would realize
that there is absolutely no benefit that can be gained from such
acts. Like I said in the beginning of this page, I think
that the idea that humans are separate from other humans and from
the environment they live in is an illusion. Ultimately we
are all interconnected. We, therefore, can not benefit from
harming each other. Evil benefits neither the world, nor the
person who commits it, since the person who does evil loses
self-respect, and loses the love and respect of others, and
contributes to a world that is worth off for everyone who lives in
it. The reason negative acts take place in our world, I
think, is because people are unconnected with themselves, act
without thinking, letting momentary passionate emotions
influence their acts.
"he had never made a major decision without taking
pause to analyze the nature of his reactions to specific
situations.
"I ask myself: am I being influenced by my emotions, are my
prejudices affecting my decisions, or am I detached and impersonal in
giving the situation the judgment it warrants?"
Can anyone really benefit from hurting someone else? From
killing someone? From raping someone? From taking
something from someone? Or from doing anything at all that one
clearly knows is wrong?
- Happiness and Altruism. In contrast to those
who believe that there is no such thing as true altruism, I believe
that there shouldn't be anything more natural that altruism for a
human being. A person who does goodness and helps others is
gaining greater respect for him or her own self, *and* living in
such a way as to put him or her self less in conflict with the world
around.
- A person who happy, healthy, wise, and in touch with him or her
self, is beneficial not only to him or herself, but also for anyone
else who comes in contact with him or her, and for the world in
general.
- However, the problem of *what is evil* and *what is bad*
arises. The answer to this question may differ from
person to person, and perhaps no one should have the right to
judge which person's or group's view is more appropriate than
another's. One person may think that a sexual relationship
between a willing 15 year old and a willing 20 year old is
wrong and immoral. Another person may not agree. One
person may argue that the use of conscience-altering substances is
wrong, and again someone else may not understand or agree. In
our society issues like the ones mentioned above in our society are
very numerous.
- Because of the above-expressed views, I am strongly opposed
to punishments, correctional institutions, and prisons.
First of all, people should not be punished because their view of
what is "bad" is not in agreement with the social view of
what is bad. Just like the views of individuals, the views of
society on what is "bad" are not fixed in stone and change
from society to society and from one time period to another.
Burning at the stake those who claimed the Earth rotated around the
sun was appropriate some hundreds of years ago, and it is very
likely, that some hundreds of years from today, what seems
appropriate to us now, will be considered absurd. Perhaps some
hundred years from now, it will become absurd to us that we have
severely punished human beings for experimenting with drugs for
example. Secondly, because like I said earlier, I do not believe
anyone in their right mind ever does anything bad *intentionally*,
people who do, or have done bad things should not be punished, but
educated and helped to become more responsible members of
society.
"I dug deeper for reasons and for the reasons behind
reasons. I became keenly aware of the relationship of apparently
isolated events to the whole of the great human drama.
Nothing could be judged in itself or by itself."
|
