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Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

The Reality of Fate

The world as we know it allows us to believe that we have much freedom, much understanding of ourselves and, hence, it gives us the belief that we are able to change things with our choices, we have the freedom of choice. Choice is something that we all perceivably have, will is something that we all perceiveably have. It’s interesting to analyze what we do, and don’t, have on levels beyond and deeper than simple yes and no questions.

If we assume that we came from a big bang, an explosion which cause random things to collide and cause things to grow and develop, then technically everything since then has been set into motion. Everything that happens is really a sequence of events which are meant to happen because there was a starting point. When we assume that something has a starting point and therefore begins a sequence of events, one has to assume that everything up until this very moment and beyond is unavoidable. What we are and the world around us is not merely a set of choices by us or the people directly around us.

You and I are the sum total of all the causal influence that is now, and has ever been in the past.

This would then mean that, if we are indeed the effect consequence of everything else, then it would be right to say that our influence and cause on ourselves and others is so minute that it is almost non-existent. And if we think about it on a slightly deeper level — because we are consiquencial machines and not causal, what we perceive as our cause is therefor, also, non-existent.

If these statements are true that we don’t influence the universe around us on a direct level, then our illusion of free will is laid to rest. If we do not influence the world, or even what we do then, really, we do not do much to change each other and ourselves. It is the factors around us which, not only allow us to be who we are, but also have dictated us to be who we are.

Many people who are reading may be thinking at the moment, what is the point of living if we are unable to do as we please, what we want? To that I would say, what has been keeping you alive all this time, so far? If you said your job, your kids, anything else, that doesn’t change. The point of our life, which is truly the greatest accident, ever, is to b happy. And when you realise that what happens to you is not a fault of your own, you can realise that there is no need to become emotionally distraught over it, but rather move forward quickly and swiftly onto the next event which is, hopefully, gratifying.

Many spiritualists will tell you that to become enlightened, one must spend a life time meditating, pondering and attempting to understand how to become accepting of the world around you. They will tell you that in order to change the world, you must first change yourself and really, after many years, you’ve changed your perception of the world around you and as such, you’ve changed the world.

But acceptance is a hard concept to grasp – hence taking a life time of dedication to achieve. I would be interested to know if spirituality is, not merely something you can practice throughout your life but also, something you are born with.

I was looking at a particular book the other day entitled The Encyclopaedia of the Brain and Brain Disorders – and one important fact to note is that disorders in the brain are not developmental (disorders don’t develop like diseases – in fact one could say they are the lack of development), they are something that a being is born with and cannot change throughout their life time unless something within them is changed (generally physically). A disorder is a structural error in the genetic code of a being (Turkington, 2002).

Therefore, there are certain properties that not every being will attain through pre-natal development. Think of a function of the human brain as a spark of electricity between two poles, every time a command takes place, the electric bolt fires from one pole to another – this is how your brain’s signal system works so that the brain works – many electrical impulses taking place. When there is a disorder in the brain the electrical impulses don’t take place and therefore the function isn’t carried out.

“Spirituality is a particular term which actually means a dealing of intuition.” – Chögyam Trungpa

Intuition is the apparent ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason. – Wikipedia

Note that, if we go by this understanding, that spirituality is not the ability to have an intuition, it is a dealing of intuition. So for the sake of argument we will say that everyone is born with a sense of intuition – our evolved understanding of right and wrong without being told – but how we deal physically, emotionally, cognitively and mentally can show how enlightened we are in the respect of acceptance and spirituality.

Intuition is knowing without knowing why we know, such as seeing someone being kicked and knowing it’s wrong, seeing a smile and smiling back because you know it’s the right response. Intuition is an evolutionary process which allows modern day human beings to act civilized to some manner because we deal with our intuition a certain way, such as smiling back.

But can spirituality be something you’re born with and developed or something that is acquired throughout life and you don’t need to be born with it? If we look at this question from a scientific and metaphysical point of view, there are a range of disorders which causes our brains to not connect the dots, i.e.: make those electrical impulses required for following a command, from Spinewave.

