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Post by inavalan on Sept 12, 2021 14:21:20 GMT -5
I've gone round and round with zd on this for 12 years. ... SDP: Those are ... I primarily challenge you because you seem to have so many ideas ABOUT the nature of "what is," and there's a huge difference between ideas ABOUT "what is" and what "what is" is in itself. You frequently list idea after idea that you seem to be attached to, and none of them have anything to do with what's right in front of our eyes right this moment. They're all abstractions, but "what is" is not abstract. What keeps bugging me into coming back to comment on some of your posts is that I find you using some terms that suggest some commonality with my understanding of the wider reality, while also interlacing them with statements that contradict. For example, " what's right in front of our eyes right this moment", to my understanding is all-wrong. What you "see" doesn't objectively exist, it is only a subjective interpretation, different from anybody else's. Even more, what you "see" with your eyes isn't even what your subconscious creates, but one step further "down" distortion-path. Besides, "this moment" is just a narrowing of focus in time just obstructs a wider perception of reality. What you perceive "right this moment" is only a slice of your perception, and is different from the next slice, next moment. Surely, there is also this phenomenal memory you have that allows you to recall tons of quotes, that may or may not be fully accurate, and your interpretation is definitely subjective, picking only one possible layer from the multi-layer symbolism they provide. Everything is multi-layered symbolism. I believe that to understand the wider-reality you have to "realize" that there is no objective reality that one perceives. It is like you have to look from the other side of the concept ... It is called wider-reality because what you consciously perceive is a narrow sliver of it. We are now-when-alive in the same reality that we ever were and ever be, dead or alive, awake or dreaming or sleeping. There are only differences of perception. There isn't another part of us much smarter, there isn't a possible sudden comprehension of everything. It isn't possible that an uneducated teenager to suddenly realize the full complexity of the wider-reality. Although tempting, I won't go further into details of my view because it is futile, as it is of no real interest to others here, and because I advocate for everybody not following anybody else's views, as they are inherently subjective interpretations / distortions. With no intention to offend anybody, it keeps coming into my mind a comparison to Masaru Emoto's pictures of water molecules reacting to thought: one thought creates a beautiful crystal, while another a black-hole like form.
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Sept 12, 2021 15:09:25 GMT -5
I've gone round and round with zd on this for 12 years. I have a pretty firm rule here, I don't talk specifically about practices, I don't talk about experiences. I've skated the edges of both of these... There is a kind of general rule here, also a kind of taboo, woo woo. And most of the foremost posters here do not consider experiences significant, especially woo woo. But one persons woo woo is another persons sacred. It seems zd (and others here) have formed an artificial boundary, a conceptual boundary disallowing any significant exploration beyond their realizations. And he has said he has never had one of his realizations later contradicted. So, basically, I post, and it doesn't go much further. I confirm others when I can agree with them, but I have added many times, there is more. There is more. I guess it's maybe possible to touch the more, but not-know what one has touched, maybe it immediately gets categorized as woo woo or insignificant (but IMO, this is just not possible, there's just too dramatic a difference. But I do know that a written account read by one who has not been there, is unrecognizable, it's just words). Most of the regular posters also ignore any mention of higher dimensions, or relegate them to insignificance. Those that do are indicating 'Seth-stuff' is not significant. But yes, there is a line drawn, OTOH, if you don't see that coming to the unborn is the end of the journey, you haven't gotten it. OToH I say coming to the unborn is just the beginning of the journey. The unborn is a kind of seed, or egg. But nobody wants to sit on an egg and incubate it, especially if they consider it already hatched. There is a spiritual journey, but it's a spiral, not a closed loop. The whole universe is quantum based. Worlds are discontinuous with each other, that's why it seems there is nowhere else to go. But the quantum gap can be crossed, and a new world entered. Glimpsed at first, but entered. It's more-real than this world even, and can't be