Suicidal

There he is.

 

This reminds me of the finale of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, when Govinda kisses Siddhartha's head and he has the vision. Have you read this novel? If not, I think you would like it. Here is the vision part:

Spoiler: Siddhartha

“Siddhartha,” he spoke, “we have become old men. It is unlikely for one of us to see the other again in this incarnation. I see, beloved, that you have found peace. I confess that I haven’t found it. Tell me, oh honourable one, one more word, give me something on my way which I can grasp, which I can understand! Give me something to be with me on my path. It it often hard, my path, often dark, Siddhartha.”

Siddhartha said nothing and looked at him with the ever unchanged, quiet smile. Govinda stared at his face, with fear, with yearning, suffering, and the eternal search was visible in his look, eternal not-finding.

Siddhartha saw it and smiled.

“Bent down to me!” he whispered quietly in Govinda’s ear. “Bend down to me! Like this, even closer! Very close! Kiss my forehead, Govinda!”

But while Govinda with astonishment, and yet drawn by great love and expectation, obeyed his words, bent down closely to him and touched his forehead with his lips, something miraculous happened to him. While his thoughts were still dwelling on Siddhartha’s wondrous words, while he was still struggling in vain and with reluctance to think away time, to imagine Nirvana and Sansara as one, while even a certain contempt for the words of his friend was fighting in him against an immense love and veneration, this happened to him:

He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha.

He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes—he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying—he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person—he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword—he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love—he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void—he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elepants, of bulls, of birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni—he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face—and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha’s smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely of the same kind as the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected ones are smiling.

Not knowing any more whether time existed, whether the vision had lasted a second or a hundred years, not knowing any more whether there existed a Siddhartha, a Gotama, a me and a you, feeling in his innermost self as if he had been wounded by a divine arrow, the injury of which tasted sweet, being enchanted and dissolved in his innermost self, Govinda still stood for a little while bent over Siddhartha’s quiet face, which he had just kissed, which had just been the scene of all manifestations, all transformations, all existence. The face was unchanged, after under its surface the depth of the thousandfoldness had closed up again, he smiled silently, smiled quietly and softly, perhaps very benevolently, perhaps very mockingly, precisely as he used to smile, the exalted one. Deeply, Govinda bowed; tears he knew nothing of, ran down his old face; like a fire burnt the feeling of the most intimate love, the humblest veneration in his heart. Deeply, he bowed, touching the ground, before him who was sitting motionlessly, whose smile reminded him of everything he had ever loved in his life, what had ever been valuable and holy to him in his life.

 

You are being intellectually dishonest. You make a claim - are challenged to justify it - then say - oh don't take what I say seriously. That's a problem - how do I know when what you say is intended seriously and when not?

OK now I am getting confused. You have admitted to 2 claims you should not have made. Are there any others? How can we tell which claims are ones you should have made - and which are claims you shouldn't have made?

I think you need to organise your thoughts and post honestly in future as you are putting a lot out there, then retracting statements later when called out.

 

No, not yet. I have it on my list. I’ve read two of his other books, Steppenwolf and Damian, and I loved those. Thanks for sharing.

Nothing I say should be taken seriously or as the truth. I’m not a teacher. I’m mentally masturbating, entertaining myself.

Btw, the “2 claims I admitted I should not have made” are 1 and the same.

I will post as I please, and think as I please. I’m not here to discuss the truth, and you can’t call me out because I have nothing to defend.

 

Thanks, @Stuart-T. I appreciate the compliment and it means a lot.

 

Ah ok - got it.

 

As long as we live, we’ll never forget those men and women whose youthful lives met a tombstone. Hyperacusis killed them, their sense of belonging nullified as it left them helpless against the world. Noise became a brutal foe and life became an impossible dream. It was just too much for them to bear, so they decided enough was enough.

Let’s remember them all and grieve. They felt the world turned on them in every possible way. I knew a few that met that fate, that ultimately died, where existence became a paradox, and life a quest of futility. “This isn’t right,” they thought. “I’m nothing more than a viewer now, unable to do anything.” And hapless viewers, they were; viewers of inert lives; viewers of a callous eater, who took their hearts and souls by force, internalized their gloom, and left them just to rot. Too heavy was that loss; too tragic, the implications: that privilege that comes with residency, where belonging to Earth’s a given, a native right for every soul that relies on it as “home,” but when every noise causes pain, you face a world of dispossession — eviction from its cradled hold. And that’s what happened to those we lost. They felt like they’d been ousted.

