The sick or the sage?

Time does matter,
If you were born some 900 years ago, you could have become a saint or a master have you had visions (and an exotic lifestyle).
If you were born last century(ish), you would be considered schizophrenic have you had visions (and the exotic lifestyle could even worsen things for you).

I was just reading Ibn Arabi's biography, and without any disrespect meant, I was wondering what would have happened to him if he were born in our time. Perhaps lots of pills and mental hospital! Good for him!

The Lights are on. Obviously someone is home. but could she get the door open?

There’s a concept in psychology, called “Automaticity” which is defined as the ability to do things automatically and without occupying the conscious mind. An action or behavior becomes automatic by learning, practicing and habituating. By this definition, one might think that, okay; this “Automaticity” only takes a fraction of our daily actions, meaning that we are conscious the rest of the time, but is it really so?

Automaticity has also been considered as the "lack of awareness in mental processes" in some texts. In that sense, three ways have been identified in which we may be unaware of a mental process: 1) we may be unaware of the presence of a stimulus (e.g., subliminal priming, like in hypnosis). 2) We may be unaware of the way in which a stimulus has been interpreted or categorized(for e.g due to some unconscious beliefs). 3) We may be unaware of factors that influence our behavior(like environmental or physiological factors).

There have been quite a few studies on the subject (on priming mostly in the studies I saw), a few of which are done by Bargh which led him to, in the extreme case, claim that:

“I emphatically push the point that automatic, nonconscious processes pervade all aspects of mental and social life, in order to overcome what I consider dominant, even implicit, assumptions to the contrary.”

Then he was criticized that he might have overestimated the role of automatic processes in the social interactions, which led him to revise his statement as follows:

“Bloodied but unbowed, I gamely concede that the commentators did push me back from a position of 100% automaticity but only to an Ivory soap bar degree of purity in my beliefs about the degree of automaticity in our psychological reactions from moment to moment.”

He implies that social cognition and behavior is 99.44% automatic.

I also found the quote from Malcom Gladwell's book "Blink"(I haven't read the book though, only saw the quote in some paper) worth noting here:

"The adaptive unconscious is not to be confused with the unconscious described by Sigmund Freud, which was a dark and murky place filled with desires and memories and fantasies that were too disturbing for us to think about consciously. This new notion of the adaptive unconscious is thought of, instead, as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”

What it means is that, not only do we need function unconsciously in order to do most of our everyday actions efficienlty, it might have even slowed us down if we were to do otherwise. We might think we are conscious (I sure do) while doing things, but it doesn’t mean that our being conscious leads to our doing whatever we are doing in the right manner.

I’m very much tempted to relate this to the issue of “free will” and I’ve seen the hints and comments in some papers to this area as well (so it’s not only me). But the subject by itself requires a great deal of pondering. If this is true, it might even prove that mental states are only epiphenomenal, i.e. consciousness doesn’t play a causal role and is only a by-product of the brain states.

the gist of it all

Fallen into existence,
forced into be,
c'est la vie.

By my dear friend, Sofy

Thinner than air it might be, but how long could you live without it?

Isn't it a fact that , wherever there is communication, in any form of it, there exists some sort of meaning?

Well, my thoughts, for a rather long while were focused on "meaning".On What it is, I mean, what is its essence? How does it emerge? And how would it feel without it?

I could only briefly understand the answer to the last question, which is not even communicable(and I believe it's not imaginable even if I could somehow explain it).

Anyhow, it didn't stop there. I was recently watching some TV show, in which some people healed patients with some severe diseases. I'd also seen in person (years ago) some sufis' self-mutilation without any further marks on their bodies. It might seem irrelevant at first, but it left me dazed for a long time, that how could it be, that doing the same thing causes me bleed and even die, but for them, it doesn't create even a slight sign of disturbance.

Now, I don't know if it's an established theory or an obvious fact, but it came to my notice only recently, that maybe, meaning is not exclusive to human beings. it comes in different levels, and defined for every group of species(different forms of life) probably different from each other. Animals, plants (also I've read about some studies regarding plants understanding emotions, which again, is a level of communication) and even cells,  communicate it at some level.

Then the sufi, in a way(even unconsciously) might be capable of communicating with the sub-parts of his body, namely the cells and could interact with them in a way we, normal people, can't. And so does the healer.

between jumping constantly and standing at one place, would you like to sit and think for a while?

There's a conflict between society and rebel in that, one cannot exist in the existence of the other. I use "rebel" here, not just as an act against the government, but against the norms and rules in general (and in a more detailed sense, an act even against one's own belief system).
I believe most of people know why it's widely prohibited. The question is, why should we be, and why aren't we rebellious enough?
Now, I was going to list some answers to these two questions.. but it came out a little too prescriptive, which was against the intention of this post. so I leave this to the individual's judgement to find out how being rebellious might be helpful.
As for my own judgement, I said rebel could be an act against the belief system of the individual. what I meant was, even though I deeply believe that having integrity and not changing mind easily are good qualities (and there's no conflict here if it's clear enough), questioning one's beliefs and really questioning them is also an act of rebel which we are usually disinclined to do. For example, a theist, an atheist or even an agnostic, probably believe they are right in their own judgement about God, and all have some sort of explanation for their beliefs; or someone who's never done drugs, might think he knows well enough what the pitfalls of using drugs are and that's good enough reason not to try it. A rebel, on the other hand, doesn't make statements like this. To him, life is a lab and one should experiment and experience the opposing sides in order to get a result and a subsequent judgement.

Krishnamurti, believes in a more radical form of rebel, in which having beliefs is contradictory to being a rebel:


"... an intelligent mind is a mind which is not satisfied
with explanations, with conclusions; nor is it a mind that believes, because belief is again another form of conclusion. An  intelligent mind is an inquiring mind, a mind that is watching, learning, studying. Which means what? That there is intelligence only when there is no fear,  when you are willing to rebel, to go
against the whole social structure in order to find out what God is, or to discover the truth of anything."

It might be very difficult(if not impossible) not to have some sort of belief system, in that , we need an evaluating system to be able to interact with our environment. I guess his point is that, remaining flexible and open is a feature of the rebel.
But the question is, for most of us(since societies survive better than rebels), is it that our answers are satisfactory enough that we don't want to give them up, or is it that it's easier and safer for us to stick to them instead of periodically revising ourselves?