Okay. Next section:

"Your mental life should never ever be simple. It should be as complex and cluttered as my house (my house is half-museum, half-junkyard but an extremely interesting junkyard). The best way to ward off diseases as Alzheimer's is by working out that mind. Not a guarantee but it does minimize your chances of getting it."

I understand your meaning, but I don't agree. I would have agreed when I was 25. Not any more. The reason I don't agree is because I have been studying meditation and Eastern disciplines, which are all about calming the mind, quieting the mind. It is an overly busy mind, constantly cluttered with thoughts, that leads to every form of mental illness and distress. It leads me to wasting hours on this forum! ;-) I kid you not. When I use the word "simple", I do not mean lacking in knowledge, I do not mean lacking in reasoning power, I do not mean anything like that. If you don't study the disciplines I'm referring to, you'll never grasp when I'm talking about on this subject. I suggest you read a book like Eckhard Tolle's "The Power of Now" for a more complete explanation.

The tragedy of modern people is that their minds are absolutely cluttered all the time with an avalanche of disordered thoughts. This eventually leads to breakdown in some cases. Ever seen a person on the street talking furiously to no one at all, as angry or anxious thoughts spill from their lips. A lot of people are like that, but they don't express the thoughts vocally, they just think them. Their minds are never calm.

I say that a calm mind is a mind dealing with reality in a beautifully smooth and simple way...far more effective than a busy mind that's jumping around all over the place like one of those music videos.

You are misunderstanding me, I think, and interpreting "simple" to mean "not smart". Nope. That's not what I mean at all. I mean that a simple mechanical device with 5 well-made parts, for example, works far better under stress than does a Rube Goldberg device with 555 parts that are dependent on 300 separate stress points. (The Germans discovered something like that in the bitter Russian winter of '41-42' when their more complex equipment simply wouldn't function...while the less complex Russian equipment kept going.) If there are two ways to do something, and one is simple and direct while the other is very complex...I suggest the simple approach.

That's why I say that we are talking at cross purposes.

And that's just 2 little paragraphs from your post.


(Would it help if I mention that I don't care whether or not you believe Jesus ever existed or not, because it doesn't matter? ;-) It may surprise me that you wouldn't believe it, but it doesn't matter, because enlightenment and human advancement are entirely possible whether or not one believes Jesus was a real person. Belief in Jesus (or any other specific religious figure) is not an essential ingredient of self-realization, in my opinion.)