Do you think its possible to be rid of all dark thoughts?
Stuff like anger, fear, jealousy, hatred, etc.?
shareNo.
But you can reduce them by a very big degree.
The secret is to feel love.
Also, if you look at like as Behaviorists do it will help you a lot. They have the opposite view of Free Will, which is a religious/legal concept people stupidly believe.
If you believe that people don't know any better and are trained to act as they do, you will be less angry and have less hate. A female friend of mine recently disappointed me very badly. Then, I remembered that she has the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder and worse. It is what people programmed like that are trained to do. I promised my gf I would no longer speak to her but want to contact and forgive her.
If you feel love you will have way less jealousy because you will be happy the other has "that thing" you want. You can also want it too, but you wouldn't want to take it since you are happy for them.
Fear is much the same. If you love life you know there's many things that are good and so scary things will not consume you.
Looking at life differently is the key.
which is a religious/legal concept people stupidly believe.
What qualifies you to make this statement? share
All of the information from Behaviorism and how it better explains behavior than the concept of free will.
The work of Kant.
The book by Hans Vainhinger called, The Philosophy of As If, which is a Neo-Kantian explanation about how pretending to know the cause of something is behind the structure of many ideas in society. For instance, with crime, in real life, criminals are trained to be that way by their life experience. They don't get up one morning and decide on doing things perfectly versus criminally. If the law acknowledged that people are trained, then they couldn't punish anyone since it's not your fault you got trained to do negative things.
The same goes for religion. You can't say someone is actually bad or good if they got trained.
I don't think it can be so easily summed up. A lot of people's "training" is a direct result of decisions they make and the motivation/morality of said decisions. Kind of a chicken/egg situation.
shareNo.
Your "decisions" aren't real. They are only based on the information from your training. You can't "decide" based on information that you don't have. So, your decisions aren't "free" they are based on a limited data set.
So, a squirrel can't decide to act like a horse. You can't decide to act like Mongolian, a Frenchmen, a person who grew up as a billionaire, a black person (if you aren't), and so on.
Our decisions aren't really decisions but forced reactions based on our limited data.
I respectfully disagree.
shareThen you are wrong and living in a bubble.
That is the way humans are and that is it.
You can't decide to be Chinese or an ancient Greek. You can only be what your environment programmed you to be.
I see. I don't agree with you so I am wrong and living in a bubble. Grow up.
shareYou are living in a bubble and you tell me to grow up?
You are wrong but happy to be wrong and unwilling to look at things differently.
Mature!
Nope. You're the one who is wrong and living in a bubble (I'll also add arrogant and condescending). I was trying to be nice, saying I respectfully disagree but since that's not good enough for you, the truth is, that crap you subscribe to is the biggest bunch of horse shit I've read, in a long time. It is true in my opinion that we are IN PART, the sum of our experiences, but to say we are "trained" and have no choice/free will (like the ONE author you site) is absolutely ridiculous.
Good luck with that.