Zero identity

[118118]

would be nice, but i'd probably waste my time here, being happy

i'm the one in the middle

 

[rhys gethin]

i don't really seem to experience consciousness as being either intermittent (except when I fall asleep, or take too many drugs) or incomplete. it feels "complete". fucked up, but complete.

it doesn't make any sense to tell me that there is no me, just a thing which thinks there is a me. if there's no me, what's the thing doing the thinking which thinks I'm me (or not)? if there's no "you", who just told me that?

i would like to argue from your position because I see many categories (gay, black, female) which imo cause far more suffering than provide comfort. but it has never made sense to me.

however I have a lot of other problems with Buddhist ideology (reincarnation, karma, etc.) which have kind of ruled it out for me tbh.

You're not alone in having problems with reincarnation. Do you need that concept? I don't.

To understand what the consciousness really is like, stop acting on faith and try meditation. Once you begin to watch the monkey-mind at it you have no problems in doubting the reality of 'self'. Language is what causes all the other 'I'/'You' type problems.

People tend to get very lost in trying to impose western notions of 'belief', whereas what the Buddha was interested in was experience, I think.

I am not deep into this stuff. Come back in a few years!

 

[fudgefactorfive]

Have you tried meditation? Get anywhere with it?

Yes, but no, not really. I found it difficult - too noisy in there.

I have "accidentally" tranced out a few times, sober. A couple of months back I was thinking about all the neutrinos coming out of the sun. Then I started to think about how the neutrinos connect with other things, and where. Was wide awake, coming home on the bus. Suddenly I think I blacked out for a moment, and then I felt something like vertigo and anxiety that I'd lost myself for a moment. It was ... disturbing. I tend to discount stuff like that due to my previously rocky relationship with hallucinogens.

I'd dispute that; a bird is hungry and if it finds food it lives, if it doesn't it dies. It might have a natural urge to eat from hunger but it doesn't develop expectations for meals. The tree just grows it doesn't expect it though, which is handy because more trees die as saplings than grow and they don't bow out thinking "Well that wasn't much of a life".
Natural law has no abstract modelling nor ideals, that's all man- the purveyor of the anti-natural law. The amoeba just exists in the moment, it has no concept of stuff.
Once enlightened Buddha knew it all, and nothing, simultaneously.

that latter almost sounds like "wisest is he who knows he does not know"

I asked 'im indoors what Buddhists thought about cogito ergo sum and he couldn't answer.

birds build nests because they expect to have eggs. the tree grows because it expects to find resources in that particular direction. that is the nature of birds and trees. amoebas have a HUGE concept of stuff. no, really

i would make such a fucking excellent hippy if i were so inclined

 

[fudgefactorfive]

To understand what the consciousness really is like, stop acting on faith and try meditation. Once you begin to watch the monkey-mind at it you have no problems in doubting the reality of 'self'. Language is what causes all the other 'I'/'You' type problems.

i'm not entirely closed to the idea of giving meditation a proper go - but I have hard time literally abandoning "self". I can't even get started. I know that "me" is just a process and has no literal materiality in and of itself - but it does "exist", it is a force, it's change, and change is "real". there is a real physical system underpinning this thing that has a sense of itself. there is a bedrock. even if it is made of monkey bits

I don't think language is really a problem. It's a symptom, not the cause. It's wrong, inaccurate, but that's OK, because it too is just change and relationships. Thought gives rise to language more than the other way round.

 

[Dhimmi]

Suddenly I think I blacked out for a moment, and then I felt something like vertigo and anxiety that I'd lost myself for a moment. It was ... disturbing. I tend to discount stuff like that due to my previously rocky relationship with hallucinogens.

That's not unusual, the first effective meditations can be very disturbing. It can be like disappearing or produce quite scary visions, often bringing one's biggest obstacles front, centre and grinning at you.

I asked 'im indoors what Buddhists thought about cogito ergo sum and he couldn't answer.

Not a lot I'd suggest. Back a few posts where Nagarjuna got mentioned is more like it "X, not X, X and not X, neither X nor not X".

birds build nests because they expect to have eggs.

I disagree birds build nests because they're having eggs, rather than the more human plan to get a mortgage because they expect to have sprogs in the future.

 

[fudgefactorfive]

I thought I was an incarantion of Nagajuna (sp?) for a while tho... heard of him, v. good philosopher iirc?

"Things derive their being and nature by mutual independence and are nothing in themselves." - Nagarjuna, c. 500 BC

it's a nice quote which applies well to linguistics and processes of mind

does it mean anything in terms of social politics though? societies are not minds.

