[Rob Instigator]

R.E.M.
Random Eye Movement.
There is a period in sleep, and it happens with everyone, except a very very few severly brain damaged people, that alsts from 30 minutes to around 45 minutes, where your eyes move "randomly" which is actually your eye reacting to the images conjred up by your brain as you dream. all dreams take place during REM sleep, and most sleep is not REM sleep.
there are many theories as to why this is, and one I have found to be satistfactory is that during REM sleep, the brain is effectively ending all superconscious thought left over from befor you fell asleep, thereby allowing the 4-6 hours of quiet, non-dream sleep your braina nd body both need to regenerate themlseves after a day of excersion.

[Rob Instigator]

and the stuff about death and the last seconds of life, is of course, just an idea I have ruminated upon for twenty or so years, correcting it as I learn new neurobiological info and new shamanistic mystic info.

[m1rr0r dash]

Originally Posted by girlgun

well i was just addressing that one fact.

synth.. there are different stages of sleep. stage 1 and 2, and then 3 and 4 are slow wave sleep or deep sleep. REM is also a stage which becomes more frequent the longer you sleep. you know that rem is rapid eye movement. and when someone has rapid eye movement, it's easy to tell they're dreaming. no one really knows the purpose of dreaming and there are a million theories from totally new age sort of bullshit to it being nothing... neurons firing randomly (which is actually what i believe). but nonetheless, REM is necessary. if you are REM suppressed, you are excessively tired and fatigued.

true, i think it's probably pseudo-random neurons firing while yr brain is trying to accomplish some other task unrelated to what you happen to be experiencing in the "dream" ....maybe related to processing memories, maybe just keeping yr heart and lungs going.... i don't think it's pure noise, but on the other hand i don't think our brains create "dreams" just to entertain us while we sleep...

[Rob Instigator]

if you enter into a sensory deprivation chamber long enough, the brain is fooled into thinking it is asleep and will begin to "dream" while one is awake. It does this also when someone is deprived of sleep for whatever reason, for a long time. the brain needs to "re-format" itself in a ssense and will do so whether you are asleep or not.
stay awake long enough and the brain shorts out and you can literally go insane. supposedly ther is no coming back from that kind iof insane.

scary

[m1rr0r dash]

Originally Posted by pbradley

I've never had a really convincing "long time in a dream but short in reality" kind of experience.

really?? i regularly experience hours and sometimes days in the time between hitting the snooze button twice, with varying degrees of realness - from the occasional "holy shit, what day is it?" to the more usual "that was strange, i want some pancakes..."

[Rob Instigator]

the scariest is when the brain makes up, in a near instant, an entire back story dream to explain something you hear or sense while lightly asleep. has that happened to you?

scientists find it amazing, the speed at which the brain/mind can send thoughts to itself.

it is like a dream that self-predicts what you needed to dream before the event happened, like an alarm going off, or water dripping on you.

they are hard to explain.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by m1rr0r dash

true, i think it's probably pseudo-random neurons firing while yr brain is trying to accomplish some other task unrelated to what you happen to be experiencing in the "dream" ....maybe related to processing memories, maybe just keeping yr heart and lungs going.... i don't think it's pure noise, but on the other hand i don't think our brains create "dreams" just to entertain us while we sleep...

this assumes that the physical aspects of the brain dictate thought and feeling, rather then believing that thought and feeling dictate the physical reactions and activities we observe in the brain. it is a chicken and the egg kind of question..

[m1rr0r dash]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

the scariest is when the brain makes up, in a near instant, an entire back story dream to explain something you hear or sense while lightly asleep. has that happened to you?

scientists find it amazing, the speed at which the brain/mind can send thoughts to itself.

it is like a dream that self-predicts what you needed to dream before the event happened, like an alarm going off, or water dripping on you.

they are hard to explain.

i know what yr talking about, but it hardly ever happens to me because i'm such a heavy sleeper. i think that's why i can re-enter the dream state (hardly ever the actual same dream though it does happen) so easily. my ex said she used to have conversations with my dream-self i the morning as i was waking up. she said sometimes i'd respond coherently but talking about something in the dream i was having, other times it would be a combination of english, french and gibberish... in both cases my eyes could be open and looking around. i have no recollection of any of this. i wonder if she ever asked me who i dreamt about having sex with....

