Believing = perception of reality

Your spot on Ray. I would take it to mean something is better than nothing. am i right in my thinking here.?

I think you are right. If you think there are monsters under the bed, your "reality" is just the same, whether they are "really" there or not...

Your mind makes it real as the Matrix movies put it...

But who can control his own thinking???

Can you? If you believe that you can't, then there's no hope.
This is what I'm talking about.

We can control our thinking, but it does require knowledge and a belief to be able to.

I guess this is sort of like the Matrix

Ever felt that something is good, but then realize that it isn't? But it's hard for you to shake off the feeling because you felt it already and you're too accustomed into thinking that it's good... But you want to change the feeling because you know it ain't right. It's hard to change it, but if you know that the feeling and the object are not the same, that feelings for certain things can be mistaken, and that you can change your feelings. However, you're afraid that you might not feel that good feeling again and you stumbled, not realizing that you're the one making the feeling seemed better than anything else, and by thinking or fearing that you will not feel good again you're "making" yourself not feel good again and you're making the feeling seem a lot more than it is so you isolate yourself. I'm making sense right?

You are making sense.

Sheesh! You even make me think that I am in some deep psychological distress...

I have never understood the Matrix trilogy. Maybe because I haven't seen the last one. I have actually heard that it is when you get to understand it thoroughly. True, right?

Ray, if you were subjected to experiments in your nervous system, you would feel the sensation that your leg is burning, when there is no heat source applied to it. But your sensation of burning is true. Only the conceptual meaning you give to it can be true or not.
If you see a man in a distance of 100 m, he would seem very little. Your sensation is true. The image in your eyes is true. But your conception of what a man is, establish the relation between size and distance.

Ray, I believe it's the same thing that happens when you are forced to remember under stress. The stress can get to you, and your focus is suddenly on the strain of remembering. You are too focused on trying to remember that what you want to have in your head is forced out. In other words: You try too hard.

The mind always works best if you let it work by itself. The conciousness has a tendency to get in the way. So there is another film wich is even more relevant than the matrix. Fight club: "Stop trying to control everything and just let go!".

My work is done. J/K.


?

The last two movies aren't that good (some would even say they're cr**). Watching the last movie didn't really make me think any more than when I watched the first one. I think that when Neo got reborned, he realized that he can control himself, he started to believe rather than try to believe that he is in some computer world and that he can control his own mind.



True in the experiment, but when you're not stimulated by the magnetic/electric signals, it is you who activate this sensation whether real or not. If you're afraid of something for example, you feel afraid even if the thing is not there but you thought it was, and even if there's really nothing to be afraid of it, you still have that fear, but you can change it.

I think concept can very much distort your view and feeling toward a certain thing, so yes, it is very crucial in our perception of reality.



I see what your point, but even the process of letting your mind subconsciously change itself requires a bit of conscious thinking. The consciousness leads to the will to change. From my buddhist readings, I read of three ways to battle a destructive feeling: to seek an antidote for it, to abandon it, or to change the feeling right away. The last one is hard to do, but it's possible. I'm ranting about all this because there's a need for me to change something within me that has been disturbing me for quite some time now.

Ray, do you play chess? Now, there's a fun game. In chess, as in life in general, you can either act or react. To act is always best, but it requires that you have some sense of direction. As long as you have a plan you can keep your oponent reacting to your moves instead of moving to counter him. But sometimes it is neccesary to react. If you can't form a plan you must sit and wait for one to open up to you through the game. It is a dangerous thing to do, because you have to sieze the advantage at just the right moment, or you will lose.

From this I learned: If you are pushing and pushing, but can't break through, then yield, and let the nature of the game reveal the path that you cannot see. Sometimes you may search so hard that the question makes you blind to the answer.

In chess the nature of the game is the rules the game goes by. It is much easier to encompass the rules of a simple game of chess than to encompass the rules of the great game that life is, but the principal is the same.