So all they could do was mourn. All they could do was cry. All they could do was die, they felt. This world betrayed them, cold and harsh, their place before its throne revoked. Once benign, it was, but now it basked in misery. Its stony-heart gave no redemption, no second chance to make things right, so they lost their will to carry on. They had nowhere to hide, these people... nowhere to go but down.

Let’s never forget these people. We need solutions fast — some treatments or a cure — so people won’t give up, so people won’t keep dying.

 

Well... I wasn't suicidal until reading the last 4 pages of this thread!

Sorry guys, there are no magic flying unicorns, no ghosts, goblins, spirits, demons, etc... If the supernatural exists, we will never know about it. Why? Because we exist in the natural world. By its very definition, the supernatural exists outside of our reality. If something is able to interact with our reality, it's no longer supernatural. It's just a natural phenomenon we don't yet understand.

As for God or Gods, every culture going back to the beginning of human history has had their own versions of Gods. The purpose of those Gods was to either explain the unknown or to control people.

I find it the pinnacle of arrogance when any follower of any religion claims that their God is the one and only "real" God to the exclusion of the thousands of Gods that have been worshipped or feared over time.

As for the Judeo-Christian creation story, it's just as much of a myth as every other tale based on God or Gods. It's nonsensical and self-contradictory out of the gate. And the Judeo-Christian God, as shown in the Bible, is nothing more than a jealous and sadistic tribal God.

On that note, back to praying that my eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee goes away one day. Ironically, praying to the same God that gave it to me in the first place.

 

We should be aware that since we are still able to use my brains (cognitive processes) - others will question if we have severe tinnitus and not a factitious disorder. Or a disorder that makes us think our condition is worse than it really is.

I don't agree with this, but I do think those with tinnitus can develop Cluster C personality disorder, which is characterized by anxious and/or fearful thinking.

I don't think that most have a histrionic personality - strong opinions, and think all relationships are closer than they really are.

I'm writing this because I had a discussion with a retired therapist who has tinnitus. He believes those who posted within the last few pages - this thread, don't have severe tinnitus. He also said, good luck with tinnitus research funding. I posted once about infinity, a few pages back.

I did not debate him.

My conductive hearing loss tinnitus is as loud as a lawnmover. It's bothersome, but I now have focus on serious painful medical conditions that will kill me. I can still use some cognitive processing per subject matter where I have lifetime involvement. I was the editor of my college journal, but I can't write worth beans now. I lost all creative writing skills.

Besides loud high-pitch noise, I can't take medications for conditions and pain. I can't leave my house without noise blocking headphones. I can't bathe or dress myself. I can't see well and it's very difficult to move due to my conditions.

 

Severe is relative. A professional therapist should know that. None of us probably would even be here on this site if our tinnitus wasn’t severe. It’s not because we don’t have anything better to do that we are discussing these things; we literally don’t have anything that we can do because of severe tinnitus. I haven’t been out of my house for 2 months. I can’t speak because of my tinnitus. I’m not trying to defend myself here, but that just really pisses me off. Good thing that he’s retired, with all due respect.

 

Why not?

Why not?

Why not?

 

Greg, your set of afflictions is heartbreaking and terrible, but you keep helping people and you have been a light for the tinnitus community for so long. I wish this world and life were a little more fair.

He is welcome to try mine for a few days. It has ruined my job, my marriage, everything. I still have my life but that's the last station, I don't know how long I'll resist.

You are in my thoughts, Greg, my friend, as long as I'm still here.

 

We run into a fundamental cognitive dissonance as human beings. We want to look into the sky and into the past and make sense of what we observe, but our brains, in the most literal way, don’t have the common sense (or senses!) to grapple with questions like quantum mechanics or the multiverse.

Why Our Puny Human Brains Can’t Fathom the Multiverse (popularmechanics.com)[/I]

 

That first paragraph by David Albert:

”The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.”

