Merkabah

[Skarekrow]

F*ck Your Rules:
Why I’ve Decided I’m Going to Have Fun All The Time

I’ve discovered the secret key to having a happier, more exponentially enticing and fierce lifestyle: I’m going to have fun.
Lots of fun.

All of the f*cking time.
And you, you can kindly shut the f*ck up about it.

Your negativity and self-loathing won’t stop me from fulfilling my goal of living a life of relentless wonder and authentic joy.
I’m sick and tired of the masses acting as if having fun and working hard are mutually exclusive.

They don’t have to be.
We’re programmed to look at work as work and play as play, but I am choosing to dismiss that tired, dated notion.

Both work and play can be beautifully interconnected, as long as you tap into that wild, repressed imagination of yours.
In fact, I have come to find that when I begin to work from a place of unabashed amusement and irrepressible bliss, my work is actually stronger and better.

There is just no good reason to not try to have fun all of the time.
There just really f*cking isn’t.

I’m bored with the self-punishing nature of our society that attempts to attach “guilt” to “fun.”
Why should we ever feel guilty for feeling fabulous and having a good time?

Isn’t that why we’re here?
“Don’t have too much fun. This is WORK,” my manager used to say to me if I was smiling too big.

I had a job selling designer makeup at a high-end department store.
I was the top seller.

I used to think: Why. The. F*ck. Not?

After all, consumers wanted to be around me because I bestowed my fun energy onto them.
Fun is infectious.

My client list was a mile long, and I made the company more money than any other girl on the counter.
What tragedy would arise if I were to dare to have “too much fun” anyway?

What if I don’t want to waste my one shot at life feeling listless and bored?
What if when I’m asked how I’m doing, I don’t want to respond with “hanging in there”?

Why would I settle for “hanging in there” when I could be having a “f*cking blast”?
What if having fun, to me, is the most powerful feeling in the world, and I’ve decided to make a conscious choice to indulge only in the emotions that serve to move me?

It’s not about getting wasted.
It’s not about getting wrecked or high.

It’s not about stumbling home at 5 am to the first signs of sun.
It’s not about being self-destructive, or wildly irresponsible, or deeply negligent or self-involved (well, maybe a little, tiny bit self-involved, but that’s okay).

I don’t know when “fun” became exclusive to being intoxicated by booze and drugs.
While being f*cked up can occasionally have fleeting feel-good moments, if being inebriated is the only way you know how to have fun – I feel truly sorry for you.

Getting buzzed off life has no wicked come down.
The truth is fun is a state of motherf*cking mind, kittens.

And contrary to popular belief, you can have a ball at your boring-as-f*ck job, when in a financial crisis, whilst healing a broken heart, while on a long line at the bank, even when doing your laundry and making your bed.

It just takes a little bit of imagination.
A spark of creativity, and a playful disposition – that’s all.

We all have an inner fun child within us begging, screaming to be set free.
Let her out to play.

She won’t f*ck you over, I promise.
Look, I still feel the bad feels from time to time.

I get hopelessly sad.
People sometimes hurt me.

But I’ve learned to find the beauty in feeling.
I don’t allow myself to go on a numb autopilot anymore.

Boredom has been exterminated from my life.
So, ladies and germs, I proudly present my thoughts and feelings as to why we NEED to have FUN all of the F*CKING TIME:

Because f*ck your rules.

It’s time we challenge the notion that fun is only reserved for certain, specific, static moments.
Just because society told us we should be miserable during our nine-to-five jobs doesn’t mean we have to listen.
Those who have decided we should dread going into work are deeply unhappy entities who are looking to drag us down with them.
F*ck that, and f*ck their rules.

---

Because we love to play characters.

I’ve had jobs I’ve sorely loathed. But I discovered how to make them gloriously fun without having to compromise the quality of the work.
I would simply get into character, channel a girl who is passionate about sales and see how well I could play the part.
We love to play characters. It’s how we get through painful, boring situations. It taps us back into our glorious childlike playfulness.

---

Because if you can be boring all the time, I can have fun all of the time.

Okay, so you’ve decided to choose a life that’s boring and dull because you don’t think you deserve to have fun. I disagree.
I think having fun is a f*cking birthright. While you’re always welcome to join the fun party – I respect your dull lifestyle.
All I ask is you accept my life of freewheeling, out-of-this-world FUN, and we can live harmoniously in perfect unison.

---

Because I have good genes.

I come from a long line of fabulously fun women. To repress my fun nature would be to attempt to alter my genetic makeup.
If we dig deep into our roots, we all have good f*cking genes. We are products of survivors who faced incredible adversity.
They didn’t withstand the hardships of the past for the future generations to feel obligated to be bored and miserable, did they?

---

Because when I enjoy myself, I do better at my job

When we work from a place of tension, it comes through in the work, however, when we work on a project, make a sales call or pour a drink from a place of relaxation and happiness – it’s reflected in this finished product.
As a consumer, we can immediately tell the difference when someone is serving us from a place of misery over a place of love.
It’s that moment when we eat something, and we think, wow – someone put a lot of love in this pasta. We can feel the difference and are more likely to be a repeat client.

