Me, Myself And I

[pokerman]

I.....have just spent the last two hours fighting with....MYSELF.....over whether I should smoke a cigarette.......

Question.....who is I and who is myself?

If MYSELF is my mind, my thoughts......who is I?

[NeverSure]

Right now I is the egocentric part of you which THINKS it needs a cigarette. Of course it is lying to you. No one will die without a cigarette.

"I" should be hating an addiction, not craving it. "I" is the imaginary need for something which controls you if you let it. "It" is mental, not physical.

As long as "I" believes it needs a cigarette, it's weak. As soon as "I" decides to hate the mental part of the addiction so that the "I" can reject the slavery, "I" will be free.

The actual physical pain of doing without a smoke is tiny compared to the mental bondage of believing "I" needs wants a cigarette. If you decide to hate them, you'll quit easily.

IF "I" CONTINUES TO LIE TO YOU AND TELL YOU YOU LOVE TO SMOKE, YOU'LL SMOKE. EVEN IF YOU QUIT FOR A YEAR YOU MAY GO BACK IF "I" IS ALLOWED THAT LIE.

[OxfordWill]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Does-All-Mean-Introduction/dp/0195174372

[trainman34014]

Man up and dump the cancer sticks forever.

[NeverSure]

Admit it. You really don't like to be smelly and rejected by so many. You've gotten past really enjoying the cigarettes and you smoke them mindlessly. They don't really taste good even to you. Your "I" is lying to you in the worst of ways, telling you something that's all bad and real poison is somehow good. Who could have thought up such a lie?

There are millions of non smokers and ex smokers all around you who don't "need" a cigarette. They hate the things. They feel better, smell better, and are stronger. They can even climb stairs without running out of breath.

Tell yourself you hate being a slave to a weed, and that you won't be. Grow a pair and be bigger than some smelly thing.

Written by an ex smoker. I HATE those fkn things. That's what it takes.

[Shaktam]

Yeah I'm pretty sure the anti cancer drugs are abit off just now. So stop trashing your health.

If you run out of smokes you could just go downstairs and wrap you mouth over the exhaust pipe of your bike for a few minutes. Would taste similar anyways.

[BigJohnnyBKK]

> I.....have just spent the last two hours fighting with....MYSELF.....over whether I should smoke a cigarette.......

> Question.....who is I and who is myself?

> If MYSELF is my mind, my thoughts......who is I?

This is actually a very deep and thought-provoking question, fundamental to the upper reaches of not only religion and philosophy but also cutting-edge neuroscience.

My understanding is that consciousness is in fact a collection of various sensory and mental processes and experiences, and that idea of a single entity we call "I" is a complete illusion.

We have many selves, some well-formed into coherent personalities with their own motivations and preferences, as well as a huge collection of more fragmentary entities driven by lizard-brain survival instincts, leftover scripts (programming) from early childhood etc.

All of these are constantly ebbing and flowing, competing with each other for our time and attention, and this is why many of us find it difficult to force "ourselves" to do the things "we" know "we" want to do. The fact is we're just not in control.

I think the more sensitive and intelligent you are, the more likely you are to become aware of these issues and perhaps affected by them more seriously than those who plow along thinking life is simple.

If you really want to explore these issues you have a wonderful opportunity living in Thailand, as exploring these issues is one of the main practices of Buddhism.

If you are more aligned with "objective" scientific methods, then psychology has been the main field for such study historically, although the more physically-oriented and recent advances in neuroscience are also of great interest.

Exploring the literature on procrastination and addiction is also fruitful from a layman's perspective - the most fruitful approaches have nothing to do with the old-fashioned concept of willpower.

I think this line of thinking is one of the main reasons we're put on this Earth, much more important than a hedonistic life of ease and comfort.

I just never get around to getting up off my ass to make any significant progress on it. . .

[somtumlion]

Apparently the fight over drinking at 10am was already fought and lost...

[omnilangur]

Get yourself an E cigarette, it has dual purposes..

[NeverSure]

@no one in particular...

All of the logical arguments in the world won't help a smoker because the addiction isn't logical. If it was no one would start.

Government campaigns showing pictures of black lungs of corpses don't work. Watching a friend die of lung cancer won't work. Knowing it's slowly killing you won't work. Knowing how much money you could save over ten years and what you could do with it won't work. No argument against will work.

