I've already given Whitehair as much rep as I can. Can some of you give him a bit more? One rep somehow doesn't seem enough.
General / Off-Topic Your Favourite Quotes
- Thread starter Genus
- Start date
I've already given Whitehair as much rep as I can. Can some of you give him a bit more? One rep somehow doesn't seem enough.
Terry Pratchett wrote a lot of wise things hidden under his humour.
And what about the cat, does she not observe whether she is alive or not?
Not, if she is dead, I admit but surely this complicates the thought experiment which Schrodinger created to show the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead until the state has been observed. Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; on the contrary, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics.*
So what is wrong with admitting that we don’t know?
*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat#Origin_and_motivation
If by every you each decade you'd by sort of right but that's normal since new things are discovered.
Actually, light can and does push stuff around thus afecting speed and trajectory.
We probed into the nature of space and time, and of the universal, both with regard to external nature and with regard to mind. But then, we went on to consider the general disorder and confusion that pervades the consciousness of mankind. It is here that I encountered what I feel to be Krishnamurti's major discovery. What he was seriously proposing is that all this disorder, which is the root cause of such widespread sorrow and misery, and which prevents human beings from properly working together, has its root in the fact that we are ignorant of the general nature of our own processes of thought. Or to put it differently it may be said that we do not see what is actually happening, when we are engaged in the activity of thinking. ~ David Bohm
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts. ~ Charles Darwin
I wish Mr. Darwin had spent as much time in India as the Galapagos. I had no idea of the extent of his brilliance. Wow.
It's not about controlling our thoughts. It's about learning to ignore them. When we just wake up in the morning, for many of us our mind is a blank. Yet we know we are alive. THAT is the divine part of ourselves. We are aware. That is enough. Ideally, that is the state of mind to be cherished and kept throughout the work day. When words come in, i.e. thoughts- that's where the havoc is wreaked when uncontrolled. One cannot solve problems at the level of the problem. That is, one cannot use thoughts to solve the problem of over-thoughtting. The trick is to ignore them. If you value your thoughts highly, ignoring your thoughts will be almost insurmountable. Hence the destruction of the ego and all the meditation modalities. The key to controlling our thoughts is to just be aware of the unnecessary thoughts in our head (awareness is also what many refer to as "mindfulness"). Yes, when comparing external objects like different houses to buy, one has to think in order to purchase the house that is best for you. Thoughts are an excellent external tool for survival. But they are only a tool. Your thoughts are not the real you. Your awareness is. Awareness is everything.
I wish Mr. Darwin had spent as much time in India as the Galapagos. I had no idea of the extent of his brilliance. Wow.
It's not about controlling our thoughts. It's about learning to ignore them. When we just wake up in the morning, for many of us our mind is a blank. Yet we know we are alive. THAT is the divine part of ourselves. We are aware. That is enough. Ideally, that is the state of mind to be cherished and kept throughout the work day. When words come in, i.e. thoughts- that's where the havoc is wreaked when uncontrolled. One cannot solve problems at the level of the problem. That is, one cannot use thoughts to solve the problem of over-thoughtting. The trick is to ignore them. If you value your thoughts highly, ignoring your thoughts will be almost insurmountable. Hence the destruction of the ego and all the meditation modalities. The key to controlling our thoughts is to just be aware of the unnecessary thoughts in our head (awareness is also what many refer to as "mindfulness"). Yes, when comparing external objects like different houses to buy, one has to think in order to purchase the house that is best for you. Thoughts are an excellent external tool for survival. But they are only a tool. Your thoughts are not the real you. Your awareness is. Awareness is everything.
Same thing.
"What I mean by 'thought' is the whole thing — thought, 'felt', the body, the whole society sharing thoughts — it's all one process. It is essential for me not to break that up, because it's all one process; somebody else's thought becomes my thought, and vice versa. Therefore it would be wrong and misleading to break it up into my thought, your thought, my feelings, these feelings, those feelings. I would say that thought makes what is often called in modern language a system. A system means a set of connected things or parts. But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent — not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence. A corporation is organized as a system — it has this department, that department, that department... they don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.
Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society — as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times. Thought has been constantly evolving and we can't say when that system began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal. It was probably very simple thought before civilization, and now it has become very complex and ramified and has much more incoherence than before.
Now, I say that this system has a fault in it — a 'systematic fault'. It is not a fault here, there or here, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system. Can you picture that? It is everywhere and nowhere. You may say "I see a problem here, so I will bring my thoughts to bear on this problem". But "my" thought is part of the system. It has the same fault as the fault I'm trying to look at, or a similar fault.
Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates."
~ David Bohm
+1 rep
very interesting
I just glanced over his Wikipedia bio. Professor Bohm suffered from depression at the end of his life. It is all too tragic that his depressive thoughts got the better of him whilst knowing exactly that they were the problem to begin with. Ignoring thought was not possible in his case. Sigh....
Being a content and fulfilled individual has absolutely nothing to do with how smart or educated one is.......
I now don't mind being sorta stupid (when my husband starts talking math and quantum physics I just zone out and try to think about Hello Kitty to make myself feel better)
Maybe.
Could be that when you get to the level of knowing as much stuff as him, it's enough to depress the hell out of most people.
We're human after all.
+ Rep for your sig, and this:
"Everyone sounds like Meryl Streep with a gun to their head."— Mike Ehrmantraut (Breaking Bad)
everybody deserves our forgiveness, without exception without limits (No one can judge on partial evidence. Since we do not know all of the past, the future, the total impact of genetics on psyches, etc.,)
true, charitable love makes no exclusions
okay, easier said than done
i'm a lunatic
LMAO
o7
"You are right, I have always known about man. From the evidence I believe his wisdom must walk hand in hand with his idiocy. His emotions must rule his brain. He must be a warlike creature who gives battle to everything around him, even himself."
Dr Zaius
The Planet of the Apes (1968)
Dr Zaius
The Planet of the Apes (1968)
Last edited: