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What is Consciousness?
Is consciousness an illusion? 5 experts explain Published on YouTube January 2024 – Big Think 7.45M subscribers “If science aims to describe everything, how can it not describe the simple fact of our existence?” On this episode of Dispatches, Kmele speaks with the scientists, mathematicians, and spiritual leaders trying to do just that: This video…
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Be careful what you wish for
Read transcript We can’t know what our future selves wants 4,303,383 views | Shankar Vedantam | TED • April 2022 “You are constantly becoming a new person,” says journalist Shankar Vedantam. In a talk full of beautiful storytelling, he explains the profound impact of something he calls the “illusion of continuity” — the belief…
An actor and a neuroscientist answer:
What makes you “you”?
Go to TED talks and videos here – ted.com
1. What’s this about manifesting ones’ wishes?
‘Manifesting’ and ‘karma’ are much the same thing. They are both ways the human mind will utilise to explain and control the consequences of action, reaction and experience as we go through life. Social media and other online platforms are riddled with scrolling video ’tutorials’ on how to ‘manifest’ anything we choose through journaling and scheming. Private and personal self-centred ‘manifestos’ on which we base all our choices in order to manifest a particular person, place, thing, or elevated situation as a self-certainty. And become that confident and successful entity, to own that ideal abode, that expensive electric car, wealth above need, success by profession, or ever-lasting fulfilment. The various popular ways to manifest your desires and wishes are not what manifestation is about. Manifestation is not a verb, it’s not a skill or action, it is the consequence of a certain string of actions in process over time, unknowingly connected, and are not limited to human consciousness or manipulation. Like karma, manifestations are more to do with how one operates and navigates through life and ones’ position in the world.
Indeed, it comes about, that things will happen, if we behave and act in a certain way, if we combine action with empathy, awareness, knowledge and resource. This pro-active combination will ‘manifest’ a scenario or environment within which something positive can occur. It’s really about going through life with the right perspective, with the right ambition, and the appropriate life skills, so good works create good returns. This has been the basic logic and best practise that challenges modern capitalism and other greed based human motivations, so materialistic want and desire go hand-in-hand with the ‘lust’ for power over others, a very negative and selfish perspective which the popular ‘manifest-ors’ (not even a word) tend to promote. It has been shown that the richest and most successful people don’t actually gain much self-satisfaction or happiness, and in many cases results in a deterioration of their ‘quality of life’, not a great result for all that ‘sacrifice’ and ‘hard work’ that they claim ‘got them where they are’. They can ‘have their beautiful house, and their beautiful wife, but they don’t even know how they got there’, having no satisfaction or appreciation for what they have or achieved, they are already wanting for something bigger or better or just MORE of everything – and the more expensive the better, because the cost of something in the window now determines ‘true’ value, but in fact, it’s the perception of value in modern times that decides and divides the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’ in the wider community.
So, let’s be careful what we ‘manifest’, the wind may change, and it may all come true.
…or, ‘be careful what you wish for …’ – Aesop’s Fables circa 260 BC
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A note from Lucy King’s collection of quotes on Medium
There’s a reason so many lottery winners end up as cautionary tales — as depressed, broke, or worse. It’s because they had a clear idea of what they wanted, but they didn’t consider how their lives would change when they got it.
When we get what we want too easily, we wind up less happy than when we started.
Ironic isn’t it?
A Manifesto is a written declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party, or government. A manifesto usually accepts a previously published opinion or public consensus or promotes a new idea with prescriptive notions for carrying out changes the author believes should be made. It is often political, social or artistic in nature, sometimes revolutionary, and may present an individual’s life stance. Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as creeds or confessions of faith.
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2. Old, Wise, and Forgotten
When considering the Greek ideologies and philosophies such as Homer’s Odyssey and Sophocles’ Antigone, it seems that human nature must make the same mistakes and misinterpretations time and time again through history, until they end up ‘shooting themselves in the foot’ which festers and they die a miserable death. Or they finally see the error of their ways and really and truly repent for their crimes against humanity.
The Yin-Yang of Continuous Existence
Every entity, whether a living thing existing within circumstance, time, or space – or any collective, society, union or culture, under similar circumstances, is energised by the attraction between positive and negative aspects acting and reacting together to form a continuum, the state of existence ….
Yin and yang (English: /jɪn/, /jæŋ/), also yinyang or yin-yang, is a concept that originated in Chinese philosophy, describing an opposite but interconnected, self-perpetuating cycle. Yin and yang can be thought of as complementary and at the same time opposing forces that interact to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the assembled parts and the parts are important for cohesion of the whole.
The methodology of yin and yang is the foundation of critical and deductive reasoning for effective differential diagnosis of disease and illnesses within Taoist influenced traditional Chinese medicine.
In many eastern ideologies, the universe creates itself out of an original chaos of material energy, the ‘oneness’ before the duality of yin-yang, which for the sake of order became the continuous cycle of form and matter.
‘Yin’ is retractive, passive and contractive while ‘yang’ is repelling, active and expansive; in principle, this dichotomy in some form, is seen in all things in nature – patterns of change and difference, such as biological and seasonal cycles, evolution of the landscape over days, weeks, and eons (with the original meaning of the words being the north-facing shade and the south-facing brightness of a hill), gender (female and male), as well as the formation of the character of individuals and the grand arc of sociopolitical history in disorder and order.[9]
Taiji is a Chinese cosmological term for the “Supreme Ultimate” state of undifferentiated absolute and infinite potential, the oneness before duality, from which yin and yang originate. It can be contrasted with the older wuji (無極; ‘without pole’). In the cosmology pertaining to yin and yang, the material energy which this universe was created from is known as qi. It is believed that the organization of qi in this cosmology of yin and yang has formed many things.[10] Included among these forms are humans. Many natural dualities (such as light and dark, fire and water, expanding and contracting) are thought of as physical manifestations of the duality symbolized by yin and yang. This duality, as a unity of opposites, lies at the origins of many branches of classical Chinese science, technology and philosophy, as well as being a primary guideline of traditional Chinese medicine,[11] and a central principle of different forms of Chinese martial arts and exercise, such as baguazhang, tai chi, daoyin and qigong, as well as appearing in the pages of the I Ching.
The notion of duality can be found in many areas, such as Communities of Practice. The term “dualistic-monism” or dialectical monism has been coined in an attempt to express this fruitful paradox of simultaneous unity and duality. According to this philosophy, everything has both yin and yang aspects (for instance, shadow cannot exist without light). Either of the two major aspects may manifest more strongly in a particular object, depending on the criterion of the observation. The yin and yang symbol (or taijitu) shows a balance between two opposites with a portion of the opposite element in each section.
In Taoist metaphysics, distinctions between good and bad, along with other dichotomous moral judgments, are perceptual, not real; so, the duality of yin and yang is an indivisible whole. In the ethics of Confucianism on the other hand, most notably in the philosophy of Dong Zhongshu (c. 2nd century BC), a moral dimension is attached to the idea of yin and yang.[12] The Ahom philosophy of duality of the individual self han and pu is quite similar to yin and yang of Taoism.[13] The tradition was originated in Yunnan, China and followed by some Ahom, descendants of Dai ethnic Minority.[14]
The Chinese terms 陰; yīn; ‘dark side’ and 陽; yáng; ‘light side’ have a rich history in the language, their etymologies and evolution analyzable through lenses of orthography, phonology, and meanings.
Characters
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Edited from various sources including Wikipedia.