There has to be a revelation within the smoker where he suddenly realizes that he is hooked not physically, but mentally. Sure tobacco is addictive and quickly, but withdrawal pains aren't that great. They are better than having the flu for a week by far. All of the nicotine is gone from the system within about 3 days. All of the carbon monoxide which coats the red blood cells and blocks oxygen is gone in 8 hours.

SMOKERS CAN SLEEP FOR 8 OR 10 HOURS AND NOT MISS A SMOKE. Therefore thinking "I" need a cigarette every 30 minutes is a lie. It is the concious mind which holds that lie, but not when asleep. If one can sleep for 10 hours without issue, and wake up without being sick, (and he can) then the lie is in the mind when conscious.

It is the mind which tells the lie. The body can deal with it but the mind must be convinced that a poison which smells so bad is hated. It's 99% mental.

Why can't you quit? Because you are AFRAID. You are afraid you are going to have to give up something which the lie says is your friend.

You must face that lie for what it is. You must decide to hate being a slave to a stupid weed. A stupid bit of paper. You must be convinced you have been sucker punched, and hate the idea.

I am one of the millions who don't smoke and who feel a lot better than those who do. My food tastes better. I smell better to others. My meals taste better and I enjoy them more if I don't finish with a smoke. I am free of that fkn weed.

I am an ex smoker.

[NeverSure]

@ no one in particular.

Products which provide nicotine in a differnet way haven't worked. Patches, nicotine gum, ecigs, chewing, cigars, etc. all just keep the body dependent. It is proven they don't work. I used to smoke while wearing a patch.

Would I give a heroin addict a different way to take heroin and think I could cure him? Of course not.

It's mental. The addiction is in taking up the weed as a friend and not wanting to lose a friend. The part which makes quitting hard is fear. Fear of having to give up a friend.

The ONLY way out is to gain a new paradigm and see the weed as an enemy, the smoker as a sucker, pardon, and to learn to hate being a slave to that. In the mind. Firmly in the mind.

There is no such thing as "just one more smoke" or any substitute. That is falling off the cliff into addiction again. That is failing to hate it.

[Semper]

@ pokerman

Sounds like you already smoked something illegal.

[h90]

One is the instinct, more natural part....It tells you the breath, to eat to drink to have sex, etc etc.

The other is the modern (in matter of millions of years) mind set on top of it, which works more theoretically.

Both parts can be controlled. If you can make yourself 100 % sure that you simply can't smoke, such things don't even exist in this universe, than you won't need to fight against it.

Of course it isn't easy to fool yourself that way.

Easiest is to just focus on not smoking today...only today. Than in the morning when you could do 1 day already be proud of it and try to extend your personal highscore by just one more day.

[bina]

just an aside, but on yom kippur and every shabbat thousands and thousands of religius jews that usually smoke, even heavily, dont smoke (because lighting fire is considered work which is forbidden on shabbat. ) so from 16:00 friday, until 18:00 saturday in winter hours, religious folk dont smoke. and yet during the week they go nuts w/o their ciggies... so obviously its very psychological. a relidious jew would never never never break shabbat for a ciggie. people wait to go to hospitals until shabbat is over, and that is more life and death... _;

so it is concious vs sub concious....

bina

[metisdead]

Moved to the Stop Smoking Forum.

Nonsense trolling posts have also been removed.

[theslime]

Your Twelth Post and I must say a very good question. As I only know a little bit of how our minds work, I have sent a Copy to my Learned Buddist Bro. Will get back with reply ASAP.

[NeverSure]

@No one in particular.

It is in the mind. If appealing to a "higher power" helps your mind gain strength in any way, I have no argument. If something someone says helps strengthen your mind against the lie, more power to you.

In the end, the lie in the mind must be rejected.

What kind of a real man would let a stupid weed control his day? The answer is all of us who ever smoked. We think we are strong men but not when it comes to that weed. How could we let it happen? We believed the lie and continued to believe it every hour of every day. We believed we needed that weed even though it was killing us and spoiling our health.

Who dreamed up this lie, and who managed to get millions to believe it? How did so many get hooked? It has to rank as one of the biggest, if not the biggest scams in history. None of us would ever deliberately allow ourselves to be scammed until it comes to that cigarette. There is NOTHING good about that weed and there is EVERYTHING bad about it. Our intellect knows it is so, but the lie in our mind which tells us it is our friend has taken over our good sense.