[devil's advocate]

yes, i am an oppressed mad black deaf lesbian, and derive a certain amount of comfort from that so-called "fact", yet it only exists because of the power of sane white hearing straight men, to use the language of loin-stirring identity politics, and in a sense i am just handing them power on a plate. it might be armour but try dodging a nuclear missile when you're wearing plate mail.

but is it actually an appropriate or useful defence tactic to "refuse to use language", or to "reclaim language" - or even more hardcore, abandon language and self-identity altogether and invest heavily in finger-cymbals?

isn't that just letting go of the bedrock completely - erasing your own identity for the sake of cowardly retreat into mental hyperspace? you are essentially opening yourself right up to whatever new abuse your political oppressors dream up next. they will label you whether you ask for it or not and treat you accordingly. you will just be mown down, or at best, drift into a margin and survive. you will be a happy idiot.

 

[fudgefactorfive]

Not a lot I'd suggest. Back a few posts where Nagarjuna got mentioned is more like it "X, not X, X and not X, neither X nor not X".

seen that one before

I = !X && !!X && !(X || !X) && !(!X || X)

so

I = FALSE

pretty - but why isn't it just another illusion

"that tao that can be spoken is not the eternal tao" - that can't be true, or you wouldn't be able to say it

 

[118118]

fff: ahah, but he classes it as a relative truth, so that does not apply. have that on authority.

 

[kyser_soze]

Sounds as big a bunch of bollocks as believing in a sky pixie IYAM.

 

[fudgefactorfive]

Sounds as big a bunch of bollocks as believing in a sky pixie IYAM.

another wonderful Kyser Post

 

[goldenecitrone]

I'm always most interested in this topic just after coming out of a k-hole. Unfortunately my ability to speak in such situations is always fairly limited. Which is a shame.

 

[weltweit]

........... isn't that just letting go of the bedrock completely - erasing your own identity for the sake of cowardly retreat into mental hyperspace? you are essentially opening yourself right up to whatever new abuse your political oppressors dream up next. they will label you whether you ask for it or not and treat you accordingly. you will just be mown down, or at best, drift into a margin and survive. you will be a happy idiot.

Yes they may/will still label you if they can because that seems a natural tendency of all of us, to attach convenient labels to people however that limits them more than it limits you.

I think greater mental freedom may be found by abandoning the labels we ourselves use to label others than by abandoning the labels we might use to label ourselves, but perhaps abandoning both might be quite fine also.

 

[rhys gethin]

isn't that just letting go of the bedrock completely - erasing your own identity for the sake of cowardly retreat into mental hyperspace? you are essentially opening yourself right up to whatever new abuse your political oppressors dream up next. they will label you whether you ask for it or not and treat you accordingly. you will just be mown down, or at best, drift into a margin and survive. you will be a happy idiot.

You start off from the belief that all these busy selves and their important dramas really exist and that one of them can WILL itself into non-existence, while still somehow actually existing. This isn't very sensible, surely? 'Willing' merely strengthens the self illusion. Try paying attention instead to what is actually going on in the 'consciousness' of this famous self. It may not be Enlightening, but it is certainly enlightening, if you see what I mean.

 

[fudgefactorfive]

I'm always most interested in this topic just after coming out of a k-hole. Unfortunately my ability to speak in such situations is always fairly limited. Which is a shame.

see, some k priests bang on in this vein - that it's a magical passport to shared universal consciousness in hyperspace - and having done k myself, I can see why it might be mistaken for that.

i'm sure i'd also achieve a fair measure of identity loss if i dashed out my brains on a large concrete slab. does that mean large concrete slabs are the key that unlocks the doors of perception? nuhuh.

you just wait, someone will make trepanning trendy again if we wait long enough

 

[kyser_soze]

another wonderful Kyser Post

Cheers.

TBH I agree with what you said about Buddhist enlightenment tho.

Another question...would the concept of 'self' be useful when pursuing game across a savannah or through a forest? Is it a useful aid to personal survival? Does the concept of the self allow or disallow us to empathise with others? Address the basic questions about why we have the notion of self in the first place and you'll be starting somewhere.

i'm sure i'd also achieve a fair measure of identity loss if i dashed out my brains on a large concrete slab. does that mean large concrete slabs are the key that unlocks the doors of perception? nuhuh.

Wasn't there a joke about finding enlightenment by charging headfirst into a wall? I think it's in H2G2 somewhere...

 

[fudgefactorfive]

Another question...would the concept of 'self' be useful when pursuing game across a savannah or through a forest? Is it a useful aid to personal survival? Does the concept of the self allow or disallow us to empathise with others? Address the basic questions about why we have the notion of self in the first place and you'll be starting somewhere.

i favour the model whereby self-awareness evolved out of predator/prey relationships. creatures began to attempt to predict each others' behaviour, because it's useful to guess at how exactly a snake will strike at you or how exactly a fluffy kitten will escape into a bolt-hole. we all run "simulations" of each other.

it's possible that self-awareness is a totally coincedental side-effect. if you can model another creature's behaviour, you can model your own. i see no particular evolutionary advantage for angst - but there doesn't have to be one, evolutionary adaptions crop up for no good reason all the time, they are dependent on something else "useful" that also changed.

on the other hand, self-awareness presumably preceded this running of simulations of external beings' mental states. that's what emotion is - awareness of the "flavour" of the neurotransmitters and hormones that your body (a cognitive network) is releasing. emotions and the ability to "register" them is the only way a creature can respond to important external events such as change, loss, being wounded, being content in a good safe place etc. Which is why I think that people who think that animals can't think are barking.

so perhaps it isn't true at all. perhaps empathy and intuition are a product of self-awareness, not the other way round.

in theory though you could be thoroughly aware of other creatures' emotional states without modelling your own at all, just responding on a "natural level" to them.

... or can you.

 

[kyser_soze]

Maybe we do by smell - it's a sense that we supposedly don't process consciously, yet it is extremely important as a means of non-verbal communication. It's my own theory for why when you meet some people you get a 'vibe' (awful word but YKWIM) and can't put your finger on it - I reckon that's a sensory response to their body odour, since BO is an unmaskable measure of the chemical processes in the body which are in turn affected by mood...

 

[fudgefactorfive]

Maybe we do by smell - it's a sense that we supposedly don't process consciously, yet it is extremely important as a means of non-verbal communication. It's my own theory for why when you meet some people you get a 'vibe' (awful word but YKWIM) and can't put your finger on it - I reckon that's a sensory response to their body odour, since BO is an unmaskable measure of the chemical processes in the body which are in turn affected by mood...

mood IS the chemical processes. we have more neuron-like nerve cells knitted around our stomachs than we do in our heads. hence, "gut feelings"

yes - it's like picking up bits of brain signal that leak out - but, there are many examples of species which actually use this to exploit other species and their own, deliberately sending out false signals to entrap. see also, creatures which imitate each others' appearance or sounds. we are kidding ourselves if we think we are the first creatures capable of lying. and maybe it is possible to be lying subconsciously

i have seen it argued that ultimately, language and all other forms of communication are about coercion - that the ultimate aim of language is modifying other creatures' behaviour. it started out as "hawk, run away, run away" and ended up as "suck my cock, bitch".

ie. we give ourselves and each other labels because we are trying to exert our wills over others'.

 

[Jazzz]

enlightenment does not mean the loss of identity except where the ego is concerned. For that, it is death. But instead of that you find your true identity, which is something really rather staggering

to answer the point about how someone enlightened functions as a normal human - well imaging you are playing a computer game. You are controlling one character. Now, you don't have to limit yourself to thinking you ARE pacman, or whoever, in order to play the game: you can control the character perfectly well while having a consciousness far godlier than that of pixels on a screen.

 

[118118]

^^ Jazzz has found his true identity - God

 

[chloe commissar]

yes, I know I bang on about this. not interested? tough.

given that we agree on what identity is and where it came from, is it

a) possible
b) desirable

to have no identity at all?

i favour the idea on a political level. but practically, the closest thing I can imagine it being like is what my partner describes to me when he talks about "Buddhist" meditation, being totally in the moment, total erasure of self etc. To be honest I always totally recoil in horror from the idea. It's like walking over a grave, or teetering on the edge of an abyss.

people often say stuff like "we will always needs labels/categories", "it's HUMAN NATURE to categorise" etc. i say, bollocks is it. it doesn't arise from language - humans have got nothing to do with it. chimps, dogs and fish know their place. it is about power, and pain, and starvation, and co-operation. a society totally at equilibrium with itself and its environment - one that doesn't depend on massive power imbalances to keep most people happy most of the time - wouldn't have an identity. identity issues do not arise in equitable situations, whether that's an entire planet or down the pub with mates.

so why is the idea also so scary?

is someone with no identity a psychopath - a walking undead - or a really happy person?

nonsense.

the only way the world could be in total equilibrium would be in a world without subjectivity and as such would be meaningless. Indentity issues are not reducable to the shit that is 'identity politics', identity is conflict! What distinguishes us from the rest of the world? The fact we are in it, but also apart from it, because we have desires and drives. The only way identity could be erased would be by destroying all desire, which is exactly what many Buddhists believe in, literally nirvana as void. And that my friend is an impossibility without suicide, it is more nihilist than nihilism because atleast the nihilist desires nothingness, that is desires the destruction of everything. The real buddhist realising that to desire even nothingness is to assert something tries to remove themselves totally. That is why Buddhism has been able to sit so well with liberal middle class hippies and also the militarist Japanese empire, because it is fundamentally indifferent to this world.

