A Streetcar Named Desire

I have heavily ignored this blog but no more! The once again new and improved Mike will attempt once again to use this blog regularly to educate you, the reader, of my explanations of our world…

 Today’s topic at hand: the connection between emotions and desire.

My theory is this: all human emotion is based on desire (there is one emotion that may prove to be an exception which I will discuss in detail later). Now some of you may treat that as preposterous and others that may even accept it. For those that choose to accept it straight-up, heed warning that what I propose means that all emotion is technically one in the same and that if that one thing can be controlled, then we can master full control over all our emotional feelings.

Let me start with an analogy to compare my idea. If someone gets drunk then they usually experience a physical change in the way they act. They might become silly, violent, stupid, clumsy, etc. The point is that they are different from their “usual self.” Now say we never knew what a person was like when they weren’t drunk. Every time we had seen them they were always totally smashed. Also say that we didn’t know of the concept of being drunk or drinking alcohol. This would have us believe that that person was normally silly, giddy, etc and that was their personality and emotional spectrum. Although they act silly and weird, we like them because they’re a fun person to hang around and also seem “in good spirits.” Now say one day, someone explains the concept of getting drunk and drinking and that the person we always saw everyday was completely different when they were sober. The very next day the country goes prohibition like the 1920’s and our friend no longer has access to alcohol (aside from the black market of course). We have no idea what to expect of this new sober friend now. They could be more fun or less, but since they were a silly fun person while drinking, then we would probably assume they would lose those qualities and be rather boring, but again, we don’t know, we can only assume.

Now apply that same concept to reality and choose someone you know and replace the “alcohol” with “desire.” People in the world are drunk on desire and they could be totally different people without it, maybe good or maybe bad, we don’t know.

So given that small intro, let me go into detail of why I think what I do.

 There are 5 basic emotions to which we all know (the key word is basic, not every possible emotion):

anger

fear

sadness

happiness

love 

I will begin with love because I believe that love is desire in it purest and “naked” form. Love is desire, but desire is not love (i.e. one can say that water is hydrogen and oxygen atoms, but one cannot say that hydrogen and oxygen atoms are water because they can be something else that isn’t water). The interesting thing about love is that it is the only emotion to have such power over others. Each emotion has “sub-emotions” that it can control that fall under it, such as ‘anger leading to hostility’ or ‘fear leading to aviodance’ and so forth. However, anger cannot bring about happiness, fear cannot bring about love, happiness cannot bring about anger (yes, one could say that “fear leads to hate and then to anger” but that’s only if you watch Star Wars religiously as if it were scripture and Yoda is your Deity). Love on the other hand can do that. Love can bring anger, happiness, and sadness. In fact when you boil down to it, love only exists as other emotions. Have you ever heard of someone in complete love and wasn’t happy, sad, afraid, or angry? Love in a sense is the “master emotion” such as the “master key” in a group of locks. You can open each lock individually with its own key and you do not require the master key to open it, but never-the-less the master key has the ability to open all the locks. And what word can we use to easily describe what this emotion is? “Desire!” What do you feel when your in love or when you love someone? The desire to be with that person, the desire to make them happy, the desire to spend your life with them, the desire to have sex with them even. You desire things with that person more than anybody else, whether it be romance love or family love. Now that’s the ‘love-happiness’ scenario, what about if its a ‘love-anger’ relationship? You desire them to be in pain for hurting you, you desire to get revenge on them, you desire them to be miserable for hurting you. Love is desire in pure form, plain and simple. And sense love is desire in full blast, it makes sense that love has such power over other emotions. Love is like a virus: it can’t exist on its own and needs a host to survive. Love hijacks other emotions, such as happiness and sadness and uses them as its own. this also explains why love can usually bring about the greatest feelings of happiness, etc. Its weakness is that it doesn’t exist by itself but its strength is that it is truly powerful to the beholder.

Alright, so your probably saying that love is desire now but what about the other emotions? How can fear be labeled as desire?

I don’t think I need to go into detail about anger; anger is generally directed toward a specific thing, object, group of people, etc and the desire is generally negativity upon that source.

Fear simply put, is the desire for a particular thing, whatever it may be, to go away. It can also be the desire to be away from a situation. In general, fear is the desire to avoid something. If your in the African plains and your just chillin’ there doing your thing and and this big bad lion approaches you what do you feel? You feel the extreme desire to not die, to not get hurt, to get away from the lion, and for the lion to go away. I honestly don’t see any other way to explain it other than the desire for the situation to end and change. It might seem that desire in this sense is “negative desire” sense something is wanted to go away, but its still the same desire as with love and anger. The number 23 is still 23 regardless of whether there’s a negative or positive sign in front of it. It’s still there as 23. I guess as a way to put it into a mathematical perspective, the desire for something can be viewed as an absolute value of itself. Whether you desire something towards you or away, its still desire regardless.