Maybe the best answer to this is; why not? Because if you keep looking for the answer to ”where was before that?” you will never land in a satisfactory answer, would you? Maybe quantum mechanics are just there and wasn’t created? Feels non-intuitive to our minds, I know, but why not? It’s also non-intuitive to forever ask ”but what did that come from then?”.

I can agree it’s probably better to be more humble than how Dawkins come across in that foreword, but I also think it’s unfair to say that Krauss says ”he has solved the problem” when that is hardly what he says at all. He speaks of things brought up in the book as being ”plausible” and that ”there are reasons to believe” these things he concludes are true based on the discoveries in physics research.

For example he in a lecture says:

• The dominant energy in the universe resides in empty space.
• We have no idea why it’s there.
• Its existence is probably tied to the very nature of space and time and to the origin of our universe.
• It will determine our future!

From this:

Lawrence M. Krauss || A Universe from Nothing || Radcliffe Institute

Also look from this time stamp where he starts to talk about the total energy in the universe being zero (but of course look through the whole thing to understand the context): Link

”This begins to suggest that maybe we can create a universe from nothing without any supernatural shenanigans”

This is what the empirical evidence shows. It’s not a proof (Lawrence even says we can’t prove it) but that’s the direction the evidence points to.

Also interesting is that he says:

”First of all, I’ve learned that one has to be careful when one talks about nothing... philosophers and theologians are experts of nothing and they get upset if you don’t talk about it in the way they like, so I want to talk about three different version of nothing...”

 Link

Also Krauss says ”there is limitations to empirical evidence” and ”limits of science” and ”we shouldn't assume we know everything” at the end here: Link

It's worth looking at the whole lecture. I don’t see what it is in David Albert’s critique that makes Krauss’ arguments ”an epic fail”.

I agree with @Stuart-T here. I don't ”believe what I want to believe.” I'm more curios about figuring out how things are even if they turn out to be in a way I wouldn't prefer over another. I'd be happy to have a God around and some kind if cosmic justice with possibility to have a greater existence than this in many ways beautiful but also flawed and unforgiving (hey, we're on a tinnitus forum) life, but I just think the way things seem to be at our current understanding there aren't much that points to ”a caring and loving God”. I hope I'm wrong...

 

I think that, for our discussion, the second paragraph (the one you didn't quote) from David Albert was more relevant. Because it shows that Krauss makes a mistake even when accepting that we need to define the void in physics terms. Krauss takes a totally misleading and wrong definition of void from quantum field theory, and David Albert suggests the correct one. It's in the second paragraph I quoted.

David Albert has more to say also on the other different definitions of void of Krauss, and some further misleading aspects of Krauss analysis, again from a physicist (rather than philosophical) point of view. I have tried to retrieve the whole review but it's behind a paywall. I'll try again next month in December when it will become accessible again.

 

On Krauss - to me - whether he has written BS or done something worthwhile is irrelevant.

Theists will continue to use anything they can find in science to legitimise their particular God while dismissing the Gods they do not favour. We are now seeing Buddhists and supporters of reincarnation and the afterlife plugging a gap left by our lack understanding of consciousness with any proposal which takes their fancy.

My position has got to be one of not ruling anything out - but abstaining from belief in any form of afterlife whatsoever - until any of these hypotheses have met their burden of proof, which, from what I understand so far, they have not.

If any had - we would all know about it.

 

We shouldn’t assume that everything is provable, and that it can be grasped by the human thinking mind.

“How could someone be so naive as to imagine that an ideology, a thought system generated by the monkey mind, would be adequate to explain the universe? That's preposterous. It's like meeting a termite who tells you he's a philosopher. What could you do but laugh at the very notion?” - Terrence McKenna

This doesn’t only go for theism, or Buddhism. Science is a belief-system, and if you don’t see it as such it’s only because you’ve been brainwashed by it so hard that you can’t see it as such.

In my view again; everything is God, which means we are God, which means you can’t find God because God is the totality of everything; A mere fraction of that totality can not grasp the totality of everything.

The proof of God is right here. It’s us. You can’t find it because you to refuse to see yourself as it. You don’t need proof. You need perspective. Perspective is the only real thing humans can ever hope to find.

 

I think you should care because a scientist making - let's be kind - hazardous philosophical claims without even being aware of it - and this happened even to Stephen Hawking - is not strengthening the materialists positions. Even worse, a materialist scientist doing wrong scientific claims in the name of materialism damages materialism even more.

Another point worth making is that even we people who believe in and practice science have beliefs and faith systems.

For example we believe we are not living a solipsistic experience. And there is no way to prove that. This is our first article of faith.

And science is asking us to believe things so weird that it has become weirder than magic or religion in many respects. Except that we have experimental proof, although we have no idea of what it really means. That is the most precise theory man has ever developed, Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum experiments require you to pick your poison: you need to believe that either the world is not real (entities don't have defined states before measurements) or nonlocal (everything is instantaneously interconnected). This is Bell's theorem, proved experimentally by Alain Aspect (who recently won the Nobel prize).

But the weird doesn't stop there. I already talked about time being not fundamental and of the statistical nature of time's arrow. Hawking himself got caught off guard there and by a philosopher - Huw Price. The story is in "Time's arrow and Archimedes's point".

And this is even before mentioning the interpretations of quantum mechanics like Copenhagen, pilot wave, many worlds, advanced action...

We talk about materialism but the evolution of what we call "material" has been so drastic that ghosts, compared to that, look less weird.

Current physics also opens a series of problems that are philosophical in nature.

Why does mathematics work so well?

Why is it so linked with the intimate nature of reality?

Where do mathematical entities come from and where do they exist? Another Nobel prize, Roger Penrose, has interesting ideas about that. What type of reality does mathematics have?

Do we have free will?

The problem of qualia and the related problems of consciousness.

There are so many questions that go outside strict science but are still important, not to mention the whole grey area of social sciences. Economics and finance and insurance use a lot of mathematical models too but in what sense are they sciences? You can't exactly repeat an experiment in economics or insurance. When you make a claim in economics, even when backed by advanced mathematical models, is that science? Yes and no.

So it's not that simple.

I don't really like this idea many materialists have that philosophy etc are useless. Even vocal materialists like Sean Carroll who are renowned cosmologists recognise the importance of philosophy. And again, it is a philosopher who corrected Hawking on the arrow if time.

Let me close with how David Albert - the atheist physicist and philosopher - closed his review of Krauss book, because he indirectly addressed how the new atheists (well not so new now) deal with religion, and we are seeing it here too in this thread a little. I'm agnostic myself, but we can do better than this.

 

I didn't say I don't care - I said it is irrelevant to the confidence I have in my position.

Also - I am not a hard materialist. I am a methodological naturalist. There are many atheists and materialists who do not speak for me - many of them make bad arguments. I am not making any claims. I am awaiting evidence. If evolution and our current understanding of cosmology was turned over - it would not impact my atheism. If the whole of science was proven no better than a faith based system of dogma - it would have no impact on my rejection of theistic claims and claims that there is anything which is not the material universe which manifests before us. I also don't care if people are moving to theism or what I call woo type positions because physicists are writing crappy demonstrably false books. There have and always will be people who make irrational choices.

Yes there are scientists who are not atheists. But their faiths are not established using the scientific method. For example Francis Collins - well known geneticist - converted to Christianity when he was out walking in nature and came across a waterfall which was frozen in 3. He interpreted this as the trinity and got on his knees and submitted to the God of the Bible. So yes - you are correct.

Solipsism is a claim and is not supported by any evidence. It needs to meet its burden of proof. We don't just go around accepting hypotheses because they have not been falsified. Though many do. Until I have evidence that solipsism is true - I accept that reality is as I perceive it to be. That there are other minds not just my own and that the material world is real. Christians often take to the hard solipsism route when back into a corner "Oh well you don't even know that reality is real!" I think it is an intellectually dishonest position - if we can't agree that reality is real - the discussion ends. If it is an article of faith - it is a necessary and justified one. Faith in the supernatural realm - is unjustified and unnecessary.

Yes you said it - we have experimental proof. Meaning it is NOTHING like magic or religion even if it has some baffling elements to it that we do not currently understand.

No we don't have to pick our poison. We can still say - we don't know. Or we can say - we don't yet have an explanation for these baffling findings.

I know what you mean by this. But weird phenomena in the natural world does not and should not make supernatural claims any more plausible or likely. Frankly on the basis of your statement - we might as well just believe anything because well everything is just so god damn weird anyway. That is not a good basis of epistemology.

Well now we are getting into philosophy when we ask why and is beyond the scope of this thread. You can put the question why next to so many things and never find any satisfactory answer. That I suppose - is the nature of the question. But when you ask these questions - you strengthen religious faith in the believers. "We don't know why - you see - so there is a god!"

Reality is not simple, I agree. And it is fascinating and thought provoking to contemplate on many of the areas you have talked about in your post. But my rejection of theistic and supernatural claims is simple. I just want evidence. Clear unambiguous evidence for a claim. Not evidence which provides certainty - just enough to give me enough confidence that a claim is likely true. If believers can't provide that - I wonder why they believe these things. I have not seen any good answers in this thread or frankly any other thread.

I don't know of any materialists who have claimed this. But if any have. I believe they are wrong.

But you don't believe in God or Gods - so you are also an atheist - right?

 

The witching hour came to him as he laid there, trance-like, thinking of death and death again: the deed of death; his gun and death; the angel known as Death; the scent of death; the sin of death; the shavings of a tragic death; death and death and death. They were not just morbid thoughts; not just grisly apogees. He used these things to cope, their purpose mainly emblematic of larger things at play. The small things bought him time, yes, like tokens for survival, but they didn’t always work. Their value was modest, at best, so his mind gave way to danger... always.

His gun was on the dresser; his eyes were fixed on it. Gazing, they were, as its cold, dark barrel defied the ether realm; dared to challenge it. What he saw within its luscious spell was hope and destiny — a chance to leave this hellish world — but fear itself came rushing back, the tokens shook his senses, and the gulps and cramps of myths and lore brought grief and apprehension.

Could he really die, he wondered... a question too dark to answer; a question too scary to second-guess; a question too profound. Afraid of death and afraid of life, he had to know for sure: was he doing the right thing? And for that, he had no answer. So he met himself from front to back and back he went again, destined to this fight within, to repeat its game forevermore. Many a night, he saw that pain and shame again, experienced bouts of sanity, but mostly went insane.

 

Love this illustration. Afraid of death and afraid of life. Yeah... Fun times.

 

Thanks, @tpj. Ya, it’s a nightmare.

 

Maybe reckless. But if they were all telling him to get over it, it's just a little ringing, etc. I can see why he did it and I don't necessarily think it's a bad strategy to get people to take it seriously.

 

I would say what he could have done was asked his family to stand outside the car - wind the windows down - then turn the HiFi on full and they would get an idea of the volume.

 

I think I will will myself. The constant, reactive hum is too much for me. I am afraid of the pain, which this involves, but also kinda happy.

I am so overwhelmed by sound. It is so frustrating, that you can get this. Hopefully there will be a cure soon.

 

I wanted to come back to this thread and thank you guys for talking me out of suicide a few weeks back.

Not sure how it’s possible but it seems I started improving drastically after a very loud unexpected sound exposure (yea I know that sounds crazy).

I have since started sound therapy.

Thank you all.

 

Do you have noxacusis?

 

It started out as loudness hyperacusis and eventually I started noticing aches and stabbing sensations in my inner ear. It felt like an itch I couldn’t satisfy. It was really uncomfortable.

It’s been subsiding the last few weeks. Things that used to make my ears spasm, like dishes clinking together and water sounding metallic, are also calming down.

Not 100% sure but I feel overprotecting my ears was a mistake in my personal recovery as it was making my ears way too sensitive to normal sounds. I’ve ditched the earmuffs completely for now.

The only reason I really started using 24/7 protection was because some people (not here on Tinnitus Talk) advised me to overprotect.

 

@Jupiterman, I implore you. Can you please throw yourself out of orbit and come hurling towards Earth? You can solve these problems for us once and for all!



Man, where’s Jupiter when you need it? I bet a lot of people here would look up with tears of joy to see that wild beast approaching in Earth’s baby blue sky.

 

Ah the chronic worsening phase where everyone around you is healing and people just think you’re nuts lol.