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February 16th, 2009 by Sean The Spirit Is Not Special

(More ramblings)

There is a certain special property to the unknown. When we don’t know something, our imagination is free to fill in the details. Like a magic trick: when we see an amazing illusion, the fact that it fools us has a special feel. But once we learn the actual trick behind it - usually something very simple - that feeling is lost. It’s no longer special. It’s just a stupid trick.

As a culture, we don’t know what happens when we die. A lot of us have beliefs, but because the concept of death is irreversible by definition… there is no certainty. As a result, death holds a very unique place in our minds. It is inherently unknown, and therefore inherently special.

There are ways to study death without actually dieing, though. Out of body experiences might be related in some way (I believe that they are, but to be fair, I haven’t proven it). But there’s another way to study death. Study reality itself. If we learn something about reality, then we can apply it to death, even though we can’t study death directly.

The more I deconstruct myself, the more I realize that so many things are contained only in mind. For example: time. Is time etched into reality itself? Does reality know that it is 11:47am? No. “11:47am” is a result of mind. It was a system built by humans after noticing the frequency between night and day, and the seasonal changes, etc. If I go to Mars, then our human system of time is completely useless. Reality doesn’t care about time - only mind does.

Recently, I’ve discovered that “sacred”, “greater meaning”, “purpose”, “divine”, etc… is contained only in mind. Reality doesn’t care about what an event means to you. Remove the mind, and the meaning is removed.

Death is also a product of only-mind. Reality follows the conservation of energy: nothing is created or destroyed. What does this mean?

It means that we’ve circumvented the need to study death. Is there life after death? The question doesn’t make sense. Or rather, if I’m forced to answer, then the answer I come up with is:

If there is life after death, then ok. If there isn’t, then ok.

What’s so special about the spirit anyways?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Note to Self, Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

### 15 Responses to “The Spirit Is Not Special”

1. SheepKing Says:
   February 16th, 2009 at 1:35 pm

   I find it hard to believe that ‘time’ is purely a man made concept.

   If we think of the concept of time, what does it represent? Motion, Change, Decay… and many other things.

   When humans all die out, or if we never existed, would the universe have stopped, and been put into stasis? Even without mind, the universe continues to do it’s thing. Without time an object would be unable to move, stars would not ‘burn out’, and events like the big-bang wouldn’t have happened.

   I don’t know what unit of measure the universe uses; But it’s probably not seconds, minutes, hours, days :-p

2. Anonymous Dark Says:
   February 16th, 2009 at 6:32 pm

   Yeah…we may measure time, but without time, everything would occur at once…or not at all. Something that happened one human year ago happened in the past, whether humans are measuring time or not.

3. bobelly Says:
   February 16th, 2009 at 10:03 pm

   What’s the point of all this questioning if nothing is really significant and reality just is? Then the only thing to do would be to go with the flow and try to get the maximum enjoyment as possible.

   Also, is it possible to ask your subconscious these deeper-meaning questions? Or does your subconscious want you to come to the “answer” on your own? I recall Robert Peterson tried to ask his inner voice the meaning of life.

4. Steven Says:
   February 16th, 2009 at 11:01 pm

   Does time exist? On the level of mind it does, I think outside of mind it does not. Outside of mind there is no consciousness or duality to create contrast. Why do I think this? Look at what we call solid. We know that it appears to be solid but under the right conditions we see that it is not. So to with time, we only see it at a certain level, it appears only one way to us, is that it’s true face? I would venture to say that it is not. By this sense there would need to be some function of universal consciousness to witness the movement of the universe, or the universe is inherently conscious. Also take into account that we see time as a variable dependent on distance and velocity. If times does not exist, do these two also not exist?

   Reality does not care, it is objective, it has no sense of things or more to say it does not have ego. It does not care, but it can be utilized and it is responsive. Look at the experiments and games that are played with reality.

