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Post by Reefs on Oct 15, 2020 13:06:17 GMT -5
Can there be self-reflection without self-consciousness? Yes. You know what autopilot is? Of course (I would think you do). self-reflection can occur on autopilot. Being self-conscious is the anthesis of autopilot (FAIAP). That's not how AW uses the term. He uses the term self-consciousness in the sense of being aware of oneself as an individual, aka SVP. You seem to use the term self-consciousness in the sense of alertness. Self-reflection means contemplating your own thoughts and behavior. So in that sense, self-reflection is just a special kind of self-consciousness, maybe we could call it hyper-self-consciousness. |
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Post by inavalan on Oct 15, 2020 15:04:39 GMT -5
Yes. You know what autopilot is? Of course (I would think you do). self-reflection can occur on autopilot. Being self-conscious is the anthesis of autopilot (FAIAP). That's not how AW uses the term. He uses the term self-consciousness in the sense of being aware of oneself as an individual, aka SVP. You seem to use the term self-consciousness in the sense of alertness. Self-reflection means contemplating your own thoughts and behavior. So in that sense, self-reflection is just a special kind of self-consciousness, maybe we could call it hyper-self-consciousness. To me there isn't such a term as "self-consciousness" as I consider "consciousness" the building material of the multiverse, be it non-physical, physical, form mineral to man, ... everything. I generally pay attention to using the word "consciousness", most of the times preferring "awareness" for when others would use "consciousness". Even "self-awareness" is a debatable wording. I understand when somebody uses it, as a superior level of awareness, that an individual point of awareness can achieve in its evolvement quest for what Seth called "value fulfillment". But people may mean something else. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Oct 15, 2020 15:20:21 GMT -5
That's not how AW uses the term. He uses the term self-consciousness in the sense of being aware of oneself as an individual, aka SVP. You seem to use the term self-consciousness in the sense of alertness. Self-reflection means contemplating your own thoughts and behavior. So in that sense, self-reflection is just a special kind of self-consciousness, maybe we could call it hyper-self-consciousness. To me there isn't such a term as "self-consciousness" as I consider "consciousness" the building material of the multiverse, be it non-physical, physical, form mineral to man, ... everything. I generally pay attention to using the word "consciousness", most of the times preferring "awareness" for when others would use "consciousness". Even "self-awareness" is a debatable wording. I understand when somebody uses it, as a superior level of awareness, that an individual point of awareness can achieve in its evolvement quest for what Seth called "value fulfillment". But people may mean something else. I don't recall Seth's use of the term "value fulfillment", but what you say is closer to anything I've been able to convey to others here, for 11 years. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Oct 15, 2020 15:22:29 GMT -5
Yes. You know what autopilot is? Of course (I would think you do). self-reflection can occur on autopilot. Being self-conscious is the anthesis of autopilot (FAIAP). That's not how AW uses the term. He uses the term self-consciousness in the sense of being aware of oneself as an individual, aka SVP. You seem to use the term self-consciousness in the sense of alertness. Self-reflection means contemplating your own thoughts and behavior. So in that sense, self-reflection is just a special kind of self-consciousness, maybe we could call it hyper-self-consciousness. OK. Not just alertness, see post above, reply to inavalan. |
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Post by inavalan on Oct 15, 2020 16:37:53 GMT -5
To me there isn't such a term as "self-consciousness" as I consider "consciousness" the building material of the multiverse, be it non-physical, physical, form mineral to man, ... everything. I generally pay attention to using the word "consciousness", most of the times preferring "awareness" for when others would use "consciousness". Even "self-awareness" is a debatable wording. I understand when somebody uses it, as a superior level of awareness, that an individual point of awareness can achieve in its evolvement quest for what Seth called "value fulfillment". But people may mean something else. I don't recall Seth's use of the term "value fulfillment", but what you say is closer to anything I've been able to convey to others here, for 11 years. There is a powerful "Seth material search engine": findingseth.com/q/'value+fulfillment'/h/asc/e/pos/ "I realize that this material is difficult, and I am giving it to you in as simple terms as possible. If growth is one of the most necessary laws of your camouflage universe, value fulfillment corresponds to it in the inner reality universe."—TES2 Session 44 April 15, 1964 |
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Alan Watts
Oct 15, 2020 17:15:02 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by stardustpilgrim on Oct 15, 2020 17:15:02 GMT -5
I don't recall Seth's use of the term "value fulfillment", but what you say is closer to anything I've been able to convey to others here, for 11 years. There is a powerful "Seth material search engine": findingseth.com/q/'value+fulfillment'/h/asc/e/pos/ "I realize that this material is difficult, and I am giving it to you in as simple terms as possible. If growth is one of the most necessary laws of your camouflage universe, value fulfillment corresponds to it in the inner reality universe."—TES2 Session 44 April 15, 1964 Thanks. |
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Post by Reefs on Oct 18, 2020 21:33:10 GMT -5
The Symbolic and The Real (3) – Thinking & Time
AW: And that is simultaneously the grandeur and the tragedy of being human. Because along with knowing that you know [goes along with] all kinds of things, the most important of which is the knowledge of time. You know the myth of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man? That when Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, death came into the world. Why? It wasn’t that there wasn’t death before. All creatures in nature come and go, everything is born and dies. But for the first time, having eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge—that is, having invented a system of knowledge: the world of symbols—people knew that they were going to die. A cat approaches another dead cat, he sniffs it and sees that it’s good to eat, decides that it’s not and goes away. Probably—although we don’t know for certain—probably, the cat doesn’t reflect: “I will one day be a corpse like that.”
