Thinking about what prevents me from greater lucidity:
When I’m feeling good, seeing things as they are (lucid living) is boring, image-ining them beyond themselves is where the fun lies. When I’m feeling bad, seeing things as they are is painful and even dangerous given my psychoemotional lability.
You?
Nothing prevents the brain from awakening to the darkness it inhabits and the dreaming that is its actuality. A flash of insight makes the brain aware that it is darkness, ignorance, make-believe, and an interest in self-knowledge may ensue.
What prevents this insight?
Is it up to us whether we are awakened or are we all at the mercy of the underlying system (the universe) that we are part of? Is there a genetic component that determines if a person can be awakened?
My answer was that nothing prevents insight because the brain can’t prevent what it doesn’t know is possible. But, it may be that a brain can be more or less vulnerable to insight by being more or less impermeable.
What prevents insight assuming it’s not the brain?
Nature and nurture play roles in awakening. Karma.
I don’t see why any brain can’t have an insight.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
The brain is the ground that gets the grooves, but it does not choose. What you say is ignorant. WTF do you people spend time on?
You seem to think that thought has a mind of its own and does what it will; that the brain is just a generator that supplies the power thought needs to do its mischief.
The mind is thought. The psychological phenomenon, you that looks out onto the world, is thought. The brain isn’t the generator; experience, challenge is. There is only a body and its thought process. There’s nothing else sitting in your chair reading this.
There is a body (which includes its brain) and there is the “thought process”, which is a function of the brain, a mechanism/process the brain uses to solve problems, imagine and invent things, practice reason, etc.
The brain is the organ of organization. The body is lost without it.
So how do you see ‘freedom’ fitting into this? Thought can’t be ‘free’ and certainly the body can’t. K’s point was that the “house is burning” and that “freedom is essential “. He seemed to be pointing at another, undiscovered potential possibility?
He called it a “new form of awareness”…Attention.
Are you ever wrong! It’s thought that imagines and invents, that captivates the brain. You are thought.
This is like saying the inventor and user of the camera does not choose what to photograph…the camera does!
As I’ve said and explained before you appeared, thought is the mechanism the brain utilizes. If you can prove otherwise, that should be interesting.
K said it was thought that was the trickster, not the brain. It was thought that created the ‘thinker’ as separate from itself. The ‘thinker’ is me, a projection of thought.
Is that insight of the dog that it can use the mirror?
Isn’t that like saying it’s guns that kill people - not the people who use guns to kill people?
If thought is “the trickster”, why does the brain need to undergo transformation? Is the problem that the brain isn’t aware of what thought is doing or sees nothing wrong or dysfunctional about what thought is doing?
To make the case that thought is an agent of evil that has high-jacked the brain, one has to explain not only how and why thought has done this, but why the brain doesn’t do anything about it, since thought is a function of the brain.
What’s interesting about the belief that thought is the culprit (if there is a culprit), is that believing, drawing a conclusion, is psychological thought. With no credible evidence to support their belief, a believer has nothing but their belief to “stand” on.
I / me is the unnecessary psychological thought that has to end.