Iolaus wrote:But don't you see that there is a difference between believing that one has a free will, versus thinking that whatsoever you decide to do is the right thing?
One is a path of service to self, with might making right. The other is actually neutral, but allows for either path; just to please James Hayes I will call them the paths of contraction (personal power and dominance) versus the path of expansion (an expended sense of self to include everyone).
Yes, I do see this. I hope you meant to imply that
the latter is the path of service to the self, and
the former actually neutral, which isn't clear from your syntax above.
brokenhead: Dreams are the mind's waste material.
Iolaus: What a shocking thing to say. Some people have prescient dreams. Some people have made scientific breakthroughs in dreams. Edgar Cacye tapped into some kind of knowledge field in his sleep. I was visited by an angel in a dream. And, I have a lifelong learning process going on in my dreams. For example, through many falling dreams I have learned to fly, learning to fly, I have come to recognize that I am able to fly when I have a falling dream, which means that I am dreaming.
I stand by my assessment, which is not entirely original with me.
When you intake food, the breakdown of that food begins in the mouth with salivase attacking carbohydrates. It continues in the stomach and is processed and separated and the nutrients absorbed and the waste is finally eliminated. I believe that during the day we are bombarded with more stimuli and information than we can analyze all at once
or are ever required to analyze for our own survival. The analysis continues while we are still awake in the subconscious. During sleep, when no more external stimuli are permitted, we experience dreams. We recall only a small portion of our dreams. The ones we do recall upon waking are not usually retained the way waking memories are. It takes immediate effort of recalling them and
placing them somewhere else for safekeeping. If we fail to do this, extraordinary methods such as hypnosis or meditation are required to recall them, if indeed reliable recall is possible.
I am suggesting that if dreams were not waste material, storage, recall, and analysis would be much easier and more common. If retention were as necessary as it is for external stimuli entering consciousness, it would occur more readily. Most just disappear - we see them once and they are gone forever
just like excrement.
Most dreams are not only never recalled, but the ones that are are rarely interesting or easy to interpret or analyze. Most seem meaningless, even the pleasant ones.
There is nothing abnormal about wanting to examine dreams. And many people look at their own feces before flushing, much the way it is quite natural for a dog to sniff its freshly-made turd. I hear in Europe, many commodes are made with a shelf for a bowel movement to fall on prior to flushing just so that a person can look to make sure everything is copacetic.
And if there is any useful content in dreams, do not forget that in a healthy person with a healthy diet, excrement is loaded with nutrients which have not been absorbed, as a well-fed body is not 100 percent efficient at removing them from what has been ingested. Even a starving body shits out something for the flies.
The content of the dreams are not important, but coming back to the same important processes is.
My point in a nutshell.
Mind you, I am not saying the angel who has visited is not real, is other than an angel, or is insignificant. More likely, that angel is there when you are awake and his input lost in the harsh glare of daylight. Upon encountering him in your dream, you are likely to be more highly alert to your circumstances and surroundings and what you permit into your psyche when you are awake. This is not unlike your reaction would be if you noticed something unusual in your stool, such as a load of worms or a particularly foul odor. In such a case you may watch your diet more closely or avoid the type of food that caused the unusually offensive bowel movement.
One time, I dreamed that I was dying of a heart attack, on a lawn on a sunny day. Since the situation of the death (not suffocation which I can't seem to stand) was not so terrifying, I decided, hey, I'll just go with it. Although I did not realize I was dreaming. Unfortunately, as I surrendered to death I awoke.
Or fortunately. You know what they say about dying within a dream, that it presages your actual, immanent demise.
I don't think I was attempting to be shocking with my statement that dreams are mental waste, merely matter-of-fact. If you are finding yourself trying to get more out of your dreams than most other people, it could be that you are not being fully or adequately "nourished" by waking stimuli, that you are requiring, either psychologically or spiritually, more than you find yourself getting.
You say some people have prescient dreams. This isn't as mysterious or uncommon as it may first sound. If we take in external stimuli all day, every day, we can be sure that external sights and sounds which impinge on or minds is merely information getting to us of external events occurring. These external events live outside us, and are all causes which have effects which are also external to us. Much of our analysis goes on subconsciously while we are awake and during sleep. If we are called upon to relate the results or our analysis while we are awake, we give our best assessment. This often takes a prescient form. We do this every day, all the time. It is so common, we would never think of calling "prescient." If anything, we regard it as "common sense." ("If I don't fill my car today, I'm liable to run out of gas on the expressway home.") If the assessment is not required of us, we may produce it nonetheless and only become aware of it
on the way out, as it is being excreted, that is,
in a "prescient" dream. ("There will be a severe aftershock from yesterday's earthquake in China...")
I find my dreams interesting as well, though almost always quickly forgotten. I also find that if I go over them upon waking in order to relive them or remember them, I almost always change them. I refashion them into something more coherent, the way I would if I were to relate them to another person. I alter them, that is, into something less like the excrement they are in their natural form, and into something less unpalettable.
But I check my poo-poo before flushing, too...