---

Because I don’t take sh*t so seriously

Why would we take sh*t so seriously? Ever? Unless we’re curing cancer or battling in a war, we need to remember that 90 percent of the sh*t we freak out over isn’t that big of a f*cking deal.
Very few things are actually life and death. To get twisted up in dire knots and hell-bent with the toxicity of stress just because you missed the train is a waste of TIME.

---

Because you get what you give

Whatever energy you throw out into the universe, you get back. I dare you to try it.
If you’re a positive force of nature who is gracing the fine earth with fruits of gorgeous joy and love – you’re going to get that back. In abundance.
Misery breeds misery. Fun breeds more FUN.

 

[Tin Man]

F*ck Your Rules:
Why I’ve Decided I’m Going to Have Fun All The Time

I’ve discovered the secret key to having a happier, more exponentially enticing and fierce lifestyle: I’m going to have fun.
Lots of fun.

All of the f*cking time.
And you, you can kindly shut the f*ck up about it.

Your negativity and self-loathing won’t stop me from fulfilling my goal of living a life of relentless wonder and authentic joy.
I’m sick and tired of the masses acting as if having fun and working hard are mutually exclusive.

They don’t have to be.
We’re programmed to look at work as work and play as play, but I am choosing to dismiss that tired, dated notion.

Both work and play can be beautifully interconnected, as long as you tap into that wild, repressed imagination of yours.
In fact, I have come to find that when I begin to work from a place of unabashed amusement and irrepressible bliss, my work is actually stronger and better.

There is just no good reason to not try to have fun all of the time.
There just really f*cking isn’t.

I’m bored with the self-punishing nature of our society that attempts to attach “guilt” to “fun.”
Why should we ever feel guilty for feeling fabulous and having a good time?

Isn’t that why we’re here?
“Don’t have too much fun. This is WORK,” my manager used to say to me if I was smiling too big.

I had a job selling designer makeup at a high-end department store.
I was the top seller.

I used to think: Why. The. F*ck. Not?

After all, consumers wanted to be around me because I bestowed my fun energy onto them.
Fun is infectious.

My client list was a mile long, and I made the company more money than any other girl on the counter.
What tragedy would arise if I were to dare to have “too much fun” anyway?

What if I don’t want to waste my one shot at life feeling listless and bored?
What if when I’m asked how I’m doing, I don’t want to respond with “hanging in there”?

Why would I settle for “hanging in there” when I could be having a “f*cking blast”?
What if having fun, to me, is the most powerful feeling in the world, and I’ve decided to make a conscious choice to indulge only in the emotions that serve to move me?

It’s not about getting wasted.
It’s not about getting wrecked or high.

It’s not about stumbling home at 5 am to the first signs of sun.
It’s not about being self-destructive, or wildly irresponsible, or deeply negligent or self-involved (well, maybe a little, tiny bit self-involved, but that’s okay).

I don’t know when “fun” became exclusive to being intoxicated by booze and drugs.
While being f*cked up can occasionally have fleeting feel-good moments, if being inebriated is the only way you know how to have fun — I feel truly sorry for you.

Getting buzzed off life has no wicked come down.
The truth is fun is a state of motherf*cking mind, kittens.

And contrary to popular belief, you can have a ball at your boring-as-f*ck job, when in a financial crisis, whilst healing a broken heart, while on a long line at the bank, even when doing your laundry and making your bed.

It just takes a little bit of imagination.
A spark of creativity, and a playful disposition — that’s all.

We all have an inner fun child within us begging, screaming to be set free.
Let her out to play.

She won’t f*ck you over, I promise.
Look, I still feel the bad feels from time to time.

I get hopelessly sad.
People sometimes hurt me.

But I’ve learned to find the beauty in feeling.
I don’t allow myself to go on a numb autopilot anymore.

Boredom has been exterminated from my life.
So, ladies and germs, I proudly present my thoughts and feelings as to why we NEED to have FUN all of the F*CKING TIME:

Because f*ck your rules.

It’s time we challenge the notion that fun is only reserved for certain, specific, static moments.
Just because society told us we should be miserable during our nine-to-five jobs doesn’t mean we have to listen.
Those who have decided we should dread going into work are deeply unhappy entities who are looking to drag us down with them.
F*ck that, and f*ck their rules.

---

Because we love to play characters.

I’ve had jobs I’ve sorely loathed. But I discovered how to make them gloriously fun without having to compromise the quality of the work.
I would simply get into character, channel a girl who is passionate about sales and see how well I could play the part.
We love to play characters. It’s how we get through painful, boring situations. It taps us back into our glorious childlike playfulness.

---

Because if you can be boring all the time, I can have fun all of the time.

