Comments on: Mind = Control

By: alistair

alistair — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 21:46:00 +0000

http://www.apfn.org/apfn/oz.htm

By: alistair

alistair — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 18:13:52 +0000

being a hypnotist i am constantly surprised at how easy it is to hypnotise people. i would go as far as to say that ease of suggestability is encoded into our dna as a necessary component of the archetecture of our consciousness.
i don`t know why though.
i am going to begin to read http://www.bubblesofperception.com as soon as i get an hour or two spare, which goes to the heart of my passion for how we are percieving our reality……….

By: David

David — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:43:43 +0000

“Mind control” by external forces is wholly unnecessary. People are so willingly hypnotized that the slightest breeze-stimulus will get them to behave according to plan, and then the most reliable thing is that they hypnotize each other. I liken it to metal shavings on a shop floor. If there is one lone piece, it’s not as easy to magnetize as many pieces in a clump.

I saw this illustrated irrefutably as I drove a major freeway a few nights ago. Traffic slowed to a crawl. I wondered, of course, what was causing it. Then we came upon the choke point.

It was no accident. No police chase. Merely a SIGN. A glowing traffic sign about a road closure that probably affected very few people on that freeway, and yet people felt the need (or were desperately illiterate en masse) to SLOW DOWN so much to read it which should have taken less than 2 seconds as they could have sped by at normal speed.

Anger and laughter ensued in the cabin of my car.

By: slomo

slomo — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:37:37 +0000

We are all interacting with our environment, so I think it is somewhat artificial to collapse the world down to a single axis of undetermined/absolute vs. determined/robotic. (prnsqlr, I realize that your oversimplification is intentional in order to illustrate a point.)

I think “consciousness” (as in spiritual maturity) involves widening your field of awareness sufficiently to understand your environmental context. In the (unreachable) limit, you would be aware of everything and your consciousness would be that of the absolute.

The extent to which you understand your environment is the extent to which you can make choices on how to react. Therefore, the more “conscious” you are, the more “control” you have.

I’m oversimplifying in a different direction, but hopefully I’ve added something to the very good comment by prnsqlr.

By: Rev Max

Rev Max — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:28:58 +0000

If the govt. engages in mind-control experiments that’s a bummer I guess, but the question of internalized control mechanisms is, I think, far more interesting to consider and examine.

Myself, I’m a big fan of Wilhelm Reich

By: prnsqlr

prnsqlr — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 15:42:47 +0000

In fact, â€œconsciousâ€ is listed as one of the antonyms (opposites) of â€œautomatic.â€ Now, I think weâ€™re starting to get somewhereâ€¦ (Where? I donâ€™t know)

Looking to traditional thinking as usual pays off. Suppose we schematicize being along a determined/undetermined axis. At the undetermined pole is the Absolute, the unmoved mover. At the other end is robotic existence, pure consequence, the cellular-automatic computer world: since everything is determined by circumstances external to it, it’s future is predestined and it’s influence limited only to the internal aspects of itself it may itself determine.

Then we have self-delusion and MKUltra both at the relative pole and the absolute pole corresponds to that within us that participates in the undetermined.

The dialectic of the two poles solves nicely (for me) the free-will problem, although a full account would be too much for this comment.