Simultanagnosia – Seeing only one object at a time, even when viewing a scene comprising many items.
Integrative agnosia – Inability to recognise whole objects, tending to focus instead on individual features of an object.
Visual form agnosia – Inability to describe the shape, size or orientation of objects, yet exhibiting no problem in manipulating them.
Optic ataxia – Ability to report the shape and size of an object, though attempts to manipulate it are clumsy.
Prosopagnosia – Failure to recognise the faces of familiar people.
Pure alexia (aka agnosia for words) – Inability to identify individual characters or read text, even though subjects are sometimes able to write.
Agnosia for scenes – Inability to recognise known landmarks or scenes.
Colour agnosia – Ability to perceive colours without being able to identify, name or group them according to similarity.

These are just a small number of disorders related to sight, most of them related to the brain (Bossenger, 2010).

Now what if there was a disorder that caused you to not respond to a feeling you had. This feeling is very simple, being right or wrong. If we consider that Spirituality is part of the creative hemisphere of the brain, that being the right hemisphere (Hermann, 1981), then we can also assume that a person who was missing this connection would also not know that he or she was missing this connection.

People who have an injury to the right side of the brain “don’t put things together” and fail to process important information. As a result, they often develop a “denial syndrome” and say “there’s nothing wrong with me.”

If we assume that the above is true, then a person who had sight damage due to the right side of the brain wouldn’t actually know that they were having vision problems in the left eye (Johnson, 1998 ). Therefore it is not only possible that a person could missing the connection in the brain which allows them to act on spiritual, but they would also not know that they are missing this.

So what? Spirituality isn’t all that.

Well if we analyse what spirituality is on a slightly deeper level, we can assess what said person is missing out on. As human beings we have evolved with a tendancy to know without knowing why we know, but if we saw something we which we knew was wrong – would we respond to that? If you saw a woman being kicked on the ground, would you feel angry or upset? Would it affect you more so  if this woman was also pregnant?

And that’s what accessing your spiritual part of the brain is about – responding appropriately to intuitive understanding. And it is unfortunately my conclusive understanding that, although we’re evolutionarily intuitive, we are not all spiritual due to under-development of the brain – at least, not yet.

References

Bossenger, N. (2010). Believing is not seeing.  Retrieved from http://spinewave.co.nz/believing-is-not-seeing/

Hermann, N. (1981). The Creative Brain. Training and Development Journal.

Johnson, G. (1998 ). How the brain works, from http://www.tbiguide.com/howbrainworks.html

Turkington, C. (2002). The Encyclopedia of the Brain and Brain Disorders (2nd ed.). NY: Fact on file, inc.

Time — a word most people throw around in regards to how long before something happens, or is meant to happen. Distance is the measurement of space between one object and another, while time is the measurement of emptiness between one event and the next, hence time is how we contextualise the understanding of beginnings and endings. It is a man-made ideology to explain why things have a beginning and end, however it is a real continuum which is, in itself, infinite. Time doesn’t stop for anything, it’s always moving forward and always with us at this present moment, moving forward as we are.

Imagine a single point, this point has no determined size or position – then imagine a second point, also of no determined size or position. To create the first dimension, all we need is a line joining two single points. This line has no depth and no width. When you draw a second line which connects at any part of the first, you are creating the second dimension. Now the object has width and height.

Time as we know it is the 4^th dimension. If you can imagine a line between two people, that would be a measurement of space in the first 3 dimensions. Now, imagine the same person twice, he or she may have done something different in the second picture, but if you draw a line between those two people, that’s a measurement in the 4^th dimension, so as to say, a measurement in time.

The progressions of time and space occur without our consent, and without our conscious awareness of it. By that, I mean that they don’t work under our control, they are almost separate entities to our existence – they would continue regardless of whether we were here or if we were not. Time, specifically being a separate entity of our existence and separate to space, progresses forward regardless of space, so it’s a valid argument to state that time is infinite.

Our consciousness is more than to simply be conscious. Consciousness can actually be referred to a measurement, as well — much like connectivity is ‘how’ connected something is to another, consciousness is the measure of how conscious someone or something is. You can think of consciousness as an ‘up and down’ measurement and time as a ‘left to right’ measurement. Consciousness, however, is the one thing that can work outside of time and space. Your consciousness is the only entity that can work outside of the laws of time and space because it doesn’t have to be with your material body, and often it isn’t. Consciousness is a bi-product of your so-called spirit. I say space as well because it is possible to disassociate your consciousness from your body, this is known as an out of body experience, and hence you’re technically taking up space without taking up space with this second entity.

So, this article is about time, how can your consciousness be out of time? The idea is where your thoughts lie, it is where (or when) you spend the majority of your thinking. And that brings you to our 3 types of people in terms of consciousness in relation to time.

• People who live in the Past
• People who live in the Present
• People who live in the Future

The past

People who live in the past generally have something to remember, or recall, which continuously draws them back there. This can be a positive experience or a negative experience, the result is the same. The issue with living in the past is that it’s something that cannot change, the past has already happened; hence we cannot do anything about it (if it was a negative experience). Buddhism preaches a very wise practice, it is the nature of Zen to understand that there is no reason to get upset or angry about something – if you can change it, change it; if you can’t, then move on and don’t linger over it as it is a waste of emotion, energy and of course, time.

The very nature of constantly rethinking something that has already happened is a flaw because it causes you to miss out on what’s happening from the time of that experience to the time of your material body.

People will often find that they have a gap in their life, in their being without knowledge of what it is – and when you don’t know what a problem is or even that there is a problem, you don’t know how to fix it. When your consciousness or intuition is in the past, you’re thinking about how to solve problems that you can’t solve, because they’ve already happened, and what happens is you miss all the glory of the experiences that have occurred from that point of experience, to the time of now. Emotional distress can occur very easily for people who live in the past, often sadness, unhappiness,

The Future

The future is on the other end of the field, but I use the word field because it’s still on the same field. Consciousness in a different time frame other than the present cannot bring fulfilment. People who are future orientated will find themselves feeling a dependency on something, often this dependency is on the idea of something happening or occurring. But what do you think the person who’s expecting feels when something doesn’t happen? Often, disappointment, anger, frustration. Do they have a right to? Sure, that’s human nature to feel emotion. But what you gain over time is an altered perception so you don’t get angry – because, really, that is the point of the future, it hasn’t happened yet and we can’t change what the future holds. Yes, the future is forever changing because of choices but it is not a single person’s (yours or mine) actions which determine the future, and often the control that we think we have is illusory.

People who live a future orientated life often live for something else, rather than self-satisfaction and self-fulfilment. Such ideologies can be religious, right to parenting. People will act and be according to what someone else wants and hope (or expect) for the gratification of that being, parent or otherwise. This again forms a gap in your existence because you’re doing something for the wrong reason. Everything you do should be for your self-achievement – any other reason and you’ll live an empty life.

The Present

The present is where our material bodies are and where our consciousness should be. This exact moment is the present, and as time goes on, the next moment will become the current one – and it is only within this current moment that we have control and only control over what we do. We don’t have control over what we have done and what is to happen, and people who get caught up in the idea that they have control literally waste their time, and often their lives. You can imagine our life in this moment as a coin, and on one entire side of that coin is the future; and on the other, the past. Our control is only that of the coin’s thickness and height.

So, how do you come to terms with living in the present? It’s about being able to recognise this lack of control and live the present moment to the fullest. It is about letting go and realising that, rather than get angry about something you can’t control, accept it and brush it off. “But how can you just take a bad experience and not care about it?” What is the logic in paying attention to an experience which you cannot change? If you can change it then change it, by all means. But if you can’t, then why spend emotion and time on that instance instead of moving forward? There is no reward for doing so. The same thing goes for future orientated people, let go of the future, and live your present moment because the future is not guaranteed, and to put your faith in it gives a 50% chance of being disappointed.

Hence, your material body, time and your consciousness should all be in sync with the space you’re in at that point. Living anywhere else will do nothing beneficial for your emotional state of well-being, or your enjoyment of current life experiences.