Okay, so you’ve decided to choose a life that’s boring and dull because you don’t think you deserve to have fun. I disagree.
I think having fun is a f*cking birthright. While you’re always welcome to join the fun party — I respect your dull lifestyle.
All I ask is you accept my life of freewheeling, out-of-this-world FUN, and we can live harmoniously in perfect unison.

---

Because I have good genes.

I come from a long line of fabulously fun women. To repress my fun nature would be to attempt to alter my genetic makeup.
If we dig deep into our roots, we all have good f*cking genes. We are products of survivors who faced incredible adversity.
They didn’t withstand the hardships of the past for the future generations to feel obligated to be bored and miserable, did they?

---

Because when I enjoy myself, I do better at my job

When we work from a place of tension, it comes through in the work, however, when we work on a project, make a sales call or pour a drink from a place of relaxation and happiness — it’s reflected in this finished product.
As a consumer, we can immediately tell the difference when someone is serving us from a place of misery over a place of love.
It’s that moment when we eat something, and we think, wow — someone put a lot of love in this pasta. We can feel the difference and are more likely to be a repeat client.

---

Because I don’t take sh*t so seriously

Why would we take sh*t so seriously? Ever? Unless we’re curing cancer or battling in a war, we need to remember that 90 percent of the sh*t we freak out over isn’t that big of a f*cking deal.
Very few things are actually life and death. To get twisted up in dire knots and hell-bent with the toxicity of stress just because you missed the train is a waste of TIME.

---

Because you get what you give

Whatever energy you throw out into the universe, you get back. I dare you to try it.
If you’re a positive force of nature who is gracing the fine earth with fruits of gorgeous joy and love — you’re going to get that back. In abundance.
Misery breeds misery. Fun breeds more FUN.

But what if I get fun out of murdering people? Huh? What does your non-rules say about that? You think you have it all figured out Peggy (I'm assuming the girl in the picture is named peggy), but you don't. You so don't

 

[Skarekrow]

But what if I get fun out of murdering people? Huh? What does your non-rules say about that? You think you have it all figured out Peggy (I'm assuming the girl in the picture is named peggy), but you don't. You so don't

Doesn’t she look high as fuck in that picture?
Hahahaha

 

[Tin Man]

Doesn’t she look high as fuck in that picture?
Hahahaha

Ha ha, yeah she really does. It even reads like she's high. Fuck your rules and shit. And, and also fuck not having fun. Y'know cause fun is like a cloud where you don't obey rules and...light me up...yeah rules and stuff.

 

[Skarekrow]

Ha ha, yeah she really does. It even reads like she's high. Fuck your rules and shit. And, and also fuck not having fun. Y'know cause fun is like a cloud where you don't obey rules and...light me up...yeah rules and stuff.

That was part of the reason I posted it…it made me chuckle.



BTW -
If there ever was a Jacobi theme song, that started to play whenever you entered the room…I vote for this one.

[video=youtube;MS4_Z84-rRE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=MS4_Z84-rRE[/video]​

 

[Skarekrow]

Talking to the Beyond through the Luminiferous Ether

By Natasha Pulley (Guest Contributor)

​

Clairvoyance today is a bit unfashionable.
In the nineteenth century, though, it was booming.

Seances weren’t only the province of circus attractions and little stripy side tents at fairs but of the great stages and salons of London, something we still often see portrayed in fiction.

​

But it sounds like an odd sort of thing to happen – especially considering that some of the people who believed in it all most fervently were some of the cleverest and most analytical in the world.

Arthur Conan Doyle believed it; Oliver Lodge, one of the first BBC science broadcasters, believed it.
There was a Society for Psychical Research. It’s easy to think that perhaps, with all the baffling new science going on in ordinary life, people wanted a way to escape.

In fact it was part of the new science.
It really began with Newton, who said in his Optics that light must have a medium to move through – exactly like sound and air.

This medium was the luminiferous ether.
If you had an ether vacuum, you would have a patch of total darkness.

Since there’s nowhere light-resistant, it follows that ether is everywhere, an all-permeating, immensely subtle substance that transports light at hundreds of thousands of times the speed of sound.

Everything: space, stars at the far end of the universe, inside the human brain.
Newton was using the idea to explain light diffraction, but it came under intense focus again in the nineteenth century, fueled by new studies in electromagnetism.

Although the mathematical models of the universe fluxed a great deal during this period, one of the few things they all agreed on was that the luminiferous ether must exist.

These models of an ether-seeped universe proved that clairvoyance could be real.
The ether was everywhere and could go through anything.

Things moving through it – light waves for a start – moved incredibly fast.
There was nothing to say that it could not also transport the impulses of human thoughts beyond the human cranium.

For the first time, science had provided a medium through which the thoughts of the dead, thoughts of the living, and perhaps other things altogether, might have been preserved.

In 1887, two scientists in America, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, conducted an experiment to prove the existence of ether.
It was one of the most significant failures in scientific history, though it did provide important findings about the speed of light.

But while it was a blow to ether theory, their experiment by no means destroyed it.
Mathematical models continued to use ether right up to 1905, when Einstein’s special theory of relativity negated the logical need for it.

