DS,
I agree that to get your goals quickly, belief in your capability helps if that belief accurately reflects your ability.
If you have an inaccurate belief, it can slow things down. That is, if you believe in yourself too much you risk incompetence, if your believe too little you risk not trying.
What I do not believe are notions like "everything has to exist in the unsees before the seen." The unseen where? A mind? Your point of view presupposes a cosmology in which I do not believe. So should the universe disappear? According to the logic in such statements, apparently it should. Ahh, but then we get all manner of speculative crap as to the reason it does not. You could use Occam's razor and cut all through that.
Scientists might explain thought as the result of electrochemical activity in the brain. You could go to a forum where people who have spent their lives studying this issue discuss it and ask your question there.
You are confusing imagination with reality, my friend. Try eating imaginary food and drinking imaginary water for a month. Perhaps then you'll learn that thoughts are not, in fact, things.
Our imaginations are the result of brain activity. We use our brains to process information about the world. The information only exists as a relation between our brains and the world by way of our senses. We use our brain activity to do things in the world and make differences in the world around us. What happens in our brains is just processes in the meat. This is why we have to actually DO THINGS. You go to the store and buy food. Real food. You eat it with a real, not imaginary mouth, and you digest it not with thoughts but with your squishy internal bits.
The new "realities" we learn about come about through the process of experimentation. (They aren't new realities, BTW, reality remains constant, our perceptions of it change.) This is where we test our ideas against reality. According to your world view, any idea should work because it's an idea. But every idea does not work. Ideas aren't realities, ideas aren't things. Ideas are the result of wet processes in the brain and do not exist without brains to create them.
I have played around with Qigong. Here is my recommendation for you: go buy The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sachs. It offers undeniable proof that thoughts as we conceive them and much of what we think of as ourselves or our spirits or souls are simply results of the brain being the way it is. He documents cases of unusual brain damage in which a person's perception of reality is completely transformed. Sadly, it's all in the brain. Read it and you'll see what I mean. Reading it made me very sad, but it is better to look the ugly truth in the eye than live with pretty lies. You may want to take the blue pill. Sometimes I do to. But it's best to have guts and swallow the bitter red one.
More faulty logic in your post: quantity equals truth. Because so many people believe something, it must be so. You say this right after saying that people erroneously thought the world was flat. So was the world flat when everyone believed it to be so? Or is it possible for large quantities of people, such as yourself, to be totally wrong?
If someone hit me in a car next week and I got $5000.00 dollars I would post it here. It may have been a coincidence, but then again it may not. It would give me pause. It'd also make me think that if someone caused that, they were a real jerk and that I hope that karma actually works so that they'd get a nice accident, too.
I have to say it is very convenient that people have better things to do than perform experiments that would confirm or eradicate their beliefs. That is, put their rhetoric to a real test. I understand you're busy believing what makes you feel comfortable and just don't have time to see if those beliefs really reflect reality or not. The truth hurts sometimes.
I think there is something to Qigong, but the mechanics of how it actually works are speculative, as far as I am concerned.
I think Photoreading is pretty much a sham. When they say, PHOTOREAD ZILLIONS OF WORDS PER MINUTE! And then say, well, we don't really mean read ... by photoread we mean ... blah blah blah. Intentionally misleading advertising and flim flammery. That being said, there are parts to it that are helpful.
[This message has been edited by babayada (edited August 26, 2005).]
