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What separates us from the "Now"?

Lost Ego

Lost Ego

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Can we quantify exactly what it is that separates us from this very moment in time and space(not physically)? Can we figure the whys and hows as well?
 
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distraction from the senses.

people who have never meet can anticipate each others thoughts, or sense the recognition of each others "presence" being acknowledged. i dont think every one is compatible in that way, though, and that some people are more receptive then others or to different individuals to varying extents.

being shocked or amazed is the most prominent distraction, or being told it is not true. for example personally i cant see auras or chakras because, i become amazed or surprised, but you can train yourself essentially by knowing what to look for and not being surprised when it does appear.
 
^I can feel auras amateurly. When i smoke weed, its alot easier to sense auras because the corpus collosum barrier seems to break when i smoke, allowing me to think with my right hemisphere which is much better at picking up on things like intuition and what not.

How about our mental/spiritual body being seperated from our physical now while i think about the past? How does this work? What plane/field do my thoughts and awareness lie on?
 
heheh

best i can say is much of our actions, and what we are drawn towards as far as material possessions, food, culture, many examples are probably related to past lives. there might be a subject of study you have a knack for, are not interested in, but excel at. Or maybe there is a subject or something that you do not like, irrationally so, this could be indicative of a past life experience that you harbor consciously a little bit, something to be resolved or a talent to be ensued.

If you 'notify your next of kin' though, thats when 'the wheel explodes'.
;)

yes i can feel them as well, not see but sense the aura or feel a draw to an area where if visible as in the aura field would be indicative of some sort of possible physical issue.

i know what you mean, i dont practice viewing them, seems too much for me atm...
 
The thing that separates "us" from the Now is ourselves.

Thinking that there is a "me" or an "I," thinking that there is something better to be had "out there."

Once 'you' realize that you are really Everything, the mind quiets down and you're able to return to the Now.
 
ohhh i read that wrong
;)

i agree with else has been said and will add that there are infinite nows, but only the one you are perceiving at this moment is what is real, to you.

there are nows of the past we can get trapped in on, and be distracted from the current now, which will dictate the now of the future in result.

how to experience now as close as possible, in its purest form seems to be by stopping thoughts as mentioned.

seems to me that feelings and emotions generate thoughts, the way we take in, recognize and relate to, and process information adds to an emotional response which leads to the thoughts we are having. because of this we each in the same room would be having a different experience, having different thoughts about the shared present experience, invoked by personal emotions of the past.

in order to reach that piece of mind, considering everyone is having a unique experience, getting rid of stuff from the past is going to be done differently.

personally, it was not until i began sewing that i noticed, i was actually meditating, besides with writing. if i need to assist my mind in getting to that place, now, just thinking about sewing is of great help. for everybody though, with time and practice the you you will shut down quicker, and the I of you will be more familiar, per say, and entering a meditative, zen and now state is done easier, almost automatically sometimes spontaneously.


i can never say enough good about Mouna Silence.

"a heavy snow fall melts into the sea
OH what silence!"
- traditional zen
 
Propagation delay? Other, similar concepts that are fundamental limitations on how fast you can receive information about empirical reality and process that information. Information coming from "the world" can come no faster then C (in most cases, much slower) once in your brain, it has "fan out time"...how long does it take to move around your brain, and then "rise/fall time" how long does it take at each point to flip the respective neurons on/off. I would assume the brain also has some sort of underlying algorithms to process whatever it does, which would have some X time-complexity (how many steps does it need to undertake in relation to how large the input is) in order to have processed that information and thus be cognitively aware of whatever it the signal received from the world is.
 
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What PiP posted above reminds me of this quote from Mindfulness in Plain English that folds itself into a very eloquent description of life:

The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant. Moment by moment life
flows by and it is never the same. Perpetual alteration is the essence of the perceptual
universe. A thought springs up in your head and half a second later, it is gone. In comes
another one, and that is gone too. A sound strikes your ears and then silence. Open your
eyes and the world pours in, blink and it is gone. People come into your life and they
leave again. Friends go, relatives die. Your fortunes go up and they go down. Sometimes
you win and just as often you lose. It is incessant: change, change, change. No two
moments ever the same.