   To define death, does there needs to be a definition of life or consciousness? When you say that we die, what part of you is making that reference and what part of you is dieing? We have various faces and states of consciousness that we use and display on a daily and moment by moment basis. When we die, do all of these states of consciousness continue on, or just that part that is truly you?

   Spirit is that part in us that is part of the greater whole. It connects us to the responsive consciousness of reality, of the universe. Being that reality is objective, there is no answer to give and it would be limited by the finite mind. It is as they say, what you make of it. For some this can be very depressive, to others it is very freeing. As the universe is objective, we create our reality. Without spirit there would be no creative interaction.

5. X-Master Says:
   February 17th, 2009 at 12:59 am

   Well as far as time goes, it is hard to say. Since as far as human time is concerned, it could just be an illusion. Since the past is just memories, and memories can always be changed. And the future hasn’t happened yet. So both past and future do not exist, at least not in the sense mentioned above. So it is only the present moment that exists just because that is all we can be aware of. But the universe as a whole may have something similar to our concept of time, since you don’t have to have the passage of time to acheive the same effect, since there could be some kind of system working that is beyond our current understanding, that preforms the same function.

   As for death, well, I guess we will all find out when we get there.

   And I have to agree with Steven about the spirit.

6. Antisankari Says:
   February 19th, 2009 at 6:53 am

   Again, are the ghost sightings and documented encounters withc such true or not. Answer this, and you have your spirit dillemma solved.

7. Claudius Says:
   February 21st, 2009 at 12:24 am

   First of all, trying to discuss the “mechanics” of time in forums like this is like trying to teach a toddler how to drive a car. You would need to have some sort of knowledge in Metaphysics If you even want to begin to understand how time works and all that jazz. You’ll find a wide range of books, that talk about philosophers of time, such as Gottfried Leibniz, Ernst Mach, and even Sir Isaac Newton. They all theorized on what time was and how it influenced us. There are also tons of books on metaphysics which I think you would find pleasantly orgasmic, seeing as how you like to question reality a lot.

   However, I think your notion of time resembles a lot like what Albert Einstein had said. He basically stated that time is in fact not real. It is only a construct of the mind. Not only that, he also said space was a construct of the mind. Both time and space are merely embedded into our minds because of how we perceive things. However, it is inhuman for us to see things in any other wayay because not having a concept of time or space is like being 3/4 of the way dead. This is why it is extremely difficult for us as humans to grasp this concept.

8. Psikillion Says:
   February 26th, 2009 at 4:38 pm

   I know that time is in a way related to the mind. However, if this reality is truly a real reality (in contrast with virtual realities and such), there are other people who are actual people and not machines, and these people can perceive time, then time must be related in some way to the physical universe.

   And I personally find Steven’s post about the spirit intriguing…

9. Niushirra Says:
   February 27th, 2009 at 6:51 pm

   This is really riddled with a lot of fallacies Sean; I’m disappointed. For example, you imply that since the universe says no energy is destroyed or created, death is only an illusion. What if our minds were created from the order and complexity held in our nervous system? That order and complexity can definitely be destroyed. Is the difference between life and death, entropy and antientropy?

10. Niushirra Says:
    February 27th, 2009 at 6:52 pm

    Also, why assume death is necessarily a constant?

11. Dancin Coyote Says:
    March 3rd, 2009 at 4:18 am

    Hey, I’ve sent you an email. Some of the ideas you’re saying I’ve thought about myself. It’s refreshing to finally see someone else doing the same thing.

12. Dancin Coyote Says:
    March 3rd, 2009 at 4:29 am

    What is your Dangerous Idea? Edited by John Brockman. The book is basically a collaborative text written by a bunch of “leading scientific minds” about what their “most dangerous ideas” are. Which I must say is very fascinating, because it not only shows what most of them are working on, but it also points a finger towards where these potential Frankensteins might lead.