imagined. And you always want to go back. I know, if zd reads this, he will consider it irrelevant (and at the same time consider his view the more significant). Thus, the secret protects itself. I consider understanding more significant than a realization. SDP: Those are some curious comments to make considering what's been posted here over the years. Most of us have talked about practices (ATA-T, zazen, shikan taza, staying in the I Am, contemplation, etc), and most of us have talked about the correlation between those kinds of practices (which often lead to mental silence), and realizations. We've also talked about experiences, and particularly woo-woo experiences. Reefs and I have written about kensho events and how significant kensho events (or experiences if one wants to call them that), can result in major realizations. You say that you consider understanding more significant than a realization, but realizations are what inform understanding by revealing what is NOT true. As someone driven almost solely by intellectual curiosity, all I wanted to understand was, in essence, "What's going on?" I knew, intuitively, that the consensus paradigm didn't make any sense, and I had no idea what I would need to discover to resolve all of the existential questions and paradoxes that plagued me. The first big woo-woo experience/event that occurred clearly answered 7 of my main questions, and that's what I used to argue with Enigma about. He dismissed ALL experiences, even non-dual kensho kinds of woo-woo events/experiences, because, from his POV, they have what he considered a beginning, middle, and end, and he rejected the idea that there could be timeless seeings into our true nature that were worth having and would yield important insights. People in the Zen tradition contemplate dozens, if not hundreds, of existential questions in the form of koans, and they resolve those koans simply by sitting in silence. In my case, solving one or two dozen of the simpler koans quickly showed me that I could find the answer to any existential question by simply bearing in mind what I wanted to know. Understanding increased as various realizations revealed that various deeply ingrained ideas about the nature of reality that I believed were true simply weren't. That's why many sages describe the path of Self-discovery as one of subtraction rather than addition. Ideas cease to have importance as we discover that they are all cartoons that keep us distracted or separated from the absolute truth of "what is." As far as I can see, there's no taboo against saying anything on the forum that one wants to say, but whatever is said is certainly open to challenge. I primarily challenge you because you seem to have so many ideas ABOUT the nature of "what is," and there's a huge difference between ideas ABOUT "what is" and what "what is" is in itself. You frequently list idea after idea that you seem to be attached to, and none of them have anything to do with what's right in front of our eyes right this moment. They're all abstractions, but "what is" is not abstract. This (post you replied to) was mostly for inavalan, and wally, and a few others, zazeniac. I have told you at least 2 dozen times over the years, I agree with you up to here, but there is more... You always/(mostly) disregard this. There is what we know. Things that work in daily life, that which is repeatable. Example: the Periodic Table and how it forms everything in the physical universe. There is what we know that we don't know, known unknowns. Example: Dark Matter and Dark Energy (We don't know why galaxies rotate faster than they should; we don't know why the expansion of space is accelerating). Unknown knowns. Example: Penzias and Wilson won a Noble Prize in Physics for discovering the Cosmic Background Radiation. But at first they didn't know what they had found. They had a white noise hiss from their radio telescope which they were actually trying to eliminate because it was interfering with their research (I don't even recall what it was). They thought it might be Pigeon crap and tried to clean their telescope out. Then down the road they heard about two physicists who were trying to find the Cosmic Background Radiation and realized that's what their white noise hiss was. Probably few people remember that they backed into a Nobel Prize by accident. There is what we don't know we don't know, unknown unknowns. Example: Black Swans Your claim seems to me to be there are/cannot be any unknown unknowns because there is one Whole of All That Is. At minimum you seem to indicate it doesn't matter even if there is more. I disagree. That's as simply as I can say it. Anybody can get stuck at not knowing that they don't know by assuming they already know. It's difficult to move from that position. But people have to recognize their own stuck-ness, it does no good to even tell them. Our search is only as good as our questions.
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Sept 12, 2021 15:15:09 GMT -5
SDP: Those are ... I primarily challenge you because you seem to have so many ideas ABOUT the nature of "what is," and there's a huge difference between ideas ABOUT "what is" and what "what is" is in itself. You frequently list idea after idea that you seem to be attached to, and none of them have anything to do with what's right in front of our eyes right this moment. They're all abstractions, but "what is" is not abstract. What keeps bugging me into coming back to comment on some of your posts is that I find you using some terms that suggest some commonality with my understanding of the wider reality, while also interlacing them with statements that contradict. For example, " what's right in front of our eyes right this moment", to my understanding is all-wrong. What you "see" doesn't objectively exist, it is only a subjective interpretation, different from anybody else's. Even more, what you "see" with your eyes isn't even what your subconscious creates, but one step further "down" distortion-path. Besides, "this moment" is just a narrowing of focus in time just obstructs a wider perception of reality. What you perceive "right this moment" is only a slice of your perception, and is different from the next slice, next moment. Surely, there is also this phenomenal memory you have that allows you to recall tons of quotes, that may or may not be fully accurate, and your interpretation is definitely subjective, picking only one possible layer from the multi-layer symbolism they provide. Everything is multi-layered symbolism. I believe that to understand the wider-reality you have to "realize" that there is no objective reality that one perceives. It is like you have to look from the other side of the concept ... It is called wider-reality because what you consciously perceive is a narrow sliver of it. We are now-when-alive in the same reality that we ever were and ever be, dead or alive, awake or dreaming or sleeping. There are only differences of perception. There isn't another part of us much smarter, there isn't a possible sudden comprehension of everything. It isn't possible that an uneducated teenager to suddenly realize the full complexity of the wider-reality. Although tempting, I won't go further into details of my view because it is futile, as it is of no real interest to others here, and because I advocate for everybody not following anybody else's views, as they are inherently subjective interpretations / distortions. With no intention to offend anybody, it keeps coming into my mind a comparison to Masaru Emoto's pictures of water molecules reacting to thought: one thought creates a beautiful crystal, while another a black-hole like form. Yes.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 12, 2021 19:56:10 GMT -5
I've gone round and round with zd on this for 12 years. I have a pretty firm rule here, I don't talk specifically about practices, I don't talk about experiences. I've skated the edges of both of these... There is a kind of general rule here, also a kind of taboo, woo woo. And most of the foremost posters here do not consider experiences significant, especially woo woo. But one persons woo woo is another persons sacred. It seems zd (and others here) have formed an artificial boundary, a conceptual boundary disallowing any significant exploration beyond their realizations. And he has said he has never had one of his realizations later contradicted. So, basically, I post, and it doesn't go much further. I confirm others when I can agree with them, but I have added many times, there is more. There is more. I guess it's maybe possible to touch the more, but not-know what one has touched, maybe it immediately gets categorized as woo woo or insignificant (but IMO, this is just not possible, there's just too dramatic a difference. But I do know that a written account read by one who has not been there, is unrecognizable, it's just words). Most of the regular posters also ignore any mention of higher dimensions, or relegate them to insignificance. Those that do are indicating 'Seth-stuff' is not significant. But yes, there is a line drawn, OTOH, if you don't see that coming to the unborn is the end of the journey, you haven't gotten it. OToH I say coming to the unborn is just the beginning of the journey. The unborn is a kind of seed, or egg. But nobody wants to sit on an egg and incubate it, especially if they consider it already hatched. There is a spiritual journey, but it's a spiral, not a closed loop. The whole universe is quantum based. Worlds are discontinuous with each other, that's why it seems there is nowhere else to go. But the quantum gap can be crossed, and a new world entered. Glimpsed at first, but entered. It's more-real than this world even, and can't be imagined. And you always want to go back. I know, if zd reads this, he will consider it irrelevant (and at the same time consider his view the more significant). Thus, the secret protects itself. I consider understanding more significant than a realization. SDP: Those are some curious comments to make considering what's been posted here over the years. Most of us have talked about practices (ATA-T, zazen, shikan taza, staying in the I Am, contemplation, etc), and most of us have talked about the correlation between those kinds of practices (which often lead to mental silence), and realizations. We've also talked about experiences, and particularly woo-woo experiences. Reefs and I have written about kensho events and how significant kensho events (or experiences if one wants to call them that), can result in major realizations. You say that you consider understanding more significant than a realization, but realizations are what inform understanding by revealing what is NOT true. As someone driven almost solely by intellectual curiosity, all I wanted to understand was, in essence, "What's going on?" I knew, intuitively, that the consensus paradigm didn't make any sense, and I had no idea what I would need to discover to resolve all of the existential questions and paradoxes that plagued me. The first big woo-woo experience/event that occurred clearly answered 7 of my main questions, and that's what I used to argue with Enigma about. He dismissed ALL experiences, even non-dual kensho kinds of woo-woo events/experiences, because, from his POV, they have what he considered a beginning, middle, and end, and he rejected the idea that there could be timeless seeings into our true nature that were worth having and would yield important insights. People in the Zen tradition contemplate dozens, if not hundreds, of existential questions in the form of koans, and they resolve those koans simply by sitting in silence. In my case, solving one or two dozen of the simpler koans quickly showed me that I could find the answer to any existential question by simply bearing in mind what I wanted to know. Understanding increased as various realizations revealed that various deeply ingrained ideas about the nature of reality that I believed were true simply weren't. That's why many sages describe the path of Self-discovery as one of subtraction rather than addition. Ideas cease to have importance as we discover that they are all cartoons that keep us distracted or separated from the absolute truth of "what is." As far as I can see, there's no taboo against saying anything on the forum that one wants to say, but whatever is said is certainly open to challenge. I primarily challenge you because you seem to have so many ideas ABOUT the nature of "what is," and there's a huge difference between ideas ABOUT "what is" and what "what is" is in itself. You frequently list idea after idea that you seem to be attached to, and none of them have anything to do with what's right in front of our eyes right this moment. They're all abstractions, but "what is" is not abstract. Is not woo woo simply mind-knots ( beliefs) coming unstuck Zd, a sign that the seeker has relaxed a little?
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Sept 12, 2021 21:51:10 GMT -5
SDP: Those are some curious comments to make considering what's been posted here over the years. Most of us have talked about practices (ATA-T, zazen, shikan taza, staying in the I Am, contemplation, etc), and most of us have talked about the correlation between those kinds of practices (which often lead to mental silence), and realizations. We've also talked about experiences, and particularly woo-woo experiences. Reefs and I have written about kensho events and how significant kensho events (or experiences if one wants to call them that), can result in major realizations. You say that you consider understanding more significant than a realization, but realizations are what inform understanding by revealing what is NOT true. As someone driven almost solely by intellectual curiosity, all I wanted to understand was, in essence, "What's going on?" I knew, intuitively, that the consensus paradigm didn't make any sense, and I had no idea what I would need to discover to resolve all of the existential questions and paradoxes that plagued me. The first big woo-woo experience/event that occurred clearly answered 7 of my main questions, and that's what I used to argue with Enigma about. He dismissed ALL experiences, even non-dual kensho kinds of woo-woo events/experiences, because, from his POV, they have what he considered a beginning, middle, and end, and he rejected the idea that there could be timeless seeings into our true nature that were worth having and would yield important insights. People in the Zen tradition contemplate dozens, if not hundreds, of existential questions in the form of koans, and they resolve those koans simply by sitting in silence. In my case, solving one or two dozen of the simpler koans quickly showed me that I could find the answer to any existential question by simply bearing in mind what I wanted to know. Understanding increased as various realizations revealed that various deeply ingrained ideas about the nature of reality that I believed were true simply weren't. That's why many sages describe the path of Self-discovery as one of subtraction rather than addition. Ideas cease to have importance as we discover that they are all cartoons that keep us distracted or separated from the absolute truth of "what is." As far as I can see, there's no taboo against saying anything on the forum that one wants to say, but whatever is said is certainly open to challenge. I primarily challenge you because you seem to have so many ideas ABOUT the nature of "what is," and there's a huge difference between ideas ABOUT "what is" and what "what is" is in itself. You frequently list idea after idea that you seem to be attached to, and none of them have anything to do with what's right in front of our eyes right this moment. They're all abstractions, but "what is" is not abstract. Is not woo woo simply mind-knots ( beliefs) coming unstuck Zd, a sign that the seeker has relaxed a little? Nice.
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Post by inavalan on Sept 12, 2021 22:38:00 GMT -5
No, no, no, ... Sorry. It feels like there is an insurmountable divider. I've gone round and round with zd on this for 12 years. I have a pretty firm rule here, I don't talk specifically about practices, I don't talk about experiences. I've skated the edges of both of these... There is a kind of general rule here, also a kind of taboo, woo woo. And most of the foremost posters here do not consider experiences significant, especially woo woo. But one persons woo woo is another persons sacred. It seems zd (and others here) have formed an artificial boundary, a conceptual boundary disallowing any significant exploration beyond their realizations. And he has said he has never had one of his realizations later contradicted. So, basically, I post, and it doesn't go much further. I confirm others when I can agree with them, but I have added many times, there is more. There is more. I guess it's maybe possible to touch the more, but not-know what one has touched, maybe it immediately gets categorized as woo woo or insignificant (but IMO, this is just not possible, there's just too dramatic a difference. But I do know that a written account read by one who has not been there, is unrecognizable, it's just words). Most of the regular posters also ignore any mention of higher dimensions, or relegate them to insignificance. Those that do are indicating 'Seth-stuff' is not significant. But yes, there is a line drawn, OTOH, if you don't see that coming to the unborn is the end of the journey, you haven't gotten it. OToH I say coming to the unborn is just the beginning of the journey. The unborn is a kind of seed, or egg. But nobody wants to sit on an egg and incubate it, especially if they consider it already hatched. There is a spiritual journey, but it's a spiral, not a closed loop. The whole universe is quantum based. Worlds are discontinuous with each other, that's why it seems there is nowhere else to go. But the quantum gap can be crossed, and a new world entered. Glimpsed at first, but entered. It's more-real than this world even, and can't be imagined. And you always want to go back. I know, if zd reads this, he will consider it irrelevant (and at the same time consider his view the more significant). Thus, the secret protects itself. I consider understanding more significant than a realization. You used some terms that I don't know what they mean, and although I can infer to a certain degree, I might misunderstand. When I am not in a reacting mode, and take things at face value for "practical" reasons, I try to interpret the symbolism of what I'm perceiving, be that what somebody says / writes, or an event, or anything. This often causes a sudden connection in my mind, I am conscious of a piece of new knowledge, or shines a new light on something, unveils another layer of significance. Sometimes although I understand the connection, it is a little more difficult to explain to those who view the reality differently than I do. For example, after I read your post, and that created a certain impression on me, I read zendancer's reply to you, got struck by his "what's right in front of our eyes right this moment", and replied to that. Then several connections came to my mind, some of them I probably shouldn't express because they might offend, although they aren't derogatory in my mind; they are the same concept expressed with a different symbolism; but others might not understand that. The first connection that came to me, which seems safer to express here, is to a comment made last evening by a relative. In a small group, we were commenting on the US Open Tennis Women's Championship, about how the two teenagers that disputed the final seemed unbelievably well prepared physically, mentally, psychologically, including how to talk to reporters. We were commenting appreciatively. At some point, one of my relatives said on a dismissive tone that they were just performers like at the theater. I didn't react, but it bothered me. I don't have a high appreciation for that relative-person, so it wasn't a surprise, but a confirmation. I had no reason (and no expectations) to give him my feedback. With a negligent remark he expressed disdain for a couple of professions (revealed by his tone and inference), for two persons who are out of ordinary in a good way, and who really worked very hard for what they've accomplished, which is well beyond what my relative ever did, and even more unfortunately, was able to appreciate. Reviewing in my mind that conversation, I realized again how we all apparently experience the same objective reality, but each one of us experiences it differently, function of their blinders (a.k.a. limiting beliefs, evolvement level, emotions, intelligence). One shouldn't get angry with his dreams' characters, or with the characters of a video-game one's playing. Should one? This reply wasn't about your post, you, or zendancer specifically.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 12, 2021 23:02:54 GMT -5
Did you read Peter Reich's writing on his Dad? My Dad was a Steel Bender, part of a Team to build hydro-electric Dams, he also our country Towns Boxing Trainer. Pushing me thro the ropes at 5 years stunted my creativity enormously and it wasn't till after he died that I began my turn-a-bout.