We will smoke ourselves right into our graves knowing it is doing that, but the lie tells us it is our friend. How many friends will I allow in my life who I know are trying to kill me? Believing that a cigarette is a friend is the world's biggest lie.

The body can easily tolerate quitting. The mind, not so much until we reject the lie.

It is 99% mental.

[NeverSure]

@No one...

Regularly I read on here about some guy who is addicted to a bad Thai woman. She is eating up his money and destroying his mind. He is addicted to her. He keeps coming back for more.

EVERYONE tells him she is bad for him and to get away from her, but he is lying to himself, believing that he needs her. He doesn't listen and he goes back for more.

What is so different about a cigarette which steals our money and destroys us?

NO ONE on this forum, even smokers, will tell anyone that smoking is good. Everyone will admit that it steals our money and ruins our health. ALMOST EVERYONE here who smokes wishes he'd never started. Some are addicted to a woman and some to cigarettes and some to both. IT IS ALWAYS IN THE MIND AND IT IS ALWAYS A LIE.

Until the person with the bad woman or the cigarettes realizes for himself it is a lie and hates being in the trap, he will stay in that trap. No one can tell him different. He must see it for himself.

It is all mental.

[BigJohnnyBKK]

It is all mental.

Yes, **all**.

When we die, we wake up and realize that what we think was our whole lifetime here on Earth was just a flicker of eye's worth of dreaming, what we thought was all of reality just a creation from whole cloth of our infinitely Creative Mind.

My typing this on my keyboard is just a figment of your own imagination.

That is reality.

So stop taking it all so seriously - go ahead and have that ciggie!

[theslime]

Your Twelth Post and I must say a very good question. As I only know a little bit of how our minds work, I have sent a Copy to my Learned Buddist Bro. Will get back with reply ASAP.

The Dalai Lama said " There is no theory of a Soul or a Self, niether on the level of Ordinary Beings, nor on that of a Budda. Non self{Anatana) is simply a natural aspect of the way in which every person exists. There is no Independant Self, that exists substanially from it,s own side, however, the Self, or Person, does exist dependant on the Psycophysical Aggregates. This Self, which is always an Individual, can only Exist in relation to it,s Aggregates." Descrates said, " I think there for I am." Budda would say "I think therefore there are Thoughts. No need for I am. Just an Endless Stream of Thought, that we create Our World.

[NeverSure]

Your Twelth Post and I must say a very good question. As I only know a little bit of how our minds work, I have sent a Copy to my Learned Buddist Bro. Will get back with reply ASAP.

The Dalai Lama said " There is no theory of a Soul or a Self, niether on the level of Ordinary Beings, nor on that of a Budda. Non self{Anatana) is simply a natural aspect of the way in which every person exists. There is no Independant Self, that exists substanially from it,s own side, however, the Self, or Person, does exist dependant on the Psycophysical Aggregates. This Self, which is always an Individual, can only Exist in relation to it,s Aggregates." Descrates said, " I think there for I am." Budda would say "I think therefore there are Thoughts. No need for I am. Just an Endless Stream of Thought, that we create Our World.

I'm sorry. No offense intended but not only do I disagree, but I don't like the religion of others posted here.

Would I be so welcome if I quoted Bible verses as the way to be?

[theslime]

Your Twelth Post and I must say a very good question. As I only know a little bit of how our minds work, I have sent a Copy to my Learned Buddist Bro. Will get back with reply ASAP.

The Dalai Lama said " There is no theory of a Soul or a Self, niether on the level of Ordinary Beings, nor on that of a Budda. Non self{Anatana) is simply a natural aspect of the way in which every person exists. There is no Independant Self, that exists substanially from it,s own side, however, the Self, or Person, does exist dependant on the Psycophysical Aggregates. This Self, which is always an Individual, can only Exist in relation to it,s Aggregates." Descrates said, " I think there for I am." Budda would say "I think therefore there are Thoughts. No need for I am. Just an Endless Stream of Thought, that we create Our World.

I'm sorry. No offense intended but not only do I disagree, but I don't like the religion of others posted here.

Would I be so welcome if I quoted Bible verses as the way to be?

Up to you, this is a Forum. By the way, could you explain what is the' I dont like the Religion of others posted here bit ' Personally Im an Atheist, and hope thats okay on the Forum.

[pokerman]

Thanks everyone for your replies

As some of you know.....it wasn't a question about smoking!

So.....are we only our thoughts? (Yes, I know we have fleshy bits aswell)