Why are they so dangerous? How can I protect my mind from the dangers of mentalism?
Mentalism is the idea that mind and mind-objects are similar, but not identical.
According to mentalists, mental phenomena are phenomena as we know them.
If you examine the mind, that’s all you’ll see.
We often mistake the mind and its objects for the same things when we’re examining our mental processes. But it’s not as simple as that. A great deal of the mind is internal and therefore not observable. These are the areas we’ll look deeper into.
For a mentalist, the nature of the mind is that it works in ways we can’t see. What is this inner reality?
As I said above, we can’t see the mind directly. Most of the time there’s some inner workings we can’t perceive directly because of some mental processes operating behind the scenes. It’s like looking into a cloud of dust. You can’t see what’s behind it, but your mind is there.
In all reality, everything is connected and interdependent. That’s what mentalism is.
There are mental processes we can’t notice because they are not conscious. Mental processes which might influence our mental processes are called passive. Most of our awareness is in these passive states. It’s like we’re not aware of the things around us, because we don’t have our own body or mind. We don’t know we have a mind. How could we possibly have awareness of the things around us?
Mentalism is really about being aware of everything, even if we know something isn’t so. If your mind experiences a negative thought, you’ll get angry.
Some people will say, “But that’s not what I’m talking about at all.” They’ll say, “Look it’s just a thought, if it had a body, we’d know that it had a body.” They’ll call it an “affirmation of our free will.”
The reality is that we see mental processes. We can observe them in our minds, because they’re very deeply buried. When we realize how deep that goes, the entire structure of the universe comes into view.
Think about this. What’s a material object that can be affected? What can we call “physical” without physical properties? What does it have that makes it physically something?
Mental phenomena don’t have physical properties so we can’t observe
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