My Responses to “Nicholas Humphrey’s Beautiful Theory of Mind By Nick Romeo”
These are just natural responses to what I felt was a great article. I never do this but my personal journey to stay present in the here and now has led me to read hundreds of books on the subject and some of them dozens of times. Like the story of the count in the Amor Towle's novel, “A Gentleman in Moscow,” I too believe in putting things right in their place to bring peace and acceptance to my reality.
What follows are what triggered my response and the response itself.
Trigger: “In his new book, “Sentience,” a neuropsychologist argues that consciousness evolved to make us feel that life is worth living.”
Response: Consciousness may have evolved but finding that worth within is a present moment’s belief and must be sustained every moment until it becomes a habit otherwise we would not have war, murder, rape, and other horrible things.
Trigger: “Some early archeologists have suggested, speculatively, that the cave is the basis for the one that Plato describes in his famous allegory, in which prisoners confuse the flickering, fire-cast shadows on a cavern’s walls with reality.”
Response: This was far more reaching as humans being here in this reality are not seeing the smoky mirror of life. Few find that they are them and them are they. I felt Pato was not describing the cave in the earth but what encircled the earth as the cave as projections of the stars and all we see below are illusions.
Trigger: “In “Sentience,” he asks readers to imagine the mind as a library. The texts of the books that it contains are our perceptions, providing relevant information about the world.”
Response: I disagree because so many humans including me lived in a world mired by unconscious thoughts. The mind cannot be carried with you and when you make a profound memory or some incredible stimulus hits you like tragedy of a death or your first orgasm with a partner, it creates a memory that isn’t stored in the mind but in the quantum realm (perhaps) just not in the body anywhere. We see humans being hit hard by their unconscious thoughts everyday and it is growing as a few people inspire that condition through their phones, computers, and televisions and the minds of those viewing have nothing prepared to interact with those memories. It is like they (thoughts) are alive and used to make the person suffer not just once but constant demons of suffering.
Trigger: “If perceptions make life possible, sensations make it worth living“
Response: Yes sir, sensations can, but we see evidence in our people that many don’t perceive the worth and only the pain of living so they only do things like drugs, drinking, X-Games, sex, and therapy to try and have worth when they could have been trained to perceive all thoughts and choose to observe rather than respond and endure the emotions that make them suffer.
Trigger: “It’s like the criminal trials of animals in Europe in the Middle Ages,” he said, starting to drift between lanes on a busy avenue.”
Response: It appears Harrison was trying to impress you and could not stay present in the here and now of his being and almost got you and the others into a crash.
Trigger: “I was coming to see that there’s something dreamily mad about human consciousness,” Humphrey later wrote of the episode.”
Response: Humphrey believes human consciousness is mad but that is just an opinion from someone just as mad as any normal person. His projection of life. Humanity’s unconsciousness is what makes them mad. A collective species mired in suffering with only 25% awakening and 10% awoke. Well everyone cannot have heaven at once when hell persists and so sentences must not be commuted at the same time.
Trigger: “Humphrey quotes the English poet Rupert Brooke, who, in a letter to a depressed friend, suggested that he might be helped by “just looking at people and things as themselves — neither as useful nor moral nor ugly nor anything else; but just as being”
Response: That is awesome but why can he help others be conscious in a way that makes perfect sense but not himself?
Trigger: “Do you know Shakespeare’s fifty-third sonnet?” Humphrey asked. “What is your substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?” He paused, looking around. “When we experience the magical properties of sensations — colors, pains, and so on — we assume they correspond to something real, the substance of consciousness. But, of course,” he went on, “it could be an illusion. The shadows could be all there is.”
Response: Just brilliant perceptions!
Take nothing from my notes and give all credit to a brilliant man who in triggering me, allows me to see my own path clearly.
