Reality – the basics of interrelations. Terminology traps

Author: Vladimir Tonkov

Date: 29.03.2010

Translated from Russian by Elena Shoshkina
Edited by Ivan Gesse

Introduction

Very few people claiming to be the experts of human souls and so-called teachers of humanity, whether it be psychics or psychoanalysts, physicists or spiritually oriented people, neurophysiologists or autopsists, ask themselves a very simple yet an extremely disturbing question: what conscience really is and how human perception and conscience enable us to see, sense and change the world. Perhaps it would not be wrong to acknowledge the two basic qualities characteristic of man in general when describing the basic particularities of man, those distinguishing and singling man out in the world around us.

The first quality is disappointing, but irrefutable: “man is a greedy animal” and the greediness itself is the most important quality descriptive of man.
The second quality is simpler and duller: “humans are eternal preachers”; his proneness to teach and preach is an indelible attribute of man, the only difference being the methods of preaching.
It is easy to avoid subjects on perception and other similar qualities when it comes to preaching about garden town planning or cluster-type potato digging, but it is an absolutely different matter when we attempt to approach areas extending to all humans and directly related to man’s spiritual and psychological growth.

It is impossible to preach to a person about issues concerning his life or perception, while barely understanding the abyss between our everyday perspective on reality and the natural state of things.
It is impossible to remain an honest scientist, psychologist, doctor, priest, healer, shaman, or a social-conventional leader – priest or a “Great Guru”, and not know the real aspects of human perception, inasmuch as without them even the best appeals and motives will forever remain mere empty words or harmful nonsense…

Moral and conscience. Ethics

Undoubtedly, our ambiguous attitude to such concepts resulted in at least as many world tragedies as were caused by some notorious world wars.

When we speak of an average man mixing these concepts together in his perception, we should acknowledge at the start that their intermixing itself proves to be a great help to those unscrupulous persons, gentlemen, comrades, brothers and teachers who are working at creating their own paradise using the hands of the fooled humanity.

This mechanism is extremely simple and is based on unconscious or partly conscious substitution of the concepts of moral and conscience and sometimes to the extent of mixing them and bringing them to a single seemingly common concept.

Moral is a public opinion requiring particular members of humanity or groups thereof to develop ways, methods and approaches to solve issues associated with the public relations reducing the harm inflicted on others. Moral is based on the initial prudence of a man implying that in the process of his personal activities the lives and activities of others: be it people, beings, environment, etc will be harmed, thus resulting in occurrence of counteractions on their part and ultimately aggravating his own standing.

Conscience is a species-based quality meaning the correspondence of man’s activity to the initial principles of his physical and psychical organisms. Conscience is sooner based on everyday manifestation of man’s belonging to the human kind as to a kind of beings, rather than on prudence, meaning the quality preventing occurrence of counter punitive actions on the part of others: be it people, beings or environment.

Following the above, moral is built on upbringing and teaching, even if it contradicts conscience manifestations thus causing personal inconveniences and damage in favor of society.
On the contrary, conscience is a biochemical, physiological, neurophysiological, mystical or any other process, the main thing being that it is quite clearly dependent on the person’s constitution, his psycho-physical body type, genetically, physically, chemically or in any other way.

Conscience is a question of internal constitution of a person based on his initial essence. Moral on the contrary makes an attempt to change the internal balance (biochemical, physiological, psychical) by means of convincing a person to a forcible reregulation of this balance in favor of society.

To illustrate the above, the psychologist tries to convince a person to sacrifice his unwillingness to live with the family and therefore forces him to change the internal operation of his organism so as to produce hormones and other active substances to eliminate this unwillingness. The psychic tries to achieve the same result by actively influencing the “reverse side” of the human psyche and its constituents. Their actions are undoubtedly moral, but are against human conscience…

In other words, it is not immoral for a man to move on all fours, as some people tend to think, but it is against the human conscience, inasmuch as human psychophysiology dictates that man move on two limbs and preferably on those furthest from the head. On the other hand, peeing in your neighbor’s saucepan or practicing urine therapy (drinking urine for healing or other purposes) is against human conscience inasmuch as here a person is trying to forcibly pour into an organism something that the organism has already rejected earlier.
Why do some people insist on substituting the concept of moral by the concept of conscience?

The answer is very simple: if you say you want to substitute the moral category with the conscience category in the course of a discussion, your interlocutor or opponent will interpret it as your refusal, and a very blunt one, to discuss certain aspects of your beliefs.

