When this does happen with a disease such as Alzheimer’s, it is a disaster. Not recognizing one’s spouse, child etc. But somehow this ‘personal reality’ , if any of this is true, has to ‘give way’ voluntarily to whatever else is possible. Much like other examples in nature, emerging from one stage of development and moving into another? However unlike the other examples in Nature, do we have a role to play for this to come about? Is that the action of ‘negation’? The action of staying with discontent?
We can only speculate as to how the brain that has ceased to be self-centered will operate, but I don’t see why it would have to forget anything. Wouldn’t it be about realizing one’s actual (as opposed to psychological) relationship with things and others?
Yes rather than the limited ‘personal reality’ there would be the ‘actual’ reality. And yes there would be no ‘forgetting’ as with Alzheimer’s, perhaps more of an absence of images stored from the past?
Why would those images be a problem once their actual significance is seen for what it is? They’re just prompts, cues, the bell that Pavlov’s dogs responded to. It’s better to see them for what they actually are than to annihilate them; better to never forget that the brain is capable of limiting itself to terms and conditions that can be more binding than temporary.
1 Like
Wouldn’t seeing them with ‘fresh’ eyes “see them for what they are” and the seeing would reveal whether the image is ‘limiting’ or of some value. My image of you could have been formed out of fear by the self. If the fear is gone, it seems the image would just dissolve?
It’s better that it doesn’t dissolve because it’s a reminder of what the brain is capable of. It’s like looking at ancient religious artifacts and images that were believed to have magical powers because of what was unknown about the brain’s power of suggestion.
Yes like as a child I can remember standing in front of a ‘picture’ of Jesus and asking for some personal miracle to happen!
Probably one of those pictures of Jesus portrayed as a Caucasian…
Were there any other kind?..yes a very nice looking Jewish boy, long brown hair and in his chest a big red heart with a vine of thorns wrapped around it. And of course the halo!
Don’t think I ever saw that one. It’s Catholic if it has the open-heart-thorn display, Jesus would be more likely to look Italian, and if he has a halo, it distracts from the fact that his hair is unusually long for Jewish men at the time.
The American Jesus used to be a castrated American man…too Godly to do bodily harm to anyone, too effeminate to exploit women, but so committed to exposing hypocrisy and greed in the name of God that he’s willing to suffer the most torturous death, and be tempted to forsake God.
I don’t know what the American Jesus looks like now, though, because it isn’t clear. What would a white-supremacist Jesus look like that would be significantly different from what it’s always been? Did he grow a pair?