But human beings predict because they are able to think about events with symbols and words. They are able to see what the future will be. And we all believe—don’t we?—that this is the most useful kind of knowledge that we have: to know the future and, therefore, to be able to plan for it. To have your savings account, your life insurance, to plan for your old age. That’s great. But at the same time it has very serious disadvantages, because the more you know the future, and are thereby able to control it, the more you realize that you can’t control it ultimately. That you’re going to come to a bad end. And so that’s what makes human beings so strange. All human beings are, therefore, slightly anxious, slightly depressed. There’s a certain kind of sadness in human nature which the Japanese call aware: a melancholy, deep down in us, because we know—in the words of the song—“But it all comes apart in the end.” And even diamonds come apart at the end.
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Post by Reefs on Nov 23, 2020 8:31:05 GMT -5
The Symbolic and The Real (4) – Foresight vs. Spontaneity
AW: And so it’s a curious thing whether a human being is really a logical construction. It’s a great question. Whether a human being is not actually a self-defeating organism, a creature who knows too much for his own good. Because—you know the proverb “What you gain on the roundabout you lose on the swings?” So with man: what you gain in power by having foresight and dexterity in controlling the world through symbols—what a price we pay for it! Because no one of us can any longer afford to be spontaneous.
Imagine a life in which you don’t have to take any provision for the future. You do just what you feel like on impulse. Now, you’d make many mistakes, and you might do things that would be quite fatal. Like a moth which can’t distinguish between a candle and the sex call of a female, and so it flies straight into the flame and it blows up. Is that too bad? In a way, from the standpoint of the universe, it’s a fairly good arrangement, because if this didn’t happen there would be too many moths. And every time a moth plunges into the flame it’s a sudden disaster. The moth isn’t worried about this—I mean, it doesn’t have anxiety about it before it happens—and the moth goes out, just like that. With a glorious explosion.
And so, in the same way, all these creatures who don’t think what to do next—cats don’t lie awake at night worrying about what contracts they’re going to have to make the next day, and yet, nothing can match the dignity of a cat when it walks, and when it licks itself. What a magnificent creature. So imagine a world in which there isn’t any worry. There will be disasters, but you won’t know it’s going to hit you.
But we have figured out how to beat that world, how to last longer and to be more smart than any other creature on earth. But the price is anxiety. The price is lying awake nights. The price is having an ego, a thing in us that we call “I,” “my self.” A compound of all the memories that we have of our experiences; a history.
When you are asked to give an account of yourself, what do you do? You give your, kind of, biography: where you were born, where you were educated, where you have been, where you have traveled, what things you are competent in. It’s your life story, it’s your history. And we learn to identify ourselves with our history. And that is a series of symbols representing the actual events through which we have passed in our lifetime. And that history is something with which we fervently identify ourselves. But all histories come to an end. And so the more we know about our history, about ourselves in that kind of a way of knowing, the more anxiety we have about the thought that this history cannot go on indefinitely. It cannot be a story of complete success.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Nov 28, 2020 14:23:05 GMT -5
Gold Leaves
G.K. Chesterton
Lo! I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold;
Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out
The year and I are old.
In youth I sought the prince of men,
Captain in cosmic wars,
Our Titan, even the weeds would show
Defiant, to the stars.
But now a great thing in the street
Seems any human nod,
Where move in strange democracy
The million masks of God.
In youth I sought the golden flower
Hidden in wood or wold,
But I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold.