Next up is sadness which might seem even trickier than fear. Some of you might think that I’m going to say that sadness is a lack of desire and back me into a corner thinking I’ve contradicted myself…but I’m sure you all know me better than that by now…sadness is actually another pure form of desire but not in the same exact way as love. I’ve probably got your head spinning with that one. Consider this: love needs to latch onto some other emotion to become powerful but sadness can exist on its own. Sadness is something love can hijack, but for the case of understanding the differences, I will use non-love related examples to illustrate my point. Sadness is pure desire for something, but also includes the acceptance that the desire will not happen. It is quite difficult to come up with non-love related sadness experiences but I’ll try my best. Say you owe a large sum of money to the government from a recent audit. If you cannot pay you will be arrested and imprisoned (I don’t know the law for sure but just accept it as part of the example). Say at your current job there is an opening for a position that pays much more than what you currently earn. The added income would allow you to pay the IRS in due time. Unfortunately for you, a new hot-shot employee is much more qualified for the position than you and you know for sure you will not get it (as you can see, this is not a love related scenario). You are now depressed and sad because you desire this new higher-paid position but know that that desire will not happen. Sadness is simply the acceptance that a desire will not come true. Regardless of whether or not you know if it will happen, you still desire it; that’s why you are sad when you know it won’t happen.

I’ve covered anger, fear, love, and sadness. Now on to happiness…but as you may have remembered from earlier in the post I stated there was one exception; happiness is it. Happiness can be viewed as either the lack of a desire or the state after a desire has been fulfilled (I mean pure happiness, not necessarily love-happiness. It can be included but it really depends.). For example, if you desire a new car and get it, your happy. Do you still desire that car? No, because you already have it. You may desire for the car not to get damaged, to stay clean, and to keep you safe in an accident. But in that split-second initial feeling of happiness when you got your new car, you were happy because that desire was finally gone. There is actually two ways of looking at that: 1) being that the happiness exists because we were granted our desire and got what we wanted or 2) the fact that the desire is finally gone and we don’t have to worry about it anymore. The second choice can lead to a number of interesting conclusions. Maybe we naturally don’t want to desire something, which explains why we seek to fulfill our desires: to simply end them. Maybe we know that desire is a bad thing and as a result try to fulfill them to end them. Unfortunately for us as soon as we fulfill them then another pile of desire awaits us. It’s is not usual to see someone desire something and not want it. If you desired to spend a day at the beach and NOTHING prevented you from doing it and I mean nothing as in no problem with transportation, fear of ocean, being seen in a bathing suit, not having enough time, etc…then you would most certainly go. The only reasons people don’t fulfill their desires is because things block their way, not because they choose to. Someone who is devoutly religious and says that money is of no importance to them might seem to someone that they desire money but do not give in to it. In fact, they say that a lot, “they do not give in to worldly desires” and so forth. But that’s not true, they simply don’t desire it. Desire is all or nothing. I may even flip the tables and say that they desire to not have money and worldly desires. Regardless, they are giving in to their desires of not wanting something, which technically is the exact same thing as desires of want for something. If we desire something we want it, there is no way around it.

My conclusion here is that if we remove desire, then all that is left is happiness, which most anybody could agree with. We want to achieve our natural state of happiness and the only way to do that is to rid ourselves of desire. And as of now the only way to rid ourselves of desire is to fulfill them, but at the same that fulfillment of those desires simply leads to new ones, and so the infinite loop continues on. From a religious point of view, maybe Heaven is a world of no desires and Hell is a world of nothing but desire. In that sense we’re all already in Hell or at least pretty close. Yes desire can be for good such as in love-happiness, but it’s like putting perfume on the pig; yeah, it’ll smell nice but it’s still filthy. Going back with what I was saying in the beginning with our true selves and being drunk on desire, maybe we will only know our true selves when desire is gone. Since all that is left is happiness, then its probably safe to assume that we could only be better people. When you think about it, any crime is based on desire: theft is desire for money, murder is desire to end someones life, assault is desire to hurt someone, the list goes on. If we remove and cleanse ourselves of this filth of a feeling called desire then we can only better ourselves. Sober up from drinking too much desire. I can create two statements using this concept (yes, technically I could combine them and it would be just as effective but I wanted to use the bullet dots):

We will only be truly happy when we desire nothing

Only when we want nothing, will we be satisfied with what we have

Political Rants

If Hillary becomes president then life as we know it will cease to exist. I tell you that the universe will implode in on itself and everything of every race, ethnicity, religion, or political view will die. And no, I’m not overestimating things…the only reason she isn’t the Anti-Christ is because she’d make such a horrible leader…

She represents everything I hate about politics and then some! I watched part of the debate tonight (I say part because there’s no way I could last the entire thing without my head exploding) and oh holy shit fuck…if she gets elected we’re screwed.