Einstein, though, never shouted about it.
His mentor was a great proponent of ether theory.

The idea isn’t quite gone even today; we still talk about things floating about in the ether.

Natasha Pulley studied English Literature at Oxford University and earned a creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia. Pulley lives near Ely in Cambridgeshire, England. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is her first novel.

 

[Skarekrow]

I really like this article even though it only gives us a scientific “materialist” view of out of body experiences.
They offer many examples of stimulating this part of the brain or that, or this person’s brain was damaged and now they how OOBEs all the time.
Maybe…stimulating or damaging certain parts of the brain are actually inducing out of body experiences instead of dismissing it as an elaborate hallucination that the brain has created for reasons unknown by means unknown.
This article offers a lot of explanations but ignores that the easiest answer - that it is actually taking place.
That’s just my two cents.

The Disturbing Consequences of Seeing Your Doppelganger

​

By Anil Ananthaswamy
​

​

More than two decades ago, Peter Brugger, as a PhD student in neuropsychology at the University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland, was developing a reputation as someone interested in scientific explanations of so-called paranormal experiences.

A fellow neurologist, who had been treating a 21-year-old man for seizures, sent him to Brugger.
The young man, who worked as a waiter and lived in the canton of Zurich, had very nearly killed himself one day, when he found himself face-to-face with his doppelganger.

The incident seemed to have been started when the young man had stopped taking some of his anticonvulsant medication.
One morning, instead of going to work, he drank copious amounts of beer and stayed in bed.

But it turned out to be a harrowing lie-in.
He felt dizzy, stood up, turned around, and saw himself still lying in bed.

He was aware that the person in bed was him, and was not willing to get up and would thus make himself late for work.
Furious at the prone self, the man shouted at it, shook it, and even jumped on it, all to no avail.

To complicate things further, his awareness of being in a body would shift from one body to the other.
When he inhabited the supine body in bed, he’d see his duplicate bending over and shaking him.

Soon, fear and confusion took hold: Who was he?
Was he the man standing up or the man lying in bed?

Unable to stand seeing his double any longer, he jumped out of the window.

When I visited Brugger in the autumn of 2011, he showed me a photograph of the building from which the man had jumped.
The patient had been extremely lucky.

He had leapt from a window on the fourth floor and landed on a large hazel bush, which had broken his fall.
But he had not really wanted to commit suicide, said Brugger.

He had jumped to “find a match between body and self”.
After getting treatment for his fall-related injuries, the young man underwent surgery to remove a tumour in his left temporal lobe, and both the seizures and the bizarre experiences stopped.

Such hallucinations are classified as autoscopic phenomena (from “autoscopy”; in Greek, autos means “self” and skopeo means “looking at”).
The simplest form of an autoscopic phenomenon involves feeling the presence of someone next to you without actually seeing a “double” – a sensed presence.

The doppelganger effect takes this phenomenon a step further, so that a person may hallucinate that they are actually seeing and interacting with another “me” – a visual double.

But probably the most widely experienced and best-known form of autoscopic phenomena is the out-of-body experience (OBE).
During a classic full-blown OBE, people report leaving their physical body and seeing it from an outside perspective, say from the ceiling looking down at the body lying in bed.

Despite their vividness, they are all hallucinations caused by malfunctions in brain mechanisms that root us in the here and now.
The strange experiences are probably our best window on some very basic aspects of our sense of bodily self – explaining how the brain builds our perception of being present in the here and now, and the subjective, emotional feelings that dominate our consciousness.

Electrifying experience

Some clues come from the work of Olaf Blanke, a neurologist a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
In 2002, Blanke managed to induce repeated out-of-body experiences in a 43-year-old woman.

He had been treating her for drug-resistant temporal-lobe epilepsy.
Brain scans did not show any lesions, so Blanke resorted to surgery to figure out the focus of her epilepsy.

His team inserted electrodes inside the cranium to record electrical activity from the cortical surface directly, rather than from outside the skull as you would if you were using standard EEG.

During this procedure, the woman volunteered to have her brain stimulated using the implanted electrodes.
This technique allows surgeons to double-check that they’ve really found the cause of the seizure, while also ensuring that they don’t excise some key brain region.

And not just that.
The procedure, pioneered by Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, is often the best way to find out the function of different brain regions, and much of what we have learned about the brain has come from courageous patients who have let themselves be stimulated while conscious.

It was during such a procedure that Blanke found that he could cause the woman to report some rather weird sensations, by stimulating a single electrode, placed on the right angular gyrus, a small region towards the back of the skull.

When the stimulating current was low, she reported “sinking into the bed” or “falling from a height”; when Blanke’s team increased the amperage, she had an out-of-body experience: “I see myself lying in bed, from above,” she said.

The angular gyrus lies near the vestibular cortex (which receives inputs from the vestibular system that’s responsible for our posture and sense of balance). Blanke concluded that the electrical stimulation was somehow disrupting the integration of various sensations such as touch with vestibular signals, leading to the woman’s OBE.