    The following I quote from one of the scientists (Robert Shapiro) in the book. (upon closer inspection I’ve found he is a …senior research scientist in the Department of Chemistry )

    “1953… …Stanley Miller… …demonstrated that a mixture of small organic molecules (monomers) could readily be prepared by exposing a mixture of simple gases to an electrical spark. Similar compounds were found in meteorites, which suggested that organic monomers may be widely distributed in the universe… …James Watson and Francis Crick. They demonstrated that the heredity of living organisms was stored in a very large molecule called DNA. DNA is a polymer, a substance made by stringing many smaller units together as links are joined to form a long chain… … the geometrical beauty of the DNA double helix, led many scientists to consider it the essence of life itself. One flaw, however, spoiled this picture: DNA could store information, but it could not reproduce itself without the assistance of proteins, a different type of polymer. Proteins are also adept at catalyzing many other chemical reactions considered necessary for life… …Which came first: DNA or proteins? An apparent answer emerged when it was found that another polymer, RNA (a cousin of DNA), could manage both heredity and catalysis. In 1986, Walter Gilbert proposed that life began in an RNA world-that is, when an RNA molecule that could copy itself was formed, by chance, in a pool of its own building blocks. Unfortunately, a half century of chemical experiments have demonstrated that nature has no inclination to prepare RNA, or even the building blocks (nucleotides) that must be linked together to form it…”

    We don’t know how life started right now, the idea that we’re simply a biological mass is an unprovable theory, something rather stupid to say especially when you’re interested in looking for answers and not spouting ridged dogmas. I don’t think the quote I posted points towards a creation theory because I think it is possible to find the missing link that theoretically started this whole shebang. However I’ll quote another book where the author has also done his research.

    “To make sense of the world at all, our scientists are, furthermore, now forced to talk about a reality founded on the notion of a ten-dimensional hyperspace-the idea that there are other dimensions or invisible layers beyond the world we know. There is no proof for this, of course; but only by supposition does reality become feasible. Without it, the world as we think we know it could not exist. But by believing in something they have no evidence for, our scientists have, in fact become theologians.”

    From the book: Plant Spirit Shamanism, by Heaven Charing.

    I’ll say from an anthropological/scientific standpoint all cultures practice magic(k) and/or supernatural things. All cultures also say they get results from said practice, beit purely psychological or actually magic(k)al. I do not have enough evidence to convince anyone anything, because you ’skeptics’ have your pre-determined ideas about life, that is in fact very anti-science, and sounds more like blatant dogma to me.

13. Mr. Tallyman Says:
    March 3rd, 2009 at 10:36 pm

    If matter is indeed, just an illusion; then, that would make your brain an illusion as well.. (rather than the word “illusion” you could say hollogram). And if this illusion is your valued life, then what is it that gives anything meaning? A soul?

    I think that a living person is a consuming entity, much like a fire, and as long as we have fuel, we will keep on radiating energy. Biological reproduction is like passing the flame onto another torch, via offspring.

    Ok, so we are consuming fuel, changing energy into different states and all that - similar to fire - but what does comparing conciousness to fire say about our ego?

    Does one fire think that it is a completely different fire, just because it is burning on a different piece of wood?

    Fire is the same any time it is fire..

    Same as conciousness/soul.

    Lo-HAHA!! Synchronicities are the adventures of universal evolution!

    Tally me Bananas =)

14. GoldenJoe Says:
    April 19th, 2009 at 12:02 am

    Despite being able to program pretty much anything I like, I still think computers are pretty neat. Having experienced metaphysical events, I also only find them to be that much more interesting. Learning how something works shouldn’t make it less special. If you have a passion for the subject at hand, you should be that much more excited to forge ahead and do something even better with your new knowledge.

15. illiterate hippie Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 4:25 am

    I think the “spirit” is what carries on after our actions. The ripples we leave in the waters of causality. The little influence we may have in our daily lives. The DNA we pass on in our children.

    There is always life after death. You die; your body rots and structured organic matter becomes plain old matter again, perhaps to be picked up by more living organisms. So life goes on.

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