This is caused by the fact that conscience, as was already stated above, is a personal psychophysical genetic category and therefore your interlocutor is simply told to back off under a threat of being forcibly kicked out for an unwelcome attempt to examine an extremely personal anatomic nuance meant for somebody else.
Most often this method is used particularly in order to put a stop to discussions about moral aspects on the occasions when discussing them is useless and it is difficult, impossible or dangerous to stop the conversation in any other way.

After all, conscience is a different matter altogether, isn’t it? You see the point, don’t you…

It’s hard to push against genetics… as the certain anecdote has it:
A young man phoned the Playboy editors and said, “You see, I am a gay!” And they asked, “Are you an artist? A poet? Or perhaps a fashion designer?” “Not at all, actually I am a janitor…” “Are you trying to make a fool out of me? You are an ordinary homosexual then…”

Following that it is high time to talk about ethics. Despite common opinion, ethics are a number of convictions of an internal rather than superficial and social nature. It is something reminiscent of a “moral of personal use” created by every individual as an overstructure, an additional coordinating element between conscience and public moral.
Ethics are a number of internal personal convictions based on personal knowledge, personal experience, personal needs and public and social inclinations. Ethics are an internal logical judge as opposed to conscience, the physiological judge punishing by “self-devouring feelings” (i.e. a special category of feelings, but not all of them) and aftereffects thereof, i.e. pains and aches.
It is ethics, meaning the need to achieve an idealistic self, that dictate permissible physiological changes in the self-regulation and self-reorganization and in the psychophysical essence of a particular individual.

And how does the notion of ethics correspond to the notion of etiquette implying a number of particular formalities with respect to certain events or situations? Very simple: in order to maintain the “idealistic self” level the participants of an event introduce and perform a system of external formalities, maintaining which guarantees untouchability of the personal ethics of each participant on the part of their neighbors.
Love and attachment. Morality

Just like it was with the previous example above, intermixing the notions of love and attachment leads in some cases to the situation of latent or in other cases immoral or unscrupulous control over a situation.

It is fairly easy to comprehend the essence and the ways of such control by separating and describing these notions one by one, while thoroughly examining their distinctions.

Love is man’s natural need generated by his psychophysiologic, genetic, physical and chemical, etc nature. Love is dictated by man’s personal need and has much in common with the notion of conscience, if not to say that they are related. In any case they do come from the same source.

Attachment is a moral category humans gained through sufferings in centuries-long battle for survival of the human kind as a social and public phenomenon. Attachment as such, being a superficial category, compels a man to actions confirming his belonging not to the human kind as such, but to a nationality, confession, profession, or group, in other words to a micro society.

Love is the process of admiring, while attachment is the process of possessing, selling and using.

An illustration.

A person is asked a question, “What is love?”

The standard answer is, “Love is when you feel good when the one you love feels good.”

Second question, “Do you love your family partner?”

Let us imagine the answer is “Yes, I do!”

A situation: “You come home. Your partner is having close fellowship with your best girlfriend (or boyfriend, neighbor, just friend, complete stranger). Your partner is really enjoying it and you can see it very clearly. What will your reaction be?”

And what will your reaction be, reader?

It is hardly likely that you will share in your partner’s joy that he is sharing with somebody else. On the contrary, it would rather offend you…

In fact, it is all very simple: try substituting the family notion of “love” by the notion of “attachment” and it will put things right! Inasmuch as your personal reaction to the above perfectly fits in with the category of attachment!

But somehow we prefer the word love instead…

This brings to mind another anecdote:
One angry neighbor is yelling at the father of the boy-neighbor, “Your rascal was just playing doctor with my daughter! I caught them in the act!..”

Dad trying to make an excuse, “Please calm down… It’s normal at this age: to show interest in the other sex, to try to imitate a family… First sexual experience…”

“It would have been much better had they been making babies! He was removing her appendix!!!” Love is a personal state of noble reverence of an individual resulting from contemplating the surrounding environment under the condition of freedom from possessing the phenomenon, event, being, space, etc which is being observed. A person can be immersed in the situation, but the act of possessing or controlling is related to the category of attachment, which is very beautiful indeed and absolutely inoffensive, provided you are not offended by putting categories into places which are more appropriate for them.

Attachment is one of the constituent elements of the morality category. Morality in turn is a subcategory or a part of moral. The part of moral that is responsible for positive and attractive moral categories, as opposed to immoral, negative, and unacceptable ones.

The fact of the matter is that it is not that you should like it, but the people around you should like it even if you are not content with it at all…

Basics of perception and interpretation theater

If you follow the logic above, my reader, then you will be able to understand the subsequent text which at first sight may seem absolutely unconnected with the two previous sections. Moreover, these subjects – seemingly different at first – appear in this chapter for a particular reason!