The next step was to try to produce OBEs in healthy participants.
In 2005, philosopher Thomas Metzinger proposed an experiment and teamed up with Blanke and Blanke’s then student Bigna Lenggenhager, and designed an elegant experiment.

A camera filmed a subject from behind, and the images were sent to a 3D head-mounted display that the subject was wearing.
The subject could see only what was being shown in the display, which was the back of his or her own body, seen in 3D and about seven feet in front.

The experimenter would then stroke the person’s back with a stick.
The subjects would feel the stroking on their backs, but would also see themselves being stroked in the head-mounted display.

The stroking was either synchronous or asynchronous (to make it asynchronous, the video feed was delayed a smidgen, so the subject felt the touch first but saw the virtual body being stroked an instant later).

In the synchronous condition, once the illusion set in, some subjects (but not all) reported feeling the touch in the location of the virtual body about seven feet in front of them and that the virtual body felt like their own.

They had experienced ownership of an illusory body – an aspect of the doppelganger experience.

A few years later, Blanke’s team upped the ante.
They rigged a setup that allowed them to conduct the same experiment inside a scanner.

The subject was lying down, and a robotic arm stroked the subject’s back.
Meanwhile, the subject viewed through a head-mounted display a video of a person being stroked on the back.

The robotic arm’s stroking was either synchronous or asynchronous with stroking of the virtual person seen on the display.
Again, in some subjects, their sense of location and sense of body ownership were shaken up.

One of the most striking outcomes was when a subject reported looking at their own body from above, even though the subject was lying prone, face-up, in the scanner.

“That was for us really exciting, because it gets really close to the classical out-of-body experience of looking down at your own body,” said Lenggenhager, who is now working in Peter Brugger’s group at the University Hospital Zurich.

The subjects were scanned during their experiences, and the scans revealed that their sense of being out-of-body was correlated with activity in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), a site that integrates touch, vision, proprioception, and vestibular signals.

Here was some objective evidence that the TPJ is involved in the sense of self-location – where you perceive yourself to be.
That’s significant: it is part of a network of regions (including the angular gyrus) that integrate various sensations to create a sense of the bodily self.

Together, they combine the different external sensations with sensations that tell the brain about the orientation of the body and the location of body parts, and signals from inside the body, such as the viscera (which contain information about the beating heart, blood pressure, and the state of the gut, for example).

In other words, it provided further evidence that it is the process of combining all these signals that together give us the feeling of inhabiting our bodies.

Could a similar process explain some particularly strong versions of the doppelganger effect experienced by some people?
These powerful experiences often feel mystical – but the process may tell us a lot about the body, emotions and the subjective feeling of a bodily self.

Chris may offer the most startling account. His brother, David, had died of AIDS a few months previous to this strange episode.
It was early in the morning.

Chris got off the bed, stood up, and walked toward the end of the bed, where there was a dresser.
He stretched and turned around and got the fright of his life.

“The shock was electric,” Chris recalled. “Because I was still lying in the bed sleeping, and it was very clearly me lying there sleeping, my first thought was that I had died. I’m dead and this is the first step. I was just gasping. My head was spinning, trying to get a grip on things.”

And then the phone rang. “I don’t know why, but I picked up the phone and said, ‘Hello.’ It was David.
I immediately recognised his voice.

I was overwhelmed, but at the same time I had this incredible sensation of joy.”
But David didn’t stay on the line for long. “He told me that he didn’t have much time and he just wanted me to know that he was all right, and to tell the rest of the family, then he hung up,”

Chris said. “And then there was this enormous sucking sensation,” said Chris, making a long, drawn-out slurping sound. “I felt like I was dragged, almost thrown, back into the bed, smack into myself.”

He woke up screaming. His wife, Sonia, who was asleep next to him, woke up to find a hysterical Chris.
“I was totally freaked out, I was shaking all over, I was sweating, my heart was beating like a racehorse’s,” said Chris.

Chris grew up in a scientific household.
His upbringing was at odds with this experience. “My heart tells me that David was letting me know that he was OK. I really believed at the time that he was somehow communicating with me from beyond death,” Chris said.

“But my intellectual side says that’s just silly. But it’s so hard to rationalise; the experience was so real.”

What Chris experienced was a particularly intense doppelganger effect, also known in neuroscientific jargon as heautoscopy.
It is different from other out-of-body experience in many ways.

For instance, during heautoscopy, you perceive an illusory body, and your centre of awareness can shift from within the physical body to the illusory body and back – there’s self-location and self-identification with a volume in space, whether that volume is centred on the physical body or the illusory body.

The other key components of heautoscopy are the presence of intense emotions and the involvement of the sensory-motor system.
“Usually, the double is moving and there is interaction, there is sharing of emotions, of thoughts, and that’s what’s giving the impression of a doppelganger,” said neurologist Lukas Heydrich, who was at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne when I met him.