 One thing being discussed (well they weren’t really discussing anything because as soon as a topic was presented Hillary Rodam took no more than 4 seconds to change it to something completely different and of no value) was the Bush’s energy bill and the candidates’ reasons for voting for or against it. Hillary Rodam (actually I’m going to refer to her as “the chipmunk” because she must have put in cheek implants or something because I didn’t really see a face…it was just cheeks) voted against it of course. Why? Because of the tax breaks the oil companies got was her reasoning, despite the fact she has none! Now let’s think this through now…the oil companies are aware of the fact that oil will NOT be around forever and that “being green” is the new hip thing to do. The big bad oil companies are investing massive amounts of money into green and clean energy! Google BP and the second hit you get is BP Solar! If a company is going to be able to mass produce new “green” energy devices on a large scale, who can do a better job? Billy Bob and his backyard garage or a company with the resources to actually invest in such a project? Think about it. When you consider the facts, those big billion dollar tax breaks are actually being invested into clean energy! But if your a chipmunk then you don’t care about the facts now do you?

Alright, that’s #1 of 3 things on the chipmunk and energy…time for #2…once again she outdoes herself with the classic “answer that actually has no answer in it at all” answer. The subject of nuclear energy was brought up (nuclear power is SAFE and CLEAN…get it through your heads people! Do you have any idea how many nuclear warheads exist in the world and around you? No problem with that but I’ll be damned if we build a nuclear plant! France gets 79% of its energy from nuclear and they’re a big giant pussy!) and Hillary was asked about her view on it and what her energy policy would be…ready?…she would 1: not allow any more nuclear plants to be constructed until it could be made more safe…(hey bitch! it’s already as safe as it’s ever going to be!!! and if you don’t want nuclear then stop complaining about the enviornment!) and 2: not allow any more coal plants to be constructed…my head’s going to frickn explode! She named 2 things! 2! TWO!! Both if which are not something that would create cleaner energy! Guess what that means? No more nuclear or coal means more OIL and NATURAL GAS (fossil fuels cough cough) would be used since our energy demand is sharply going up! And how about you point your chipmunk eyes over at the Chinese and their energy policy…2/3 of their power comes from coal and guess what? in the next few years they have over 560 new planned coal units to be built. That’s 2 new coal plants being opened every WEEK! But in the eyes of democrats like Hillary Rodham, America is always the worst thing in any category no matter what it is.

Time for #3 and your going to want to sit don for this one…the chipmunk in her dream enviornment of communism is next…it was during the topic of the energy bill and she started rambling about Bush’s tax cuts for the oil companies (which if you read the beginning is actually good…and that’s just from a “green” perspective and I haven’t even included the economical benefits of it) and her “plan.” The words out of her mouth were “profit-tax”…a tax on companies making high profits…THAT’S FUCKING COMMUNISM!!! Not to mention that would be a horrible thing to happen in terms of energy. If the oil companies are taxed for high profits, then they’ll just produce less to avoid the tax. Them producing less oil to save money means shorter supply for us and higher prices. And if she uses her communist ways to control the oil companies then they’ll just jack up the price to compensate for the cost of the tax! But why in the world would Hillary consider that? Remember she doesn’t care about facts, just whatever people want to hear that will make them vote for her!

My old high school principal said a very famous thing nobody in the school will forget and that’s “DON’T DO STUPID”…so please I beg you…don’t do stupid by voting for the chipmunk for president!

Dream Theory

I wrote this a while back. Even though there’s a few things I feel different on, it still gets to the core of things…

“Everyone has had a dream at one point or another (when I say dreams I mean the type when you go to sleep). Supposedly we have dreams every night but only remember parts of a few once in a while. But what memories we have of them are usually very broken, random, and distant, even as soon as one wakes up. But this is generally how we can separate our “dream world” from our reality. We know that we went to bed and then fell asleep and we remember waking up in the same bed. We can assume that what happened in between those times was a dream. And since most dreams are very random and strange, we can further dissociate it with our known reality. Our dreams are usually scattered bits of information and experiences we have encountered recently, or some or all of a distant traumatic incident(s). Our minds jumble all this stuff up into this world where we think were awake but really aren’t. We then wake up and know we were dreaming. Generally, in a dream your mind plays tricks on your senses, making you see or hear things that aren’t there.

 

            One interesting thing I believe is that during our dreams time seems to be altered, sometimes to the extreme amount. My dad had told me of a dream he had one time where he was part of a big bank robbery. He and these other guys had planned it out for hours and waited for the right time. The broke in the bank carefully, not to set off the alarm, and started to use their torch to burn past the door on the safe. The very second that the door opened on the safe, his alarm clock immediately went off. Now is that pure coincidence that in his dream lasting hours, that the very second he opened the door to the safe his alarm clock went off, and on top of that, it was the correct sound of an alarm? His alarm was the perfect sound and at the perfect time. That seems to be much more than pure coincidence to me. I believe that the very instant he heard the alarm in his sleep, he had a dream that lasted hours in a matter of a second or maybe even less. I’ve had dreams that seemed to last hours and so much had happened, and I had fallen asleep for only 15 minutes! I don’t think it’s uncommon for a person to have a dream where they might die or get hurt, and right at the exist time it’s supposed to happen, something just happens to wake them up whether it be an alarm clock or a sound in the night. Dreams can happen in an instantaneous instant and we don’t even realize it. Our minds are well capable of altering our perception of time much greater then we think.

 

No, that’s not my Dream Theory; I’ve barely begun to start with it yet. I just wanted to give a little background and concepts on the topic; it’ll have more meaning later on in this theory.

 

            I want you to take an object in front of you, anything will do. My object will be a Sharpie marker. Why does that pen exist? Other than then common logic telling you it’s really there, your senses and brain do all the work. Your eyes tell you that you see an object. The memory part of your brain tells you that it is a pen and it’s for writing, chewing on, stabbing someone in the jugular with, whatever uses for a sharpie pen that you know of your brain tells you immediately in a split second. Your brain interprets what your eyes “see” and you know that it’s a medium sized silver Sharpie. You touch the pen and your brain tells you it’s round long in relation to its width and it’s smooth in texture. You smell it and it smells like a permanent marker pen. Now that you’re high from smelling the Sharpie you might see what it tastes like. Your brain tells you it tastes like a Sharpie. If you have never tasted a Sharpie before then your brain tells you your tasting something and since your other senses are telling you it’s a Sharpie pen then your brain assumes that it’s what a Sharpie tastes like. When you write with the Sharpie you hear the squeak on the paper and your brain tells you your hearing the sound of a permanent marker on paper. You see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the Sharpie. For some reason we as human beings are happy and content with having just those five things as proof enough that something exists. Heck, just one of those is enough to make most people believe something is real. All of those “different” senses, however, are all basically the same thing though. Our brains must interpret all five of them. We simply trust our brains that what they are telling us is the case.

 

            When we dream our brains do the exact same thing as in reality, just a lot more sloppily. But why are we so sure that everything our brains tell us is true. Why do you trust your brain in telling you that your holding whatever object you are, or even this text you’re reading right now. Why do we have so much trust in something that has total control over what we perceive? Our brains are interpreters of the world around us, or so we are led to believe. The Bible was made a long time ago and has undergone many interpretations. Do you seriously think that The Bible is exactly the same as it was so many years ago in its first edition? Interpretations always tend to change things around, even if only minutely. But it is already proven that our brains can falsely tell us of our surroundings.

 

            Sit in a spinning chair and close your eyes. Spin your self around a few times then let the chair slow you to a stop on it’s own. Try to guess when you are still moving and when you have stopped. Chances are you will be wrong the majority of the time. It’s called spatial disorientation and it’s what happened to JFK Jr. when he was flying. Its shows how easily the mind can misinterpret information about your surroundings. But we assume that only in cases like that is when the “bad information” is received. We assume that everything we sense in “normal conditions” is 100% accurate.

 

If I still seem a bit vague at what I’m getting at then this is much simpler put: Somebody prove to me the world/universe exists, without using any of the five senses that we have. All you have to do is find a way to prove to me that the object in front of you exists, but you cannot use any of the five senses to do so. Not so easy is it? Maybe I’m wrong though. Maybe our brains are interpreting everything perfectly fine. They probably are…That’s because our brains are making everything we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell completely up.

 

How do we know we can trust our own brains? There is no object in front of you…it’s only there because your brain is telling you that it’s there. In The Matrix, there’s the one part where the traitor on the Nebaknezzer makes a deal with the agent to give the machines information on Zion’s location. He then goes on saying that the only reason he tastes the steak he is eating in the restaurant is because his mind is tricking him into believing that he is actually eating a big, juicy, tasty steak. “Ignorance is bliss” is his statement to it. Our brains might just have created the world we think we live in. Everything we know of is based on the five senses in some way or another. My belief is that this world we think we live in, this “reality”, is just a dream that we will awake from at one time or another. We are so convinced that when we wake up, we are in reality until we go to sleep. Anything after that is just a random dream, and once we wake up again, it’s back to reality. We are so ultimately sure, convinced, and dedicated to that notion.

 

The saying is that if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it does it make any sound? No it doesn’t, only just invisible waves in the air that would be interpreted as sound. Well the bed that is right behind me as I typed this is not currently being looked at, or smelled, or heard, or felt, or tasted. The only reason I know it’s there is because my brain tells me it is. Common sense dictates that there’s no reason for the bed to go anywhere and I assume that it is still there as it has been. But how do I know for sure that it’s still there though? The brain has control once again. The bed probably isn’t there anymore; I just simply assume it’s still there. Science says that we only use something like 10% or 12% of our brains. Maybe this is what the other 90% is working on…our world. I’m even going to go as far as saying that maybe the world does revolve around me. Maybe none of you out that reading this really exist. My brain is telling me that you exist and not to question it. So technically nobody out there is reading this because nobody out there exists. Actually this philosophy doesn’t even exist either because my brain is just telling me that it does.

 

There is, however, a perfectly plausible explanation for these atrocities though. The world would be made up and I would be the only one “in” it…this is a dream…everything, everyone, and all time…all a dream…well maybe not everyone. If I believed that I’d be quite cynical by now. Generally, the most likely explanation is that we all have out own dreams; we just all share the same “space.” We each have our own dreams, but all of us can interact with each other in it.

 

            You might be thinking if this is throwing to the wind all religious views. Not necessarily. When you die, your dream ends, and you wake up in “reality.” Your dream, by which I mean reality right now currently, is a reflection of what your life is after you die. If you lead a bad life, then your currently in Hell already, and if you are leading a good life then that means your already in Heaven. Just as in our dreams, which consist of jumbled up bits of our lives, maybe our lives are jumbled up bits of our true reality. That’s why if this theory is correct, then soul mates can be possible (if you have read my Soul Mates Theory). Because we are already in Heaven and Hell, then God can know if there is an even umber of people to pare up and how pares with both be in Heaven.

 

            Since I’m on the topic of religion and God, this is the best time to bring up another point. God is good, not evil. That said, why would He create us with the capability of the evils we commit. Good and bad are relative to the time period and society. In a society where killing someone is ok, then some one who just hurts a person, but doesn’t kill him or her is considered a “good person.” Just as in a society where everybody is and has always been happy and kind to each other, s a person who wasn’t friendly or got frustrated with another person would be viewed as evil. As far was we know the majority of us might already be in Hell. But God is all powerful, and can do ANYTHING. He created us, and He had the power to do so in any way He wished. Now option A is to create a race capable of evils, and option B is to create them without the capability of evil. If you’re good, would you not create the option B, NOT capable of evils? In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit because the evil snake tempted them to do so. Well if you created a race of life and didn’t want them to eat the fruit from a tree, wouldn’t it save everybody a lot of time and trouble if you never put the fruit or snake there in the first place seeing as how you created them to begin with? It’s like making a button in an empty room that says in big red letters “DO NOT PUSH”…well if the button is not supposed to be pushed then why in the world was the button created in the first place!? I do not believe that God created us simply so he could test us. Yes there is the Book Of Job in the Bible, but that doesn’t mean that out entire purpose is to be tested…right? Clearly with our history and society, there is much evil in our world. Hence why I believe that this is not reality at all. This is a dream, and anything can happen, including evil. Maybe I am wrong about being in Hell or Heaven, maybe we are all already in Heaven living peacefully, it’s just some of us are having bad dreams, i.e. our bad realities we are currently experiencing. My dad had his dream of being a bank robber, but he isn’t one in our reality, just as you may have had a dream where you hurt somebody or done something you would never do in reality. But then again, bank robberies are only bad relative to our society. The rules of Heaven and Hell are probably a lot stricter than bad being just bank robberies. Generally, happiness should not be used as a meter for goodness. Murderers can like what they do and be destined in hell, and like wise some can be unhappy with the world and be in Heaven.

 

            Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m just going crazy and I should just accept with world for what it is and just leave it at that. But maybe I’m right…or at least on the right track to the truth.”

Fear

Religion is based on fear. There is no way around it. Why is it based on fear you say? Because it is the only way in to get followers of it to actually follow the “rules” provided.

 In almost any religion, the general concept is ‘be good and you will be rewarded’ and ‘be bad and you will be punished.’ Now when a person chooses to, not commit a sin when they are tempted to do so, one of two things might run through their head: ‘If I don’t commit this sinful act then I will go to Heaven’ or ‘If I do commit this sinful act then I will go Hell.’ Now if i remember correctly society works like this: If you commit a crime then you get punished for it. NOT if you don’t commit that crime you will not get punished for it. If a ‘bad’ act becomes a choice, the majority of people will think of the consequences of choosing “yes” for that act. People do not think of the consequences of not choosing it if it is an act of negativity. So with that said, I believe it is safe to say that people would avoid sin in order to not go to Hell, rather than to get in Heaven. Another way of looking at it is this. If a person, in the Catholic faith, commits a sin, they are destined to go to Hell unless that sin is forgiven. Action must be taken in order to “remove” the sin from that person. So it can be said that if a person commits that sin, then they will go to Hell. You cannot say that if a person does not commit that sin then they will go to Heaven. They can not commit that sin and still be destined or Hell for something else.

 Once again, it is the thought of going to Hell that prevents a person from committing sin. People are afraid of Hell, hence why they don’t want to go there. Fear of Hell keeps people in line. And since the basis of any religion is a set of “do this” and “don’t do that,” then fear is the perfect way to make sure people follow the “rules.”

I understand that religion needs to be based on fear. How else will people actually behave? But seeing how God is all about forgiveness and love and all that crap, then why in the world would religion (i.e. connection to God), be based on something as negative and “un-loving” as fear? It’s straight up hypocrisy!

I should not do certain things because if I do then I will go to Hell. Says who??? I can’t trust the customer at work who is paying with a check because it could be fake, but I can trust the church to say: “Yes, we know. This is what will happen to you when you die!”

What better way to get a group of people to believe what ever you want them to, then to place the notion of eternal damnation to keep them in line. Even better; anyone why questions this will also suffer eternal damnation! What a coincidence! Guess nobody can question anything now, huh? Sucks for people like me I guess…

Lets think of the concept of Heaven and Hell briefly…your telling me that we are supposed to divide the entirety of human emotions, actions, and existence into 2 places. 2! Not 5, not 23, not 487986, but 2! TWO! I almost find that impossible to believe. Your telling me that life is either pass or fail and that’s it. That’s the biggest pile of bullshit imaginable if you ask me…

Our soul is destined to go to one of two places huh? Well do I have some interesting information for that concept! Here’s a video to illustrate…

If your a bit confused let me explain. People who have bad cases of epilepsy in which no other treatment has worked can go through a procedure called corpus callsotomy to correct the condition. The brain is divided into left and right hemispheres connected by a series of “wires”  directly in between them. They are virtually identical in nature. One exception being that only one side controls speech. During this procedure, the connections between the two hemispheres are cut and there is in a sense two brains now. Each hemisphere adapts to being on its own and as far as it’s concerned, the other hemisphere doesn’t exist. Now for epilepsy to exist it required both sides of the brain and since the connection is severed, then the condition is cured. But this also raises some very interesting questions because there are two separate spheres of conciseness in the same person. Since speech is only controlled by one side of the brain, a person can only say what they see, hear, etc for information sent to that side of the brain. For example, if a person sees a toy car with on eye, with that eye’s information sent to the non-speech side of the brain, then if the person is asked what they see then they would say nothing. But the side of the brain still controls one side of the body, and when the person is asked to draw what they see they draw it perfectly fine. When asked why they drew the toy car, they are confused because the speech side of the brain doesn’t know that was a toy car to begin with. This is much better illustrated in the following video.

So they have found that when each side of the brain is asked if it believes in God, then 1 side can say yes and the other side can say no. Now the only way around that is to say that another soul was created. And if that’s the case than that technically makes us God because He’s the only one that can make a soul in the first place!

Back In Black

Yeah, its been something along the lines of many days since the last post (so much for that everyday crap). But I’m going to try a new approach…

So I’m definately starting to freak myself out sometimes with this little situation that occurs every once in a while. A “deja-vu” situation that is. I know what deja-vu is: (time for wikipedia kids!) “The experience of feeling sure that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously.”Apparently I’ve had a “temporal-lobe epilepsy.” In other words, my brain is having a seizure. There has been a ”mismatching in the brain that causes the brain to mistake the present for the past.” My brain is mistaking the present for the past? That doesn’t make any sense. In order for my brain to have a “past” it must have already happened! We have a feeling of time with past, present, and future all because of memory. Now if something really hasn’t happened yet, then how can my brain confuse it with what is currently happening? It like saying when you put a certain file on a hard drive, it will make the computer crash, but the computer crashes before it’s been written on the hard drive. Sounds like the computer had a deja-vu. The computer, i.e. my brain, must then known that the file is gong to be uploaded and therefore must have previous knowledge of the future event that it will crash upon the file being written on the drive, a.k.a. a deja-vu! So by trying to explain a deja-vu, I’ve created one, and hence, and infinite loop. If I try to explain the deja-vu, I end right back at the same deja-vu I wish to explain!

It was Saturday night and I was sitting at the left turn lane on Turner rd to turn left onto Gunn. I was talking to my friend, everything was normal, and I guess I had a “brain seizure” because it was like somebody glocked me with a cricket bat. I swear that I had been there sitting in my truck, late a night, waiting to turn left onto Gunn, with my friend, talking about the exact very same topic! As I was sitting there I’d swear that I had been sitting there before! I was even in mid-sentence when it happened! I even stopped talking right then and told her about the feeling. It lasted literally 2 seconds and I just thought whatever and went back to finishing my sentence. Never even thought about it for the rest of the night, but it just randomly popped in my head about over an hour ago and I can’t stop thinking about it.

OK, let’s analyze this through; My brain confused the present (in my truck, night, friend, conversation, etc) with the past…That means it took the present as a memory…a memory that technically doesn’t exist yet…

Fuck it, I’m tired of thinking about it. I had a brain seizure that’s all there is to it. I guess they go around like the flu these days…

Here’s some links, you figure it out…

http://people.howstuffworks.com/question657.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vu

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_lobe_epilepsy

This is why I keep say we can’t trust our brains! Maybe are brains are confusing the past with the present for all we know…I’m just going to stop there…I can go on for days about this crap…

Radical Views

Being agnostic is a wonderful thing for a person like me. I like to question everything. ‘Is it true? Why is is that way? how?’ And “everything” does include religion. The wonderful thing about being agnostic is that I can question religion and nobody can tell me that it is because I do not believe in God. I simply question what is presented to us as the “real thing.”

The way it goes in the Christian faith for the “end-of-the-world,” is that the Anti-Christ will come to power and destroy all hat oppose him or his beliefs. Christ then comes to go battle in a valley somewhere over by Israel with the Anti-Christ and then all hell breaks loose. There is a lot more details in there, but that is the general idea of what will happen in the Christian faith. The Anti-Christ will be someone who will come to control the entire world and will someone who will be selected for this absolute power. He/She will be a perfect public speaker and will be able to grab the attention of most people. Generally speaking, the Anti-Christ will be someone who seems like the savior of the world, but is actually pure evil. Now you have some background knowledge on the topic.

If you are a devout Christian or deeply religious or even not open to “radical” ideas pertaining to Christian faith, I highly advise you NOT to read the next paragraph. It will anger you, upset you, make you throw your hands in the air and think of doing very violent things to me for the idea that I am about to unleash here…

I propose that the Bible is the work of the Devil. Everything about it is all the work of the evil itself. It simply contains all this “good” information in order to throw us off from the fact that the author’s name is Evil. Being agnostic, I also have doubts that the Bible is even real and not the work of a bunch of bored people 1500 years ago. But supposing the Bible really is “real,” then I propose it is the work of the Devil. Take the Anti-Christ for example. In my view, the Anti-Christ is good. I know, a hard pill to swallow. The Anti-Christ seems like a great fellow, but the Bible tells that he is the root of evil and will bring the destruction of the world. This is why the Bible might be the evil we try to run from. The Anti-Christ will tell us the truth about the world and our existence. The Devil does not want us to know about that, so He created the Bible, disguised as the work of God or whoever else, and tells of the Anti-Christ as being evil shrouded in good. The Bible tells us that the Anti-Christ will destroy all that do not follow his/her beliefs of blasphemy. That sounds like an evil individual. But compare it to the world today. Terrorists believe us to be the infidels because we do not see their view on religion. We “destroy them” not because of their radical views, but because their radical views cause them to to acts of terror such as bombings and hijackings. That is why we view them as the enemy. Now imagine your are an outside neutral viewpoint and do not view the acts of terrorism and the killing of innocent people that they cause. Now it appears that it is simply us killing them because they have radical beliefs. This is similar to what will be the case in he time of the Anti-Christ. The people that are against the Anti-Christ and the true beliefs of what our world is and stands for will be the future terrorists. The Bible says this “evil” Anti-Christ will kill them because they are against him/her. But it reality it is like an outside viewpoint on terrorists now-a-days. The Anti-Christ will not persecute them because they do no believe his/her ideas, but because their “Radical” viewpoint cause them to commit evil acts that they believe is for “good,” just as terrorists today commit acts of evil because they believe it is for a “good” cause.

I’m going to let that sink in for a while and simmer a bit. I will add to it in a bit if I can get my ideas more organized and better explained. Yes I might be wrong, but who knows…maybe I am the Anti-Christ…ah, the wonderful thing of being agnostic; there is no such thing as blasphemy to us…

…The Little Things in Life…

The little things in life can affect your life itself. The smallest decision to either do something or not, whatever it may be, can drastically change your life, either good or bad. You deciding to start a conversation with someone could lead you to becoming great friends with that person. On the flip side, your deciding not to start a conversation with them and remaining quiet, could lead to an even better friendship with some other person at a later time. Maybe it simply ends up with you not gaining a friend either way, you can never know. The funny thing is, sometimes I even know when these decisions come up and despite the knowledge that I should go for it because it could lead to a good thing, I turn it down. The regret of making that choice just follows me around for a while after that. “Gee, maybe If I had stayed…” just runs through my mind over and over. I can tell myself though that there will be other choices that will come across. Yes, it could have been the only one, but I can always hope it is not. There is just so much uncertainty in it all.

Have you ever felt that what you want more than anything else is right in front of you, but your just too dumb to realize that it is there?

‘Till Death Do Us Part…

Who here is afraid of death? I most certainly am. Is it because every living thing is programmed to fear it or is it because we don’t know what is “beyond the line?” When you think about it, you don’t know what might happen to you when you wake up the next day any more than when you die. Sure, you might know what you plan to do that day but you don’t know what will happen to you. You could get in a head-on collision, contract some deadly super-disease, or worse yet, Mormons could arrive at your doorstep. You don’t know what will happen to you. I can even be as so bold as to say that deeply religious people believe to know more of when they die over what will happen to them the next day. They are 100% sure they will go to Heaven after they die.

Back when I used to go to church, our priest gave a sermon about fearing death and brought up a very interesting point. If we are deeply religious and are good people then we know that we are going to Heaven, a much better place that where we are now. So if we know we are going to a much better place then why do we fear it? If a relative dies and goes to that “better place,” then why do we mourn their death instead of celebrating it? Granted to me the concept of the “better place” still seems to me like a “happy pill” to swallow to make us less fearful of dying or when friends die. I do agree with the priest though. It seems almost hypocritical to believe someone goes to a better place and then to feel sad about it. Maybe that is going too far by saying that but you get the idea.

Speaking of death, you don’t immediately die as soon as your heart stops beating. No no, you die when brain activity ceases, which takes a few minutes at least. This is how people that are “dead” can be brought back even after a couple of minutes of clinical death. That is also why I generally do not believe those death stories of “I saw a light and a tunnel!” Yeah you did see a light and a tunnel. When you died, you went into a state of shock and your brain gave you the popularized notion of death, which is: ding ding! A light at the end of a tunnel. Yes your heart keeps you alive, but it is not what makes you alive. You can replace the heart with an artificial one and not notice a difference. There is no artificial brain to replace yours if something goes snap inside. The organs and body cannot do anything without the brain, but the brain can survive and still think and work, although not for very long, without the body.

So you die and then you exist in this state of not having any senses. You can’t see, hear, taste, smell, or feel for probably like 10 minutes. You are literally imprisoned in your brain and can’t get out knowing death is going to come in only a few minutes. The worst way to die is to know your going to die, but technically because the brain still goes on after the body stops working, everyone has to go through the state of knowing their going to die. So when you “die,” your still there in this state of paralyzed panic and you can’t do a damn thing. All you can do is wait for the blanket of death to cover you completely. In that process your brain cells are dying and you basically get dumber as the minutes past. That makes sense because people that were dead for more than just a few minutes before they were brought back suffer brain damage. All your memories gradually dissolve away as the nerves die and then you think your very last thought until you reach permanent sleep. Maybe that is what it is after death. Like a dreamless sleep that you never awake from. Trying to think of being after death is like trying to think of before you were born.

Who ever said the “first is the worst?”

Have you ever had a feeling that something is not quite right about the world? I get it every once in a while. It only comes once in a while but it usually hits me when I least expect it to. It’s like this wave that quickly washes over you. When I say “not quite right,” I am not simply implying of all the terrorists, wars, or slow drivers. I mean that the world really is not there. Not a feeling of a dream per say, but this feeling that nothing is there. That everything you know exists is simply just an illision or make believe. The feeling only lasts a few seconds, but when it’s there…wow, it’s very convincing. I remember what I was thinking though when it came. I was thinking about if when we die, and after the universe ends, the same thing happens all over and we wake up as a new person. Similar to incarnation I suppose. It seemed almost scary to me, that’s what life could be, just dying then living then dying then living, forever and ever, with no end.

I have respect for people that are deeply religious and as much as I would like to be someone like that, I feel at the same time such a strong dislike for religion. When you look at it from a non-religious, or as I am, agnostic, perspective, it seems so…plastered, fake, planned out, and obvious. If your good then you will have a good after life and if your bad you will have a bad one. Reward the good people. I think that someone thousands of years ago had a group of people that were getting out of control, so, to help motivate them to be good people and not cause problems, told them when they die they will suffer pain and anguish. If they changed their evil ways (good song by the way), then they will go to Heaven or recieve 72 virgins or aquire inner peace. It seems fake. I am not even talking about the idea of God or Jesus yet, just the bare bones of the basics of almost every religion. It’s just like Santa Claus! If your good you get presents and if not then you get a lump of coal. We all know that Santa Claus is not real though, but we believe it as little kids because our parents told us to. A lot of us believe the religions that we do because we were brought up with it from our parents.

What really grinds my gears are thing like “God was watching over me” and things of the sort. To say that you survived a horrific car accident means that “God has watched over you!” In order to judge it as a horiffic accident though, that means a much larger amount of people must have died in similar accidents, hence why it would take the “Hand of God” to help you live. What of all those people that died in the previous accidents? No one ever says “God wasn’t watching over them,” it was just bad luck or that is simply the way it happens. Why is it that if something good happens its God’s work, but if something bad happens it is not God’s fault? That’s basically saying there is no such thing as good luck but bad luck can happen to anyone. That does not make any sence. I do not care that the religious people would say things like “God works in mysterous ways” or “God has a chosen few.” Take Jessica Lunsford. Innocent child that was buried alive in a trash bag. Well if God “chose” her to join Him in Paradise, how could a good and just God allow her to die in such a horrific way? Why not have her killed in some painless and quick fashion and also not have the horibble thing of her knowing she was going to die? Then you see the bad murderers of the world die quick and painlessly. Now does that make any sence?

There is a video I saw that explained how prayer is an optical illusion. Christianity.com states that God answers prayers in the form of “Yes, No, or Wait.” The guy showed that the same principle can be applied to praying to a milk jug. Using “Yes, No, or Wait,” means that there will be an answer to anything no matter what it is! Anything you pray for can be answered in either “Yes,” “No,” or “Wait.” He showed that we would not believe that a milk jug answered our prayers but we believe that God does, despite the fact that it is the exact same concept, just a different idol that is prayed to.

Being agnostic, I do not believe that God does not exist, but I can not say that He does either. We do not know and most importantly, we can not ever know. Being simple humans it is way beyond our ability to comprehend. The most I can say is that I believe that God could exist in a higher demension, outside our universe. We can not, however, ever prove He exists though.