 

[kyser_soze]

mood IS the chemical processes. we have more neuron-like nerve cells knitted around our stomachs than we do in our heads. hence, "gut feelings"

yes - it's like picking up bits of brain signal that leak out - but, there are many examples of species which actually use this to exploit other species and their own, deliberately sending out false signals to entrap. see also, creatures which imitate each others' appearance or sounds. we are kidding ourselves if we think we are the first creatures capable of lying. and maybe it is possible to be lying subconsciously

i have seen it argued that ultimately, language and all other forms of communication are about coercion - that the ultimate aim of language is modifying other creatures' behaviour. it started out as "hawk, run away, run away" and ended up as "suck my cock, bitch".

ie. we give ourselves and each other labels because we are trying to exert our wills over others'.

Can't see anything I disagree with here TBH - I've long held the view that at root all 'human' behaviour is basically animal with some bells and whistles on top that gives us an awareness of our actions, but that lots and lots of informaitonal processing takes place without our awarenss control of anything else.

 

[chloe commissar]

Can't see anything I disagree with here TBH - I've long held the view that at root all 'human' behaviour is basically animal with some bells and whistles on top that gives us an awareness of our actions, but that lots and lots of informaitonal processing takes place without our awarenss control of anything else.

those bells and whistles are pretty impressive, infact they are the very things that allow you to assert such inane nonsense.

 

[fudgefactorfive]

those bells and whistles are pretty impressive, infact they are the very things that allow you to assert such inane nonsense.

drop the attitude "friend", this is a friendly thread in a friendly sub-forum, if you can't keep a lid on your temper, get the hell out.

 

[chloe commissar]

drop the attitude "friend", this is a friendly thread in a friendly sub-forum, if you can't keep a lid on your temper, get the hell out.

ah but why label me friend or not friend, if we all just dropped the labels.

sorry, it's just this inane pseudo philosophy really annoys me, but i don't think my shortness was warranting of a 'get to hell'.

perhaps we/you/buddha will find in yourself (of course the self is just a label, an identity that causes wars) to forgive me and address my points.

 

[fudgefactorfive]

sorry, it's just this inane pseudo philosophy really annoys me

then you're in the wrong forum.

 

[chloe commissar]

then you're in the wrong forum.

I would doubt that, it says theory, philosophy & history, not 'whatever inane unthought out nonsense a stoned hippy told me in the back of a van heading to Glastonbury'.

Would it be too much to ask for you to engage the discussion?

 

[rhys gethin]

ah but why label me friend or not friend, if we all just dropped the labels.

sorry, it's just this inane pseudo philosophy really annoys me, but i don't think my shortness was warranting of a 'get to hell'.

perhaps we/you/buddha will find in yourself (of course the self is just a label, an identity that causes wars) to forgive me and address my points.

It is odd how residual Christianity affects mosts persons' thinking on here, what with going to hell and needing forgiveness, that sort of thing. The busy selves certainly pour a great deal of emotion into quarreling with one another, which is an example of the way in which false belief produces suffering. What are you so cross about, Chloe? Because fudge is trying to put you down? Because you want him to believe something else? Will you produce that effect by these means?

That sounds very patronising - sorry. It is the way I sometimes address 'my' 'self'. It doesn't listen much either!

 

[chloe commissar]

It is odd how residual Christianity affects mosts persons' thinking on here, what with going to hell and needing forgiveness, that sort of thing. The busy selves certainly pour a great deal of emotion into quarreling with one another, which is an example of the way in which false belief produces suffering. What are you so cross about, Chloe? Because fudge is trying to put you down? Because you want him to believe something else? Will you produce that effect by these means?

That sounds very patronising - sorry. It is the way I sometimes address 'my' 'self'. It doesn't listen much either!

I'm sorry I tried really hard to find a cogent point in all that, but it does serve to show buddhisms 'non identity' (and that's not a non identity in a negationist sense but literally 'nothing') as utter nonsense.

But I was perhaps to quick to judge, afterall he did seem only to be putting forward the beliefs of his partner. Sounds like he would need the patience of a buddhist monk to put up with their utter twaddle.

 

[rhys gethin]

I'm sorry I tried really hard to find a cogent point in all that, but it does serve to show buddhisms 'non identity' (and that's not a non identity in a negationist sense but literally 'nothing') as utter nonsense.

But I was perhaps to quick to judge, afterall he did seem only to be putting forward the beliefs of his partner. Sounds like he would need the patience of a buddhist monk to put up with their utter twaddle.

Fine. Read it up when you feel calmer perhaps? The great thing, though, is to meditate, listen to all the meaningless noise passing through without being moved. It is more useful than all this rage.