Using data from brain scans, Heydrich and Blanke have found that patients who have reported heautoscopic hallucinations typically show damage to the left posterior insula and adjacent cortical areas.

Given that heautoscopic hallucinations involve emotions, it’s revealing that the insular cortex is implicated.
The insula is the hub that integrates visual, auditory, sensory, motor, proprioceptive, and vestibular signals with signals from the viscera.

It’s the brain region where the body’s states seem to be represented and the representations are eventually manifested as subjective feelings, giving rise to the perception of a bodily self.

When abnormalities arise in the integration, it’s as if there are now two representations of the body instead of one, and somehow the brain has to choose the representation in which to anchor the self, or rather choose which representation to imbue with self-location, self-identification, and first-person perspective.

The “minimal self”

Based on all these findings, Metzinger and Blanke think they are ready to examine the more philosophical aspects of our beings – such as what is needed to create a sense of embodiment (the “minimal phenomenal self”).

One surprising conclusion is that the sense of agency is not key to this state, since you can create a sense of being a body in some other location by merely passively stroking someone’s back and messing with their visual input.

“From a philosopher’s point of view, it is important to find out what is necessary and what is sufficient for self-consciousness,” Metzinger told me. “We have shown that something that most people think is necessary is not necessary, namely agency.”

Rather, Metzinger argues that this feeling of being embodied comes before everything else.
The next step in the process is when this primitive selfhood, turns into selfhood as subjectivity.

“If you not only feel that you are in that body, but if you can control your attention, and attend to the body, that’s a stronger form of selfhood,” said Metzinger. “Then you are something that has a perspective, something that is directed at the world, and something that can be directed at itself. That is more than mere embodiment.”

One idea is that minimal phenomenal self may also act as a thread through our autobiographical memories, helping us to build a narrative through our own life story; some experiments have shown that, despite the intense sensations, out-of-body experience weakens your memories – perhaps because they aren’t so tightly anchored to the bodily self.

If we are now beginning to understand the neural underpinnings of the self, many questions remain.
Why did it evolve in the first place, for instance?

Most likely as an adaptation that let the organism orient itself and function better in its environment.
If the brain evolved to help the body avoid surprises and remain in homeostatic equilibrium and to effectively move around in its environment, then representing the body in the brain was a necessary step to fine-tune these abilities.

Eventually, this representation became conscious, further enabling the organism to be aware of the body’s strengths and weaknesses, which must have given it a survival advantage.

But in this case, rather than physical attributes, it was the self that was being honed in evolutionary time.
Regardless of how complex our self feels to us – with its conceptual and autobiographical aspects – autoscopic phenomena are showing us that it all begins with the body.

As Metzinger writes in his book The Ego Tunnel, “‘Owning’ your body, its sensations, and its various parts is fundamental to the feeling of being someone.”
It’s no wonder that Brugger’s young patient took the drastic step of jumping out of the fourth floor to reconcile body and self – he was desperate to become himself again, of one body and mind.

This article is based on a chapter of Anil Ananthaswamy’s book, The Man Who Wasn’t There (Dutton).

 

[PintoBean]

It's interesting, us as an SSRI/SSNRI nation. It's true, that's what we've become. People without the foggiest notion of the difference between a say a bacterial or viral infection (as in when antibiotics might or might not help them) toss about the names of different SSRIs, mood stabilizers, atypical anti-psychotics etc etc like they've had an intro course in psycho-pharmacology. What they've had is waiting time in various doctor's offices with pamphlets courtesy of big pharma, and then an RX given to them to address the fact that they feel sad, fail in school, have difficult moods, can't sleep, sometimes talk a lot or shop too much. Anyway, I was reading an article recently that stated which only 25% of people being treated with SSRIs actually have identifiable low levels of serotonin or norepinephrine. So the big explanation for use of these drugs promoted by doctors and big pharma doesn't apply to 75% of patients using these drugs. It's mystifying. I'm on one myself as of the past few weeks (Lexapro), but it's been a tortured decision, a path of last resort of sorts for me after years of refusing. The DSM now gives such a ridiculously wide description it's hard for anyone to escape the diagnosis at some point in their lives. Here is the article I was just reading on the topic, if you are interested:
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-neuroscience-of-despair

 

[Skarekrow]

It's interesting, us as an SSRI/SSNRI nation. It's true, that's what we've become. People without the foggiest notion of the difference between a say a bacterial or viral infection (as in when antibiotics might or might not help them) toss about the names of different SSRIs, mood stabilizers, atypical anti-psychotics etc etc like they've had an intro course in psycho-pharmacology. What they've had is waiting time in various doctor's offices with pamphlets courtesy of big pharma, and then an RX given to them to address the fact that they feel sad, fail in school, have difficult moods, can't sleep, sometimes talk a lot or shop too much. Anyway, I was reading an article recently that stated which only 25% of people being treated with SSRIs actually have an identifiable low levels of serotonin or norepinephrine. So the big explanation for use of these drugs promoted by doctors and big pharma doesn't apply to 75% of patients using these drugs. It's mystifying. I'm on one myself as of the past few weeks (Lexapro), but it's been a tortured decision, a path of last resort of sorts for me after years of refusing. The DSM now gives such a ridiculously wide description it's hard for anyone to escape the diagnosis at some point in their lives. Here is the article I was just reading on the topic, if you are interested:
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-neuroscience-of-despair

Thanks for the article.
I myself take Remeron which is in the atypical section you mentioned….Lexapro, like Effexor, and a lot of those make me so fucking anxious that you would think I was a serious tweaker.
Anyhow…I understand your hesitation. I have a full bottle of Seroquel which is an antipsychotic (prescribed for sleep and anxiety. But it just makes me really tired….like it doesn’t make me feel any better whatsoever….so I just feel really anxious AND tired…and it makes me sleep TOO deeply when I do sleep…like the bed could burn and I wouldn’t wake up.
The only reason I still have them in the cabinet is because they are one of the few drugs that will cease a mushroom trip.
So even though, I haven’t done shrooms yet, I keep the pills just in case of the fabled “bad trip”.
I can get whatever I want prescribed to me, because my Doctors know that I don’t abuse them, but am in fact quite conservative in how much and what I take.
I read all the fine print for everything I take…that’s a lot of info btw hahaha.
Anyhow…there is nothing wrong with trying to see if it is beneficial to you or not….if it doesn’t help, then at least you know.
If it does help, then I certainly wouldn’t beat yourself up over it…yes, it is big business…but for some people it literally is a life saver.
Also, what natural-type remedies have you tried for depression (is it? you didn’t specify nor do you have to)?
Do you meditate?

 

[PintoBean]

Thanks for the article.
I myself take Remeron which is in the atypical section you mentioned….Lexapro, like Effexor, and a lot of those make me so fucking anxious that you would think I was a serious tweaker.
Anyhow…I understand your hesitation. I have a full bottle of Seroquel which is an antipsychotic (prescribed for sleep and anxiety. But it just makes me really tired….like it doesn’t make me feel any better whatsoever….so I just feel really anxious AND tired…and it makes me sleep TOO deeply when I do sleep…like the bed could burn and I wouldn’t wake up.
The only reason I still have them in the cabinet is because they are one of the few drugs that will cease a mushroom trip.
So even though, I haven’t done shrooms yet, I keep the pills just in case of the fabled “bad trip”.
I can get whatever I want prescribed to me, because my Doctors know that I don’t abuse them, but am in fact quite conservative in how much and what I take.
I read all the fine print for everything I take…that’s a lot of info btw hahaha.
Anyhow…there is nothing wrong with trying to see if it is beneficial to you or not….if it doesn’t help, then at least you know.
If it does help, then I certainly wouldn’t beat yourself up over it…yes, it is big business…but for some people it literally is a life saver.
Also, what natural-type remedies have you tried for depression (is it? you didn’t specify nor do you)?
Do you meditate?

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I am unable to meditate to be honest. I have tried Valerian for anxiety, no dice. And then a tincture called "Rescue Remedy" which is 27% prune brandy, so if I drink the whole bottle as opposed to take the prescribed 4 drops, it's mildly effective as a night-cap. I tried St. John's Wort and found the experience identical to Prozac actually, which was not pleasant. It made me almost manic. At first Lexapro was pleasantly sedating (about 6 days). Now it is acting like Effexor, which caused light, unrestful sleep, disruptively vivid dreams and really obnoxious jaw tension. I am going to give it 3 more weeks to see if these side effect abate and I get some mood elevation.

 

[Skarekrow]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I am unable to meditate to be honest. I have tried Valerian for anxiety, no dice. And then a tincture called "Rescue Remedy" which is 27% prune brandy, so if I drink the whole bottle as opposed to take the prescribed 4 drops, it's mildly effective as a night-cap. I tried St. John's Wort and found the experience identical to Prozac actually, which was not pleasant. It made me almost manic. At first Lexapro was pleasantly sedating (about 6 days). Now it is acting like Effexor, which caused light, unrestful sleep, disruptively vivid dreams and really obnoxious jaw tension. I am going to give it 3 more weeks to see if these side effect abate and I get some mood elevation.

If only you could still run down to the Pharmacy and buy a Laudanum tincture (mostly opium) like you could back in the good ol days hahaha.
Feeling tired…here, have some Cocaine!
I’ve never really had much luck with natural remedies, except for marijuana.
Melatonin is like No-Doze for me hahaha.
St. John’s Wort is so expensive, just like SAM-e.
If there is some benefit that it is doing for me…it is so incredibly subtle that I may as well not take them.
Curcurmin is what I take now for the arthritis pain, and I have to say that I think it makes a small noticeable difference.
Meditation has been extremely difficult for me lately.
And I know you think you can’t, but you can. It really is what kind of meditating that you are doing as well.
I have found some of the guided meditations on youtube on “healing light” to be quite nice…and you just listen along with your eyes closed…you don’t have to clear your mind of all thoughts, or find Samahdi.
Really, there is no good definition of meditating….it can consist of you sitting there in quiet introspection.
Or it can be more in depth.
My point it…you can make it a habit, you can make the techniques and mind-set a habit or at least reach it quickly when you need to.

Sorry about your side-effects…that has been the main reason (besides them doing absolutely nothing) for me not continuing with a med.
Hopefully it will improve and it will work for you.

Also…and you can feel free to call me crazy now…
I have been exploring the idea of my anxiety/depression not being produced in my head, but is instead me picking things up from whomever or wherever.

 

[Skarekrow]

 

[PintoBean]

Also…and you can feel free to call me crazy now…
I have been exploring the idea of my anxiety/depression not being produced in my head, but is instead me picking things up from whomever or wherever.

I don't think that's crazy at all. It's why avoid certain people, places and even objects. Concept of psychological toxicity/"bad energy" or whatever you want to call, is common sense to me. As an aside, sam-e gave my dog seizures. Weird, right? And I gave it to him at the recommendation of a vet who swore the seizures were not related. But they stopped when I stopped the sam-e.

 

[Oscillation]

Yup, I'm also a bit of a:

Oooh! Nice picture, and yes, I have a tendency to like the dark aswell. Not like I'm Gollum or anything, but come on, I live in a basement...

By the way, what do you call these... these... philias? There should be a thread about them. "Love/fear for..." or something. It could be interesting!

 

[Skarekrow]

I don't think that's crazy at all. It's why avoid certain people, places and even objects. Concept of psychological toxicity/"bad energy" or whatever you want to call, is common sense to me. As an aside, sam-e gave my dog seizures. Weird, right? And I gave it to him at the recommendation of a vet who swore the seizures were not related. But they stopped when I stopped the sam-e.

Oh, I for sure avoid certain people…even on the forum, there can be energy vampires even online!
That meaning of “bad” as some kind of residual energy from bad feelings of a horrific event.
I have found that the more I talk about these types of feelings the more people have come out of the woodwork and said they feel similarly.
So that’s good to know!
Never heard of SAM-e for a dog, but I would certainly draw that same correlation between the two!

Oh man, speaking of dogs…I am scraped and bruised...my Rottweiler who was tethered out front just happen to see his arch-enemy “The Husky” and snapped the tether I had him on like it wasn’t even there…so then I’m running after him while the Husky lady is screaming (at her own dog actually, I guess finding out in retrospect that he starts shit) and I ry to tackle/head-lock this 140lbs all muscle dog trying to attack this Husky and he slips from me knocking me against the curb and tweaking my wrist and elbow…but I got up and grabbed him by his thick neck while this poor lady scampers away as fast as she can with her dog. I say - Want to exchange numbers? She says - No, he does this, he starts fights.
Weird.
I do wish I had myself on video eating shit though…hahahaha.

 

[Oscillation]

Jack pot!
http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/philias.html


I still think it would be a good idea to start a thread about it... but I won't do it. I have made my part.

 

[Skarekrow]

Oooh! Nice picture, and yes, I have a tendency to like the dark aswell. Not like I'm Gollum or anything, but come on, I live in a basement...

By the way, what do you call these... these... philias? There should be a thread about them. "Love/fear for..." or something. It could be interesting!

I feel the same way…you should start that thread!!

 

[Skarekrow]

 

[Kgal]

Look how fabulous she is.... She knows that guy ain't got nothing on her. Woot.... It's good to see his hand on fire...'cause they're going down in flames! Yeah baby!

 

[Kgal]

Speaking of being an empath and feeling others emotions....

My Ex came over the other day while I was in the middle of listening to channeled message. He sat in a chair right next to me - elbow to elbow - and remained silent while the message continued to play for about another 10 minutes.

As is often the case in channeled messages designed for Americans she talked of connecting with the Creator. When I was an Atheist I couldn't listen to words like god, creator, and angels, and would have never talked about these things to anyone - including my Ex. Now I'm used to hearing them all the time and I feel comfortable listening to these kinds of messages.

I was very open energetically and I began to notice what felt like "spikes" of fear impinging upon me every so often - especially when the word Creator came up. It dawned on me the words in the message were making my Ex very uncomfortable and something was making him feel fear. I tuned in to my energy field and sure enough the next time the word Creator was said - there was a spike of Fear.

So I went inside my heart and called up the energy of the creator and combined it was the feeling of Joy and Unconditional Love. I then pushed this out to occupy my entire field and I made it "solid" along the outer edge. I remember seeing purple and gold in my minds eye.

During the rest of the message I never felt any more Fear spikes.
So I assume they were coming from him into my personal field since we were sitting so close and I was open.

That was a huge lesson for me and I will continue to practice this.

PS. I love the fact @invisible will seek to be around others who find them totally adorable and special. This is such a healthy attitude...and can you imagine the energetic infusion of love you'd get from them???!!!!