I also agree with the idea that pain is needed to live, and without pain, no one learns anything.

I also agree with the idea that once you rid yourself of pain, choices and decisions are that much easier to make.

“When you feel pain you know you are alive, you know that you can still learn, still fight.”

If that is true, than what happens when you lose the ability to feel pain? Or, I mean, you gain the ability to ignore pain?

Pain is the worlds greatest teacher. Removing this teacher, no matter how invincible it would make us feel, would remove the ability to understand new things around us. As well, we would not be able to understand others pain, which is an essential societal trait.

Plus, when your fighting, pain is needed to enact you adrenal glands, which are pretty important if you plan on not dying.

Pain is something gritty that will always bring out the human within us, remind us of how fucked up our society is. Ridding our selfs of the pain will give those manipulative drug companies that much more control over our lives.

It’s all just propaganda anyways, the media – it’s all just ads.

I can totally see your point. It’s like saying: “do you like dictatorship?” when talking about Irak. No, obviously I don’t. But the world isn’t either black or white… there are many shades in between.

I hate this war. I don’t think we should have gotten involve as Canadians, and as a French I still can’t believe Chirac stood against it. Only smart thing he did.

I support the soldiers there, they are my age and they were innocent, most of them. But I don’t buy the propaganda.

I found Descarte eerily comforting? It was almost zen like.

Every meeting at work now, every cubicle seems that much more contrived, and yet that’s ok, because the meager act of questioning my relationship with them, validates my existence, even if everything I think that I’m aware of is artificial. Is it possible to question or define the self, with out having to prove or disprove a god like creature?

1) There can be no awareness of existence without some sort of subject-object dichotomy. That means that rocks cannot know that they exist unless they have some awareness that is relatively objective. While some sort of extraordinarily primitive prehension is conceivable for rocks, it is difficult to imagine. Without the senses to mediate a sense of objectivity, there can be no sense of separate self. It is questionable that this even exists in the animal kingdom apart from language, except on a raw physiological and emotional level. So you wouldn’t know that you existed, in any language-based way, if you were born without senses; you couldn’t, because language is based on and assumes sensory awareness.

2) Given that there ARE senses operating, a sense of self can be built on top of that as a potential that was previously unexpressed. If we lost our senses, would those potentials also be lost? The experience of dreaming implies that non-sensory mediated experience continues in the absence of sensory input, at least for a while. Therefore it is tempting to answer that “yes, once potentials are awakened they do have some sort of resonance or echo that amounts to something more than sensory experience, something along the lines of Sheldrake’s morphogenic fields, perhaps.” I am enough of an optimist to believe that nothing is ever lost, even if it simply is absorbed back into a slowly awakening species unconscious.

The problem of contemplating existence apart from the senses or the mind comes in asking, “Where then is meaning?” So one might say, yes, we continue to live on as souls, whatever that means, or as kleshic attachments, as the Buddhists believe, but the statement “I exist” needs to have a referent. In the absence both senses and thought, one has to work pretty hard to find a referent that provides a teaspoon full of satisfaction.

3) If I have never developed a sense, I am ignorant of it. I do not know what I have lost; therefore I do not have a problem. Therefore, I cannot even pose this problem to myself. It exists, but only as an unrecognized, unrealized, unmanifested potential within me. There are ways that at least some of these can be brought into awareness and incubated into waking existence. These potentials seem to want to be born on their own, regardless of whether we are aware of them, want them, or like them or not. There is something much bigger than ourselves that is always working to be born in and through us. We may understand it or we may not; we may like it or we may not; we may believe in it or we may not, but in my mind the reality of those largely unarticulated and uncomprehended potentials is a given not just of human experience but of evolution itself.

It is only because you have evolved quite beyond identification with your senses that you feel a need to ask these questions; it is only because you are able to separate your sense of self from the contents of your mind and do meta-analysis: thinking about thinking, that the existential concern of justifying your existence even comes up for you. People who are not yet at this level won’t get what you are talking about because they are not at this level of objectivity; people who are beyond this point will not seek validation for a transrational process (life) from a merely rational perspective. That is not to discount the mind or the importance of your thoughtful questions, but only to say that the mind cannot grasp and does not want to grasp the final absurdity of trust in the face of fear, rationality in the face of monstrous abuse, or meaning in the face of rampant meaninglessness.