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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 4944966" data-attributes="member: 59082">To Jack7Jack, there is just too much to reply to in your dense posts--and maybe this isn't the place for it--but very interesting, indeed. I'll try to tease out a few things...Leaving aside intentionality for a moment, we can look at how what we do and take in impacts consciousness.  Not everyone engages meditative practice of one sort or another, or at least consciously (and to the extent that you've described), but we all "feed our soul", so to speak; we all "eat the world." From this perspective, everything is food, and food creates our "body."A more pragmatic and achievable approach, I think, is to be aware of that and note the effects of the "food" we take in. We don't all need to take up intricate and often archaic meditative practices, but we all do "eat" (physically, energetically, emotionally, mentally, psychically, spiritually, etc) and at the least we should do so consciously. Think of Pratyahara in Patanjali's sutras: the withdrawal of the senses through abstinence of various kinds of external "stuff" which feed different aspects of our psycho-physical being. What we feed grows. We don't need to take a purely yogic/transcendent approach where we disavow the worldly, but Pratyahara itself can be taken to mean a kind of consciousness and, yes, intentionality brought to one's experience. Choosing what one takes in in a conscious manner; or, at the least, noting the effects of it.Perhaps, but certainly you need a plane to fly? A boat to float? Etc. Right tool for the right job; using the wrong tool for a given job complicates things at best; at worst it destroys what is being worked on.I'm all for different "modes of travel," but think we need to be clear in how we use our technologies. The mode of travel impacts the experience of the traveler. One's experience of a given place is vastly different if one is, say, a passenger on a train vs. driving a race car.Interesting stuff. Actually, this in some ways explicates my point about the mode of travel impacting the experience of the territory. If I drink a pot of coffee and get all agitated and then yell at my daughter when she does something I don't like, there is an obvious connection between the coffee and the anger, right? If I drink some chamomile tea the same action by my daughter might not effect in my in the same way (or rather, I might not react in the same way).This is not to place the blame elsewhere or to deny responsibility, but in fact the opposite: by noting now different things effect us, we begin to free ourselves from our habitual, mindless patterns--and take true responsibility. It is recognizing one's place within a vast network of influences, in which everything means something, impacts something (or someone) else. It is Buddhism 101, really: all phenomena are co-arising, are interdependent (okay, that's more like Buddhism 202, but I'm sure you get my point).I am by no means a puritan or a "yogic ascender". I regularly engage in grounding, agitating, stimulation, simulating activities. It is not my view or approach that we disavow everything that is, or could be, harmful in any way. I am, however, interesting in understanding cause-and-effect, inter-relationships, how MMOs effect my consciousness vs. RPGs.</blockquote>

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