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Post by inavalan on Apr 2, 2021 14:07:14 GMT -5
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Post by Reefs on Apr 29, 2021 11:12:03 GMT -5
The Veil of Thoughts (1) – Money – Confusion between Symbol and Reality
AW: Thought is a means of concealing truth, despite the fact that it’s an extraordinarily useful faculty. But in quite recent weeks we’ve had an astounding example of the way mankind can be bamboozled by thoughts. There was a crisis about gold. And the confusion of money—in any form whatsoever—with wealth is one of the major problems from which civilization is suffering. Because, way back in our development, when we first began to use symbols to represent the events of the physical world, we found this such an ingenious device that we became completely fascinated with it.
And in ever so many different dimensions of life we are living in a state of total confusion between symbol and reality. And the real reason why, in our world today—where there is no technical reason whatsoever why there should be any poverty at all—the reason it still exists is people keep asking the question: “Where’s the money going to come from?” Not realizing that money doesn’t come from anywhere and never did, except if you thought it was gold. And then, of course, if to increase the supply of gold and use that to finance all the world’s commerce, prosperity would depend not upon finding new processes for growing food in vast quantities, or getting nutrition out of the ocean, or getting water from atomic energy—no, it depends on discovering a new gold mine.
And you can see what a nonsensical state of affairs that is, because when gold is used for money it becomes, in fact, useless. Gold is a very useful metal for filling teeth, making jewelry, and maybe covering the dome of the Capitol in Washington. But the moment it is locked up in vaults in the form of ingots it becomes completely useless. It becomes a false security, something that people cling to, like an idol, like a belief in some kind of Big Daddy Oh God with whiskers who lives above the clouds. And all that kind of thing diverts our attention from reality, and we go through all sorts of weird rituals. The symbol, in other words, gets in the way of practical life.
So it was—you remember the Great Depression? —when, one day, everybody was doing business and things were going along pretty well, and the next day there were bread lines. It was like someone came to work and they said to him, “Sorry, chum, but you can’t build today. No building can go on. We don’t have enough inches.” He’d say, “What do you mean, we don’t have enough inches? We’ve got wood, haven’t we? We got metal, we even got tape measures!” They say, “Yeah, but you don’t understand the business world. We just haven’t got enough inches! Just plain inches. We’ve used too much of them.” And that’s exactly what happened when we had the Depression. Because money is something of the same order of reality as inches, grams, meters, pounds, or lines of latitude and longitude. It is an abstraction. It is a method of bookkeeping to obviate the cumbersome procedures of barter. But our culture, our civilization, is entirely hung up on the notion that money has an independent reality of its own.
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Post by Reefs on Apr 30, 2021 8:41:22 GMT -5
The Veil of Thoughts (2) – Politics – Thinking about Abstractions
AW: We are bamboozled by our thoughts which are symbols. And what can we do to become un-bamboozled, because it’s a very serious state of affairs. Most of our political squabbles are entirely the result of being bamboozled by thinking. And it is to be noted that, as time goes on, the matters about which we fight with each other are increasingly abstract, and the wars fought about abstract problems get worse and worse. We are thinking about vast abstractions, ideologies called communism, capitalism—all these systems—and paying less and less attention to the world of physical reality, to the world of earth, and trees, and waters, people, and so are in the name of all sorts of abstractions busy destroying our natural environment. Wildlife, for example, is having a terrible problem continuing to exist alongside human beings.
Another example of this fantastic confusion is that, not so long ago, the Congress voted a law imposing stern penalties upon anyone who should presume to burn the American flag. And they put this law through with a great deal of patriotic oratory, and the quoting of poems and so on about Old Glory, ignoring the fact entirely that these same congressmen—by acts of commission or omission—are burning up that for which the flag stands. They’re allowing the utter pollution of our waters, of our atmosphere, the devastation of our forests, and the increasing power of the bulldozer to bring about a ghastly fulfillment of the biblical prophecy that “every valley shall be exalted, every mountain laid low, and the rough places plain.” But they don’t see, they don’t notice the difference between the flag and the country. Or the difference between the map and the territory.
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Post by Reefs on May 2, 2021 4:00:20 GMT -5
The Veil of Thoughts (3) – The Physical World – Basic Reality
AW: When we use the word “physical reality”—as distinct from “abstraction”—what are we talking about? There’s going to be a fight about this, philosophically. If I say that the final reality that we’re living in is the physical world, a lot of people will say that I’m a materialist, that I’m un-spiritual, and that I think too much of an identification of the man with the body. Any book that you’ll open on yoga or Hindu philosophy will have in it a declaration that you start a meditation practice by saying to yourself, “I am not the body. I am not my feelings. I am not my thoughts. I am the witness who watches all this and is not really any of it.” And so, if I were to say, then, that the physical world is the basic reality, I would seem to be contradicting what is said in these Hindu texts. But it all depends on what you mean by the “physical world.” What is it?