[atari 2600]

Many people having near-death experiences report a slowing-down of time perception as reality becomes dream-like.
As I offered before in another thread, I personally believe that sleeping and dreaming are functions of a larger whole of our true beings and that we are preparing for both life and death as we dream. In dreaming, just as in death (and to an extent in orgasm), our waking consciousness is extinguished.

Dostoevsky writes of his dizzying, consciousness-altering experience before the firing squad prior to getting a last-minute reprieve. The experience changed his life in many ways. One thing it did though is that the stress of the event (and his sufferings in the Siberian labor camp too) probably caused his epilepsy.

C.G. Jung wrote an essay of the Catholic mass ritual as a rehearsal for death and the ideation of self-sacrifice of the ego. Now, Jung was not a Catholic, in fact he was a sun-worshipper of a relatively esoteric Egyptian sect if you can believe it, but much of his study is concerned with comparative religion and mythology as much as psychology and philosophy and these very same questions raised in the thread.
He also wrote much on the subject and history of Christianity in general as saw Christ as a symbol for the actualized self that is part of a larger whole.

Before the big bang happened there was no sense of time, but only of what we can describe as eternity. As one's consciouness is extinguished, one may very well dwell there in that thought (as was written previously in the thread) for eternity. Then again, perhaps one's state of matter is transformed in some other way; at any rate, it cannot be denied that we are eventually, as it is said, food for worms.

All religions seek to provide a basis of understanding of life's mysteries and are concerned with death, but some religions are more obsessed with death and the afterlife than others. In Buddhism, for instance, they crafted the science of death we know as The Tibetan Book Of the Dead that espoused one to clear one's mind of fears and desires as they die. The concept, as you may know, being to embrace the clear white light and escape the cycle of birth and death to reach nirvana. (Lynch's Agent Dale Cooper character provided a memorable westernized version of a Buddhist death ceremony on the Twin Peaks television series).

I think the Buddhists have a very interesting idea with the bardo and reincarnation, but I happen to believe personally that existence on this planet is a one-shot deal and that they are merely attributing a physical form (via the doctrine of reincarnation) for a metaphysical reality. They do, however, have a great notion about the importance of one's state of consciousness in the moment of death. And the Buddhist karmic reminder that the life one leads provides a certain threshold upon the moment of death is a grand one. In other more direct words, life is art and one cannot cheat in death.

[Rob Instigator]

see? this is what I like in internet forums, and this is the only one I go to.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

see? this is what I like in internet forums, and this is the only one I go to.

they usually mash me down when I speak of things like this and accuse me of all kinds of nonsense. in a thread that asked what is a forum good for, this is the answer.

[atari 2600]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

see? this is what I like in internet forums, and this is the only one I go to.

Just as meditation teaches the mind to be able to acquire more endless possibilities of "space" in-between automated and somewhat programmed thought-patterns, time away from this board has helped me make a perhaps less confrontationally provocative post (see my post above) than I would have had I been routinely posting lately.

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

this assumes that the physical aspects of the brain dictate thought and feeling, rather then believing that thought and feeling dictate the physical reactions and activities we observe in the brain. it is a chicken and the egg kind of question..

Reminded me a bit of Krishnamurti:
http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/About_J_Krishnamurti

Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever-limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution.
When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.

Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence.

[pbradley]

holy shit, atari's back

I forgot why you left.

[atari 2600]

every once in a while, I am...

Then again, it (^) could have something to do with the fact that the topic is non-confrontational...as opposed, to say, the "there is no god" and "all religion is stupid"-type of topics.

[pbradley]

yes, it is nice

[atari 2600]

Many would assume, and naturally so, that Christianity teaches a somewhat opposing view of death and the afterlife than Buddhism, but a closer comparative look reveals that there are some important and interesting similarites of belief.

