[kevincarter]

We are experiencing “good times”, people have all they can wish for and still not many seem to have a fulfilled life. Of all the people around me, none of them has to worry about food, shelter, clothes, security or healthcare. They have all have this things more or less granted, yet many are depressed and find their life don’t have a meaning. We live in “advanced” countries with hospitals and professionals that can make us live longer, but it seems to me that the longer we can live the less reasons we have to live!

Me? I have reasons to live, I’m making preparations!

[vision-master]

1st circuit: Survival/security
2nd circuit: Territorial/Emotional
3rd circuit: Conceptual
4th circuit: Social/Sexual

What do you do after these 4 circuits are satisfied?

Time to reach for those upper levels of consciousness.

[Narz]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vision-master', 'T')ime to reach for those upper levels of consciousness.

[skiwi]

6 am here and I have to waste 2 hours sleeping till 8 am

Interviews with Eckhart Tolle

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')or two years, a small man sits quietly on a park bench. People walk by, lost in their thoughts. One day someone asks him a question. In the weeks that follow there are more people and more questions. Word spreads that the man is a "mystic," and has discovered something that brings peace and meaning into our lives. It sounds like fiction, but today that man, Eckhart Tolle, is known worldwide for his teachings on spiritual enlightenment through the power of the present moment. His first book, The Power of Now, is an international bestseller, and has been translated into 17 languages. More than 20 years have passed since Eckhart Tolle answered his first question on that park bench. While his audience has grown, his message remains the same: that it is possible to stop struggling in your life, and find joy and fulfillment in this moment, and no other.

[NeoPeasant]

What could be more fulfilling than driving to distant big box retailers to shop among strangers when your massive collection of home entertainment electronics in your suburban castle fails to alleviate the boredom and loneliness?

[Peakprepper]

"1st circuit: Survival/security
2nd circuit: Territorial/Emotional
3rd circuit: Conceptual
4th circuit: Social/Sexual"

Exactly NP, Visionmaster forgot all these:

5th circuit: MP3 player/ DVD player, in-car entertainment
6th circuit: Plasma screen
7th circuit:Bigger house
8th circuit: newer car
9th circuit: oops, nearly forgot, bigger loan/mortgage

..etc...

[AWPrime]

At least we have choice now.

[americandream]

The very act of living is the interplay of the highs and lows.....the good moments and the bad. Without the one, would the experience of the other arise and give effect to the self? There is no choice, only the now's of the wave called YOU.

[Ludi]

I'm have depression and I still have tons of reasons to live!

I find life extremely fulfilling, personallly.

But, I'm not a modern man. Maybe that's why.

[gego]

Life is what you make it! Certainly you cannot control external circumstances like a war in your back yard, or being born into the time of the dieoff, or living at the peak of human civizilation, but within those circumstances you can either live miserably or find happiness.

[Chicken_Little]

As long as I can sit at my computer drinking wine and having futile arguments with random strangers, it's all good.

[EndDays]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vision-master', '1')st circuit: Survival/security
2nd circuit: Territorial/Emotional
3rd circuit: Conceptual
4th circuit: Social/Sexual

What do you do after these 4 circuits are satisfied?

Time to reach for those upper levels of consciousness.

[Ludi]

I think a certain number of people are content with the "things of this world," depending on what is meant by that phrase. Even consciousness can be satisfying. After all, the Kingdom of God is within you.

[Chicken_Little]

Can we just leave Jesus out of this please, the pleasures of the flesh are quite enough for me.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Chicken_Little', ' ')the pleasures of the flesh

[Chicken_Little]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Chicken_Little', ' ')the pleasures of the flesh

[topcat]

This all begs the question if we are 'the modern man?'

Current yes, modern I don't know.

I am satisficed; part satisfied part sufficied.

[master_rb]

why people are not happy, maybe because not everybody has the same I.Q. I would assume those coming here are really smart people, it's hard to be happy for a minority, the happiest are always those in the middle, they understand most people and most people understand them, they feel at home


at least that's what i observed

[vision-master]

Number (5).............

V. THE NEUROSOMATIC CIRCUIT
When this fifth "body-brain" is activated, flat Euclidean figure-ground configurations explode multi-dimensionally. Gestalts shift, in McLuhan's terms, from linear VISUAL SPACE to all-encompassing SENSORY SPACE. A hedonic turn-on occurs, a rapturous amusement, a detachment from the previously compulsive mechanism of the first four circuits. I turned this circuit on with pot and Tantra.
This fifth brain began to appear about 4,000 years ago in the first leisure-class civilizations and has been increasing statistically in recent centuries (even before the Drug Revolution), a fact demonstrated by the hedonic art of India, China, Rome and other affluent societies. More recently, Ornstein and his school have demonstrated with electroencephalograms that this circuit represents the first jump from the linear left lobe of the brain to the analogical right lobe.

The opening and imprinting of this circuit has been the preoccupation of "technicians of the occult"--Tantric shamans and hatha yogis. While the fifth tunnel-reality can be achieved by sensory deprivation, social isolation, physiological stress or severe shock (ceremonial terror tactics, as practiced by such rascal-gurus as Don Juan Matus or Aleister Crowley), it has traditionally been reserved to the educated aristocracy of leisure societies who have solved the four terrestrial survival problems.

About 20,000 years ago, the specific fifth brain neurotransmitter was discovered by shamans in the Caspian Sea area of Asia and quickly spread to other wizards throughout Eurasia and Africa. It is, of course, cannabis. Weed. Mother Mary Jane.

It is no accident that the pot-head generally refers to his neural state as "high" or "spaced-out." The transcendence of gravitational, digital, linear, either-or, Aristotelian, Newtonian, Euclidean, planetary orientations (circuits I-IV) is, in evolutionary perspective, part of our neurological preparation for the inevitable migration off our home planet, now beginning. This is why so many pot-heads are STAR TREK freaks and science fiction adepts. (Berkeley, California, certainly the Cannabis Capital of the U.S., has a Federation Trading Post on Telegraph Avenue, where the well-heeled can easily spend $500 or more in a single day, buying STAR TREK novels, magazines, newsletters, bumper stickers, photographs, posters, tapes, etc., including even complete blueprints for the starship ENTERPRISE.)

The extraterrestrial meaning of being "high" is confirmed by astronauts themselves; 85% of those who have entered the free-fall zero gravity describe "mystic experiences" or rapture states typical of the neurosomatic circuit. "No photo can show how beautiful Earth looked," raves Captain Ed Mitchell, describing his Illumination in free-fall. He sounds like any successful yogi or pot-head. No camera can show this experience because it is inside the nervous system.

FREE-FALL, AT THE PROPER EVOLUTIONARY TIME, TRIGGERS THE NEUROSOMATIC MUTATION, Leary believes. Previously this mutation has been achieved "artificially" by yogic or shamanic training or by the fifth circuit stimulant, cannabis. Surfing, skiing, skin-diving and the new sexual culture (sensuous massage, vibrators, imported Tantric arts, etc.) have evolved at the same time as part of the hedonic conquest of gravity. The Turn-On state is always described as "floating," or, in the Zen metaphor, "one foot above the ground."

[gego]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EndDays', '
')
Have the things of this world, even the idea of consciousness ever satisfied anyone? In my experience, absolutely not. Its all empty promises requiring more consumption to temporarily "satisfy".