First of all, it must be pointed out that the idea of the “material world” is itself philosophical. It is in its own way a symbol. And so, if I take up something that is generally agreed to be something in the material world, and I argue that this is material—of course, it isn’t. Because nobody has ever been able to put their finger on anything material—that is to say if, by the word “material,” you mean some sort of basic stuff out of which the world is made. By, say, analogy with the art of ceramics, pottery: we use clay and we form it into various shapes, and so a lot of people think that the physical world is various forms of matter. And nobody has ever been able to discover any matter. They’ve been able to discover various forms, yes—there is patterns, but no matter. You can’t even think how you would describe matter in some terms other than form, because whenever a physicist talks about the nature of the world he describes a form, he describes a process which can be put into the shape of a mathematical equation.
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Post by andrew on May 2, 2021 11:02:20 GMT -5
The Symbolic and The Real (4) – Foresight vs. Spontaneity
AW: And so it’s a curious thing whether a human being is really a logical construction. It’s a great question. Whether a human being is not actually a self-defeating organism, a creature who knows too much for his own good. Because—you know the proverb “What you gain on the roundabout you lose on the swings?” So with man: what you gain in power by having foresight and dexterity in controlling the world through symbols—what a price we pay for it! Because no one of us can any longer afford to be spontaneous. Imagine a life in which you don’t have to take any provision for the future. You do just what you feel like on impulse. Now, you’d make many mistakes, and you might do things that would be quite fatal. Like a moth which can’t distinguish between a candle and the sex call of a female, and so it flies straight into the flame and it blows up. Is that too bad? In a way, from the standpoint of the universe, it’s a fairly good arrangement, because if this didn’t happen there would be too many moths. And every time a moth plunges into the flame it’s a sudden disaster. The moth isn’t worried about this—I mean, it doesn’t have anxiety about it before it happens—and the moth goes out, just like that. With a glorious explosion. And so, in the same way, all these creatures who don’t think what to do next—cats don’t lie awake at night worrying about what contracts they’re going to have to make the next day, and yet, nothing can match the dignity of a cat when it walks, and when it licks itself. What a magnificent creature. So imagine a world in which there isn’t any worry. There will be disasters, but you won’t know it’s going to hit you. But we have figured out how to beat that world, how to last longer and to be more smart than any other creature on earth. But the price is anxiety. The price is lying awake nights. The price is having an ego, a thing in us that we call “I,” “my self.” A compound of all the memories that we have of our experiences; a history. When you are asked to give an account of yourself, what do you do? You give your, kind of, biography: where you were born, where you were educated, where you have been, where you have traveled, what things you are competent in. It’s your life story, it’s your history. And we learn to identify ourselves with our history. And that is a series of symbols representing the actual events through which we have passed in our lifetime. And that history is something with which we fervently identify ourselves. But all histories come to an end. And so the more we know about our history, about ourselves in that kind of a way of knowing, the more anxiety we have about the thought that this history cannot go on indefinitely. It cannot be a story of complete success. This is excellent, and prescient. |
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Post by Reefs on May 3, 2021 9:30:42 GMT -5
The Veil of Thoughts (4) – The Physical World – Transiency and Spirituality
AW: “Physical world.” This is a concept. This is simply an idea. And if you want to ask me to differentiate between the physical and the spiritual, I will not put the spiritual in the same class as the abstract. But most people do. They think that 1 + 2 = 3 is a proposition of a more spiritual nature than, say, for example, a tomato. But I think a tomato is a lot more spiritual than 1 + 2 = 3. This is where we really get to the point. That’s why, in Zen Buddhism, when people ask, “What is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?” you could very well answer “A tomato.” Because, look how—when you examine the material world—how diaphanous it is. It really isn’t very solid. A tomato doesn’t last very long. Nor, for that matter, do the things that we consider most exemplary of physical reality, such as mountains. The poet says, “The hills are shadows, and they flow from form to form, and nothing stands.” Because the physical world is diaphanous. It’s like music. When you play music it simply disappears, there’s nothing left. And for that very reason it is one of the highest and most spiritual of the arts: because it is the most transient.
And so transiency is a mark of spirituality. A lot of people think the opposite: that the spiritual things are the everlasting things. But the more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless. Nothing is so dead as a diamond, and yet, this imagery—the idea of the most mineral objects being the most permanent, and so they get associated with the spiritual. Jesus Christ is called the Rock of Ages. And even the Buddhists have used the diamond—the vajra—as an image of the fundamental reality of the universe. But the reason why they used the diamond was not that it was hard, but that it was completely transparent and, therefore, afforded a symbol of the void which everything fundamentally is. Not meaning that there simply is nothing there, but the void means that you cannot get any idea which will sufficiently define physical reality. Every idea will be wrong. In that sense, it will be void.
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