While Buddhism has Escape from The Wheel of Birth and Death as a strived-for ideal option to being reborn based on one's mettle in the bardo stages, Christianity has a heaven and a hell. Buddhism teaches that one must let go of fears (in a loose sense, hell) and desires (in a loose sense, heaven) to reach nirvana and leave samsara.

But Buddhism teaches also that one's likelihood of escaping birth and death is proportional to how one has prepared themselves for death. In other words, the degree to which one has lived an artful life with good karma and a strong mind disciplined in meditation relates to how likely it is that one embrace the clear white light after death losing all fears and desires and rejecting being attracted into being born again into another life.

New Testament Christianity teaches that one needs to repent in the name of Jesus Christ who died for one's sins. It teaches that one can do this at any time before death and be saved from hell and be set aside a place in heaven provided the prayer is heard. Again, this seems to run contrary to the Buddhist idea of karma. I write "seems" because Christianity also (per the above italicized portion) teaches, (and one rarely hears much about it) that God simply doesn't hear the prayers of those that have been cut off from God from living an unjust life that rejected the soul, the human part of being a human animal; the lamentations for salvation of the dying one that chose fear over love all their life isn't heard. God doesn't accept a person for the prayer's sake, but the prayer for the person's sake.

So, we see that essentially in this regard that Buddhism and New Testament Christianity teach the same concept: that life is art and one cannot cheat in death.

[pbradley]

I've always enjoyed the idea that life is art. But so many people forget who the artist is.

[atari 2600]

Life is art in every sense. As Pollock was fond of saying, "Art and life are one...inseparable." It can be good art or bad depending on what you make of your life. And success rarely leads to good art just as the Bible reminds about the rich man's chances of getting into heaven are about the same as a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Humans are fairly obstinate and usually require suffering to live an artful life. Thus, many religions (over?)emphasize the importance of an ascetic lifestyle.

If life is art, then what is art? For as much as has been written over the ages by philosophers and critics concering aesthetics, no one has a comprehensive definition really. My definition of art is meditation or prayer; it's about the the arduous process of perfecting the will no matter what your vocation and evolving consciousness in yourself and those you relate. The lifelong relationship between a cognitive spirit and Eternal Truth finds its expression in artistic endeavour. Even science, even sports can be artistic. The object d'art itself is a manifestation of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious contents in the artist's mind and a symbol for Socratic self-discovery. In Picasso's words: "Art is a lie, but a lie that leads us to the truth."

__________________
"Music is my religion. There'll be music in the hereafter too." - Jimi Hendrix

[floatingslowly]

Originally Posted by atari 2600

Many would assume, and naturally so, that Christianity teaches a somewhat opposing view of death and the afterlife than Buddhism, but a closer comparative look reveals that there are some important and interesting similarites of belief.

I think it's great that over mankind's history, isolated groups of people have developed belief systems that often mirror each other.

the medicine wheel of native american belief wisely predicts and explains this similarity.


the Great Spirit exists within the circle of life.

as a man (or woman) traverses this circle through time and experience, they will each have a different view inward, but ultimately, they are "seeing" the same thing.

I'm pretty sure that I've posted almost exactly this same thing before, but I think that it's beautiful. [this board will never witness me post anything else as personal].

although my beliefs do not attract me to any one organized religion, I feel sad for those that do not see or sense the underlying current that caused this infinitely complex universe to arise.

as far as art goes, I feel that it stems from the same place as religion.

[/endtxt]

[ALIEN ANAL]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

the scariest is when the brain makes up, in a near instant, an entire back story dream to explain something you hear or sense while lightly asleep. has that happened to you?

scientists find it amazing, the speed at which the brain/mind can send thoughts to itself.

it is like a dream that self-predicts what you needed to dream before the event happened, like an alarm going off, or water dripping on you.

they are hard to explain.

i have often thought about how this works
like for example..if someone knockson my bedroom door and then i have a dream about someone walking all the way up from the hallway and knocking on my door... so when in the real world someone knocked on my door my brain made a dream that seemed like it was real time..yet it must of been so fast to sync up with the real door knocking...did that make sense