There is not a thing wrong with this. It is the nature of the universe. But human culture
has taught us some odd responses to this endless flowing. We categorize experiences. We
try to stick each perception, every mental change in this endless flow into one of three
mental pigeon holes. It is good, or it is bad, or it is neutral. Then, according to which box
we stick it in, we perceive with a set of fixed habitual mental responses. If a particular
perception has been labeled 'good', then we try to freeze time right there. We grab onto
that particular thought, we fondle it, we hold it, we try to keep it from escaping. When
that does not work, we go all-out in an effort to repeat the experience which caused that
thought. Let us call this mental habit 'grasping'.

Over on the other side of the mind lies the box labeled 'bad'. When we perceive
something 'bad', we try to push it away. We try to deny it, reject it, get rid of it any way
we can. We fight against our own experience. We run from pieces of ourselves. Let us
call this mental habit 'rejecting'. Between these two reactions lies the neutral box. Here
we place the experiences which are neither good nor bad. They are tepid, neutral,
uninteresting and boring. We pack experience away in the neutral box so that we can
ignore it and thus return our attention to where the action is, namely our endless round of
desire and aversion. This category of experience gets robbed of its fair share of our
attention. Let us call this mental habit 'ignoring'. The direct result of all this lunacy is a
perpetual treadmill race to nowhere, endlessly pounding after pleasure, endlessly fleeing
from pain, endlessly ignoring 90 percent of our experience. Than wondering why life
tastes so flat. In the final analysis, it's a system that does not work.

No matter how hard you pursue pleasure and success, there are times when you fail. No
matter how fast you flee, there are times when pain catches up with you. And in between
those times, life is so boring you could scream. Our minds are full of opinions and
criticisms. We have built walls all around ourselves and we are trapped within the prison
of our own lies and dislikes. We suffer.

Suffering is a big word in Buddhist thought. It is a key term and it should be thoroughly
understood. The Pali word is 'dukkha', and it does not just mean the agony of the body. It
means the deep, subtle sense of unsatisfactoriness which is a part of every mental
treadmill. The essence of life is suffering, said the Buddha. At first glance this seems
exceedingly morbid and pessimistic. It even seems untrue. After all, there are plenty of
times when we are happy. Aren't there? No, there are not. It just seems that way. Take
any moment when you feel really fulfilled and examine it closely. Down under the joy,
you will find that subtle, all-pervasive undercurrent of tension, that no matter how great
the moment is, it is going to end. No matter how much you just gained, you are either
going to lose some of it or spend the rest of your days guarding what you have got and
scheming how to get more. And in the end, you are going to die. In the end, you lose
everything. It is all transitory.

Sounds pretty bleak, doesn't it? Luckily it's not; not at all. It only sounds bleak when you
view it from the level of the ordinary mental perspective, the very level at which the
treadmill mechanism operates. Down under that level lies another whole perspective, a
completely different way to look at the universe. It is a level of functioning where the
mind does not try to freeze time, where we do not grasp onto our experience as it flows
by, where we do not try to block things out and ignore them. It is a level of experience
beyond good and bad, beyond pleasure and pain. It is a lovely way to perceive the world,
and it is a learnable skill. It is not easy, but is learnable.
Click to expand...
 
"we perceive with a set of fixed habitual mental responses."

exactly, we are such material creatures of habit that it is a problem to change those habits, but new productive habits can be just a difficult to break.

it can suck with stuff like this sometimes, because the more you know the less excuse you have...

_________
i am much better at math then my confidence lets me know

rangrz said:
Propagation delay? Other, similar concepts that are fundamental limitations on how fast you can receive information about empirical reality and process that information. Information coming from "the world" can come no faster then C (in most cases, much slower) once in your brain, it has "fan out time"...how long does it take to move around your brain, and then "rise/fall time" how long does it take at each point to flip the respective neurons on/off. I would assume the brain also has some sort of underlying algorithms to process whatever it does, which would have some X time-complexity (how many steps does it need to undertake in relation to how large the input is) in order to have processed that information and thus be cognitively aware of whatever it the signal received from the world is.
Click to expand...

So much is what we accept to see. It makes sense to me that in some cases, "enlightenment" can be the function of shock and trauma, or a Near Death Experience where the brain begins to shut down & "black out", and the synapses recoil, loosing contact with the receptors they had been trained by experience to come into contact with. Once the synapses are allowed to make contact again, they could do so as they should be, not as they had been trained to through exposure, ones personal life experiences or any environmental/social contributing factors.

If this is the case, having this new "wiring" would be very confusing, isolation and phobias from this new sense of awareness could arouse many psychological issues like depression, anxiety, personality disorders, dependency issues trying to find a way to cope; an explaination of the so called 'Dark Night of the Soul'

Meditation and prayer is proven to develop the brain in areas it normally would not, mostly the right side frontal lobe, and measurable gray brain matter else where, I feel confident assuming that decalcification of areas of the brain occur during these practices as well.

In other words, there are ways to help the brain shift its focus in this direction, with out a NDE, trauma or drug use.
 
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It's hard to play socrates when nobody is giving me an answer i can argue with. I'll give you a hint @ the idea im trying to shoot for and build on.

Thought seperates us from the now. It pulls us to the past, it allows us to predict the future. We think about the past and we are no longer in the now. What i want to find out is why does consciousness allow us to leave this now. As i described in What Is Now?, there is only one now. How is it that thought can tear us away from where time and space merge? Why is it capable of doing this? Do we have any science that can build on this? Any famous philosophers?
 
i agree thought does separate us from now, with simple reflexes, a sensory distraction from your perception of any given moment can cause it.

"How is it that thought can tear us away from where time and space merge? Why is it capable of doing this?"

We are distracted from the ethereal(ill call it for now) as a defense mechanism preventing shock, also we have been taught such things are insane delusion, so denial for this reason happens. there are many reasons.


... this is why Christ spoke in parables, because only those with ears to hear, will hear whats to be heard.
 
qwe said:
words and cognitive systems of words.
Click to expand...

from C.D. Broad, Cambridge professor via The Doors of Perception:

The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born--the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Click to expand...

and a Zen Koan: "Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born."
 
qwe said:
words and cognitive systems of words.
Click to expand...

please elaborate. i was toying with the idea of language being the source of consciousness a while ago but i didn't have enough knowledge on the matter to think about it more in depth.
 
qwe said:
words and cognitive systems of words.
Click to expand...

Absolutely.
"There is some error, one frightful error, in the thinking of men" - Ayn Rand.
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was God" - Words.
"If the proposition 12 × 12 = 144 is exempt from doubt, then so too must non-mathematical propositions be." - Wittgenstein.
"I think therefore I am" - Descartes.
This can be interpreted wrongly or rightly.
 
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Relativity : A state of dependence in which the existence or significance of one entity is solely dependent on that of another.

its cuz you can

you is the answer
you separate yourself from the now
cuz you can, cuz you want to
 
ninjadanslarbretabar said:
the question is the answer
Click to expand...
no it isn't, the question can refer to a feeling of dissociation that occurs even when not asking distracting questions or attempting to numerically quantify things.
qwe said:
What separates us from the "Now"?
Click to expand...
words and cognitive systems of words.
Click to expand...
please elaborate. i was toying with the idea of language being the source of consciousness a while ago but i didn't have enough knowledge on the matter to think about it more in depth.
Click to expand...
i don't think language is the source of consciousness, but i do think most of us do most of our decision making via language (aka, verbal sequences of information program us). language is basically a mechanism by which a large amount of information content can be delivered in a small amount of information (aka, language requires encoding and decoding. this leads to advantages and disadvantages).

verbal information programs us because, i think, it's our currently most effective means of interpersonal communication. if you think about human evolution, it makes sense to say we were "conscious" before we developed language (so language is not the means by which we are conscious) but when language entered the scene, our neurology adapted and co-opted it as our primary means of brain/body control because interpersonal communication with language is so crucial (to surviving, to avoid being outcast from one's tribe, etc). once all environmental rewards and punishments exist primarily in the context of a society's system of words, the human brain adapts and consciousness exists in this context.

though you're right that consciousness would have been something quite different than we might think, before large systems of words developed.

given that switching a ferret's auditory and visual cortex allows it to literally see with its ears, yes the brain is capable of re-arranging its entire muscle-control structure so that packets of "verbal information" become the dominant kind of data processing "from the top down." and, yes it's possible that the brain changed that much due to social evolution alone (none of the evolution of the brain considered here is genetic, afaik).
 
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