If we were to look at a particular individual then the situation will be as follows: There is something that common people call consciousness. There is also a specific function of consciousness that we call perception.

“Consciousness is undoubtedly an immaterial formation consisting of a vast conglomerate (a mishmash of a wide range of materials) of obvious and indirect, direct and collateral products of life sustaining activities of the human organism”, medicine says.

“Consciousness is undoubtedly a material formation entering our world by means of a physical body and leaving it at the moment the physical body dies”, say occultists.

Where is the truth? Apparently the truth lies with the one possessing more rights, i.e. capability to outshout the opponent. The important thing is that consciousness undoubtedly exists and that it is, again, undoubtedly material inasmuch as immaterial things cannot have any functions and yet the functions are there…

Here we come across a certain scholastic (verbose) trap. We won’t argue of the primary matters, i.e. of the consciousness materiality, we will reverse our train of thought.
Dear psychiatrists, does the consciousness have functions or doesn’t it? Yes, it does have functions. Thus meaning that whatever we may imply here, the materiality of the notion called consciousness is indisputable, otherwise the presence of the above category is absent…

In other words, based on the fact that the functions attributed to consciousness do exist, we inevitably force ourselves to imply materiality of consciousness: either the materiality of consciousness partly present in the spleen, liver and the central and peripheral formations of nerves in case of medical psychiatry, or a mystical-fine-extramaterial substance, intricately organized for the universal luck of all human kind in case of occultists of any type and manner…

An average fairly educated modern person thinks that in the process of perceiving the surrounding environment our consciousness receives a “window view”. “Window view” here implies a direct non-transforming looking, listening, sensing, etc of the surrounding world.

As a matter of fact, it is all different. Even at the very first stage everything our organs and systems come in contact with is principally and fundamentally transformed into a completely different state.
For example, it is well known that eyes send no direct images, like a lens, even to the brain, not to speak of deeper layers. An eye is a biological device transforming information coming from without and giving it a better form more acceptable for transmission to and perception by the brain.
Eye nerves do not carry a flow of images, no, they certainly do not…

Moreover, it will make no significant difference to the brain and the brain will be quite happy with the end result if we try to replace an eye with a complex device transmitting to the brain similar forms of signals organized analogous to the natural eye signals. It is the same with other transmitters of information about the surrounding world.

Consequently we arrive at the implicit conclusion that we are incapable of principally perceiving the surrounding world as such and that our idea of it is more or less adequate reactions (appropriate for the situation) to the surrounding, but absolutely unfamiliar irritants.

If we bring together the conclusions following from the above we will clearly see that what took place here was an internal interpretation theater (interpretation meaning explanations based on analogies, i.e. similarities) that brings together the external irritants based on the interpreters that throughout a long experience, personal and generically human, proved themselves to be the most stable and suitable.

Therefore the things we see, hear or sense in any other way are actually figments of our imagination that creates inside of our organism an adequate interpretation form of the possibly permissible outer world.

Considering that we are not alone, even though the presence of this very theater easily allows us to suspect that we are in fact exercising different types of communication with ourselves rather than communicating with others, it is worthwhile thinking of an inverse system, namely the system of transformation of elements of internal performance meant to be brought out into the outside world for communicating with possibly existing neighbors…
With all consequences ensuing from the above…
Including the dualism of the above described categories most important for the human existence.
Spirituality and religiousness. Soul expertise and soul experts. Psychical health.

The average modern man sees practically no difference between spirituality and religiousness inasmuch as with the help of adherents of religious movements the notion of “spirituality” has migrated from the secular circles and settled down in churches, temples and monasteries. The same public category commonly called spirituality, which was distorted in the burst of noble indignation, was displaced to the book shelves, theater auditoriums and limited to the kitchen communal microorgasms in the field of the public supreme art.

In reality it is all different. What is color brilliance? It is a function or in other words an expected result from a multicolored paint work. Hence what is spirituality? In essence it should be something associated with the spirit…

According to the traditions of a number of world religions which in fact are peculiar occult-mystic formations with ceremonial and ritual elements clearly related to the area of magic, irrespective of what their adherents and founders may say, there are three basic constituent parts to the human being: spirit, soul and body. To put things right it should be noted that there are other religious movements in the world presenting this fact somewhat differently or sometimes even very much differently.

