Why do we have to eat, drink, and all that?

[Cybernetic_Jazz]

This might sound like a really dumb or cheeky question but, in context I mean it.

I don't think I've ever gone to the cinema and seen a movie where the projection on the screen had to metabolize certain elements of itself to stay alive and continue to display on the screen in addition to the sustenance of light coming from the projector. Also it seems like there's so much raw energy pumping through the universe that digestive classes of action - whether us eating or burning fuel in stoves of automobiles - would be of a superfluous character.

The only answer I can think of is that we're not just the pixels landed on the screen but the whole beam and our need to eat and drink comes from a need that has to be addressed anterior to the projection. If that's the case it might suggest that the real or actual world is a world without senses but that the senses are projected onto that world as a result, thus we don't really eat or drink in the physical world but our five senses give us a replay of what we're working with almost instantaneously after our interaction with it. That doesn't answer the fundamental title question but it at least makes a lot more sense than the projection needing to eat or drink independent of the film that's projecting it.

If I'm still sounding really cryptic - I had a fun night of dissociatives last night and I can't escape the feeling that material reality is a series of waves in cross-section, the rules of the dissociation itself seemed to play out exactly like that all the way down to the comedown process (which was fascinating as I got to experience my etheric body collapsing itself back into line with my physical one). It's as if dissociation is a phenomena governed by what are usually tightly tuned strings getting loose and sloppy thus spreading out.

I feel really strange saying this but I might have to reread Seth's Nature of Personal Reality again because that's what this seems to be rhyming with.

[magari]

Creation is only possible through destruction.



We are walking/talking examples of the principal.

In order to grow, we must consume.

[Shinichi]

You're way over complicating things. There is no mystical supernatural reason why we eat and drink. Basic biology, chemistry and physics answers this question perfectly and accurately.

All animate things use energy in a vast number of ways. Every movement you make, every breath you take, every thought you have, the heat your body needs to generate to keep you at optimal temperature, the combat your immune system constantly does against invaders, it all expends a certain amount of energy.

The material universe is very much finite. It may be incomprehensibly large, but it is nowhere near infinite. Likewise, all microcosms are also finite. As such, when energy is expended out of any (especially micro-) system, the energy in that system will reduce until there is no energy left to expend. In an inanimate entity, this total expenditure results in the collapse of the system, because no more energy can be drawn from it. When you drain a battery, it is dead, and the material that housed the energy is just a basic empty shell. Rechargable batteries can be revived, but eventually even they will completely die. In an animate, living entity, this total expenditure also results in the collapse of the system, because no more energy can be produced and thus the system can no longer operate. Thus, the body shuts down and simply dies. Dehydration, starvation - these are not pleasant ways to go.

To prevent this total expenditure of energy, living entities possess a system which allows them to consume energy from other sources, digest it, and use this energy to fuel their own system. Calories and other things, basic nutrition and chemistry. This system allows the animate entity to continue operating for a very long time, compared to the short time available from constantly expending energy without drawing any back in.

Think of it like your monthly financial budget. You have bills to pay in order to enjoy the goods and services that you enjoy. Movies, games, books, housing expenses. All of these payments are an expenditure of money. If you constantly pay without having an income, you will go broke, the system will collapse, and you will no longer have the goods and services that you enjoy. Thus, you need an income that is equal to or greater than your expenditure, and thus the system will remain operational for a long time.

And, for the record, this system of consumption in order to recharge applies to immaterial entities (spirits, servitors, constructs, whatever) just as much as it applies to material entities. Every system has a finite amount of energy, and if you don't have an income to pay for expenditures, you go bankrupt very quickly.

Don't over complicate basic, simple things with mysticism and philosophy. It is, quite simply, a waste of energy. [wink2]



~:Shin:~

[Cybernetic_Jazz]

Don't over complicate basic, simple things with mysticism and philosophy. It is, quite simply, a waste of energy. [wink2]

I guess this is what I was getting at, ie. I was wondering just how many other sources of energy we have flowing into us that are usable on a metabolic level.

That makes me curious, for example, whether kundalini increases amount to something more like a voltage or amperage step up of what energy was already there rather than an increase in sum-total.

[Desecrated]

Well you could technically survive for years without eating. There are a couple of examples of this in india and some other extreme christians.

BUT!
It has to be sad that the human body consumes massive amount of energy every day. Our brain consumes about the same amount of energy as 83 computers and our heart is even worse.

So unless you are planing on become a saint or sadhu eating is still the viable option.

[Stukov]

As Shinichi wrote biological existence requires biological fuel to transform into energy. As for your follow up question, I know the answer, its there somewhere but I'm not finding the words that sufficiently explain the issue. Though its not something I've done in a while, I'm going to try to send you the knowledge, or the key to the knowledge room so you can experience and understand it yourself. Let me know if it works (don't know how long it will take).

[Cybernetic_Jazz]

As Shinichi wrote biological existence requires biological fuel to transform into energy. As for your follow up question, I know the answer, its there somewhere but I'm not finding the words that sufficiently explain the issue. Though its not something I've done in a while, I'm going to try to send you the knowledge, or the key to the knowledge room so you can experience and understand it yourself. Let me know if it works (don't know how long it will take).

TY.

It was really brought on by that sense that the atoms and molecules of our bodies (and at a minimum our consciousness) is like a bundle of fibers where we're seeing a cross-section in our physical reality. It would be a cross section of a bundle of fibers if considered in a four-dimensional construct, a bundle of 2 or 3d sheets if handled in a 5 dimensional construct. I feel like I reached out and touched something here in terms of understanding what's behind the universe but my immediate intuitive assembly of what it suggests could be very first-stage in it's thinking.

That's kind of why I brought up the projector issue - one of the most immediately familiar things that I've been doing since I was a baby takes on a certain logical oddness if I consider that it's a world where the real meat of it is vertically oriented but these metabolic interactions are cross-sectional like a bundle of chords in a cable interacting in some way that's necessary for their interaction even if, when we think of a bunch of lines moving together we'd think of their points of merger as tangential, almost unimportant compared to to what dominates the picture - ie. the trajectory of the lines.

I hope this all doesn't sound too wacky or like a stoned teenager with a crackpot theory, I'm largely just throwing this against the wall because I know there are plenty of people with far more experience in mystic exploration of granular varieties than I have and I kind of wanted to see if the types of questions it's caused me to raise are of a helpful variety in terms of pointing me along the right track. It might be something, might equally be nothing, and if it's nothing it likely means that I'll just want to meditate on the meaning of this experience a lot longer and file it away to see if anything else happens farther down the road that explains the context of it properly.

Several years ago I 3rd plateaued and saw a particular scape almost like two planes of vines with trees of vines between them and sloth-like creatures happily sleeping in them, munching away loose ends, a bit like it was something like a cozy forest for them. Might be the same content (ie. the vine structures), then again it might not.