The mystic religious confessions (religious formations) from the abovementioned trio system define:
– the physical human body as a temporary shelter for the remaining two;
– the soul as a specific formation – either a fine-material or an extra-material one – with a fairly long, but limited term of existence, accompanying the life sustaining activity of the human physical body,
– the spirit as a rather peculiar, very unpredictable formation immersed in that very man exclusively, and factually carrying away an imprint of the man upon his self-destruction in the manner of “from the earth taken – to the earth returned”, and present in a man by the will of some “other” (fine-material, extra-material, intellectually superior, primordial and controlling, universally existing or some other being-substance-event).

According to the same traditions all living things are divided into beings and creatures. A creature is a creature because it was created, the matter they are created from is temporary and transient, and hence their existence is limited. Beings are different: they are initially made of a substance quite resistant to destruction and therefore they are fairly long living…

World religious movements of a different nature provide a different description of this fact: all things without exception have a consciousness and each representative of “all these without exception” is obliged to justify hopes of that very “fine-material, extramaterial, intellectually superior, primordial and controlling, universally existing or some other being-substance-event” and as the end result be transformed into a brilliant likeness of it.

Therefore, according to the beliefs held by the world religions, considering that the overwhelming majority of humanity are adherents thereof, and while leaving room for the special group of believers, i.e. atheists, being in fact even stronger believers than those attending cathedrals and prayer houses, spirituality is a special collection of qualities acquired by the beings having something conventionally called the “spirit” in their psycho-physiological structures.

Following the above it is easy to make a conclusion that spirituality is a personal peculiar feature intrinsic of every being or “creature” (you choose, so as to avoid any argument), and religiousness is just a public claim of a group of persons (either big or small) to know the ways to attain spirituality.

The very notion of religiousness is likewise easily defined. Religiousness is an unsubstantiated acceptance of a particular way of spiritual fulfillment accompanied by refusal from any forms of free search in this area. That is exactly why the adepts and adherents of any of the world religions frequently provide absolutely inconceivable eccentricities, irrationalities and contradictions as facts and evidence.
What does evidence have to do with it all? If a person wants to research his own spiritual qualities, then just let him do so, and if he does not, even facts will not be facts for him and more so if they are unsubstantiated and aggressively imposed. A person can well be spiritual, but ignorant and antireligious at the same time, especially if we consider that religion is a social-psychological system, and yet not primordial at that.

In some incomprehensible way the people who, based on their conceptual position, do not believe in the existence of the soul, i.e. psychologists, psychotherapist and psychiatrists, have become the most competent soul-scientists. The prefix “psy” means “soul” and all the other prefixes are the things that people do with the “psy”: some study and rationalize it, others heal it.

According to the common classification, psychology is a science of laws on development and functioning of the psyche as a special form of life. Psychotherapy is a part of psychology. Psychiatry means “soul healing” and it is devoted to clinical healing of sicknesses and pathologies.

Considering that the three above listed categories are based on the modern evidence-based science asserting – in an organized manner ¬– that there is no soul, and only rarely questioning this issue – individually by certain scientists, it is strange and incomprehensible what the representatives of the so-called soul-expert professions are in fact dealing with.
Inasmuch as our society has authorized these people to take care of our mental health, it becomes absolutely clear that the primary goal and objective of these specialists is to squeeze out the very idea of the soul’s existence from the individual and public consciousness, and it is to this that we have all fallen victim.

There are two basic perspectives on mental or psychic health
– The first one is of mystical and religious nature, meaning that spirituality should be prevailing thus dictating events of the human existence. This includes sacrificing one’s own children at the directive from above, announcing holy wars and witch hunts, as well as religious love and mystic compassion.

– The second one is materialistic and psychiatrical: “do you see demons?”… And so on and so forth. This perspective is rather pragmatic and reasonable although offensive for a person entering the soul-expert environment for the first time. It is difficult to argue with a psychiatrist explaining that it is outside of his area of expertise to know whether something supernatural really exists or not. His expertise is to bring a person back to society responding to reality in the manner which is adequate, i.e. considerate, predictable and constructive. All the other things are none of his business, as one joke has it, “Soldier, why aren’t your boots polished?” “It is none of your business, colonel sir!” “What? Answer my question!” “We are out of shoe polish!” “That is not my business!” “That’s what I am talking about, colonel sir…”

Perhaps that could be a brief definition of mental health – adequacy of a person to the situation in terms of its reasoned, predictable and constructive continuation…

Basics of the scientific ideology, naturalistic experimental traditions and natural pragmatic approaches. Initial goals and characteristic ways of conception

When discussing the areas included in the heading of this paragraph, it is absolutely necessary to provide their definitions at least in terms of their basic distinctions. It is specifically their contradictions and oppositions that will enable us to elicit a “something” which is extremely necessary for further description.

Scientific ideology

The basics of the scientific ideology, presently defined as academic ideology, is in fact a fairly successful attempt to create a real and effective mechanism of survival of humans as a biological kind in its real physical form.

Scientific ideology can conventionally be divided into the area of scientific convictions of prospective nature (designed for future developments) and the area of applied science.

Prospective scientific convictions are very diverse and frequently extend far beyond the existing scientific ideology or so-called “scientific paradigm”. They may include philosophical ideological contemplations on matter properties, including fantastic, mystical or speculative, on the time qualities similar to the previous, on the purposes of existence of the world and living beings inhabiting it, as well as of their relationships existing, having existed or absolutely absurd (contradictory and stupid). The basic characteristic is that “maybe one day the science will benefit from them”. The basic difference distinguishing them from the mystical insights and revelations is that this practice is commonly popular among scientists with vast experience in science as opposed to homemade dreamers… Applied science is the basic stimulus for social and industrial progress and its basic qualities are substantiation, applicability and capability of being repeated. In this regard applied science is justifiable and indisputably valuable.

Applied science includes cars and apartments, clothes and works of art, medicine and statistics, as well as many other things which no men, both modern and cavemen, can conceive their lives without. Science has always existed and its basic characteristics substantiation, applicability and capability of being repeated had likewise been useful during the prehistoric times.
The basic characteristic of science is the “capability of being learned”, i.e. the succession of all knowledge of the previous generations can be passed to subsequent generations by direct and accessible means, and in the absence of some outstanding and exclusive geniuses. Scientific ideology has provided a special niche for geniuses, but even for them scientific succession is a necessary condition.

aturalistic experimental traditions

To be honest, naturalistic experimental traditions are in fact a predecessor of science, an integral part thereof and moreover the very first and the most used method of scientific research. Here we have taken them beyond the boundaries of scientific ideology as a sort of payback to those “know-it-alls scientists” and the “pillars of scientific ideology” that swell with importance and have grown too big for their boots.

There is an entire layer of representatives of scientific society who are prone to taking technical and mechanistic results as the only scientific evidence and rejecting any direct observations. One can only grin at that inasmuch as the process of reading the meters or magnetic ribbons, charts, monitors and clipboards is the process of observation, perception and human interpretation, i.e. self-explanation, which is directly related to the area of naturalistic experimental traditions and is directly dependant on the objectivity of the observer, as well as on the degree of his sickliness, soundness and hallucinating.

Moreover, creating apparatuses and mechanisms themselves is human work, thus meaning that even in this area it is easy to create an apparatus based on the modern epoch knowledge, which is designed to register a particular effect but will instead register something different; in the world of modern science there have been ample examples of that…

Naturalistic experimental traditions are an enormous, practically unlimited number of means, methods, ways and approaches to know and explore the world around us. To know the world they use naturalistic means inasmuch as they are the nearest to the original natural forms, for example, minerals, plants, living beings, and other objects, as well as the means of direct man’s perception, i.e. those he possesses. Here we have chemistry, physics, anatomy, biology, zoology, up until the boundary line of instrumental research.

The basic characteristic of naturalistic experimental traditions is obseravability and registrability of phenomena (events and objects of events in question) by man directly: with his organs and perception systems and with subsequent classification.

Natural pragmatic approaches

Natural pragmatic approaches are not aimed at creating a profound classified scheme of the world (including theoretical or philosophical and ideological) to be passed to the next generations in an easily perceivable form, as in the case with science, or at conducting vast superficial research, as in the case with naturalistic experimental traditions.

The natural pragmatic approaches are a very peculiar type of research strictly aimed at solving particular, namely personal problems, extremely imperative for a particular individual or a group of individuals closely tied in together to solve a common problem – common, yet personal for each member of the group. Here ‘personal’ is used not in terms of being involved in activity “for the wellbeing of ones Homeland”, “nation” or the “world community”, but specifically personal!

The most personal task of each individual is finding his presence in life and finally his exit to death. It is in the attitude of an individual toward life and death that the abovementioned natural pragmatic approach may show itself in its entirety, manifested in a meticulous selection of knowledge and experience that can become useful at the final minute of the time spell named life.

The selection of knowledge and experience is made exclusively individually. This means that the methods and ways suitable for others may be perceived as something beneficial, but when used thoughtlessly and inconsistently they will for certain entail results opposite of those expected.