Haven't read, will check it out, sounds interesting. ...Good you got turned around... Did you ever see The Great Santini? Death delivers for many attending grief,
the massive movements of the life force mobilising life,
that which 'concretes' the mind,
making them set.
It is fascinating that individual mind only last a few days after-physical-death; I dont know why ppl make it so precious.
Dunno the great Santini. ps, a film?
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Post by Reefs on Sept 13, 2021 4:15:49 GMT -5
I don't have much time for debate, but I did a thread on TPON once, and here's what I wrote back then about the book and the pain body theory:
So, I'd imagine that the concept of a pain body would make a lot of sense to people who are in pain, i.e people that hang out on the lower half of the emotional scale a lot (or predominantly). But the higher you are calibrating on that scale, the more bogus that concept of a pain body will feel to you. Also, imagine Niz or Ramana or a Zen Master talking about a pain body! That would be just weird! Anyone who has ever suffered has (or had) a pain-body. If one doesn't suffer any more, most likely the pain-body is just buried deeper and it will take a ton of a s**t-storm in life to make you suffer again. Life will usually accommodate you. Never say never. I would say the pain-body pretty-much = vasanas and samskaras. What most of you here don't seem to get is that as long as there are vasanas and samskaras left in(as) the pain-body, these will necessitate another incarnation. Even if choice is involved, one will choose to come back because only in a physical body can vasanas and samskaras be dealt with. But of course you ("most of you here") will all say, nope, I'm good. But a few here I see continue to tackle their s**t. If you have a problem with anything in life, you're not done (life is not done with you, as was said above). Let's recap: ND101: 1) there is only what you are, which in practical terms means... 2) there is no self and no others that are separate, there is only the appearance of a separate self and others, which means... 3) whatever such an appearance does or whatever happens to such an appearance as a separate volitional entity is not real. LOA101: 1) that which is like unto itself is drawn, which in practical terms means... 2) you get what you think about, whether you want it or not, which means... 3) the more you think about it the more active it is and the more active it is the more it comes to you and the more it comes to you the more you count it as evidence and the more you count it as evidence the more you believe it and the more you believe it the more you come to expect it – and you always get what you expect! (that was actually an A-H quote, hehe) Now, I hope you can see that Tolle's pain body makes no sense from either perspective. From the ND perspective it is unnecessary TMT, and from the LOA/deliberate creation perspective it is unnecessary self-torture. Because where both teachings agree is that suffering is optional. The difference is that from the ND perspective suffering is not real because the separate volitional entity that is believed to suffer is not real to begin with; and from the LOA/deliberate creation perspective suffering is not real because absolute well-being is the basis of this universe, aka our natural state. Which makes suffering just a really dumb personal choice, because you could as well believe in a well-being body and make that your truth, instead of believing in a pain body and make that your truth. Makes no difference to LOA. LOA will assist you in manifesting whatever truth you choose. So why choose hell on earth when you could as well choose heaven on earth? Some food for thought.
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Post by zendancer on Sept 13, 2021 7:28:03 GMT -5
SDP: Those are ... I primarily challenge you because you seem to have so many ideas ABOUT the nature of "what is," and there's a huge difference between ideas ABOUT "what is" and what "what is" is in itself. You frequently list idea after idea that you seem to be attached to, and none of them have anything to do with what's right in front of our eyes right this moment. They're all abstractions, but "what is" is not abstract. What keeps bugging me into coming back to comment on some of your posts is that I find you using some terms that suggest some commonality with my understanding of the wider reality, while also interlacing them with statements that contradict. For example, " what's right in front of our eyes right this moment", to my understanding is all-wrong. What you "see" doesn't objectively exist, it is only a subjective interpretation, different from anybody else's. Even more, what you "see" with your eyes isn't even what your subconscious creates, but one step further "down" distortion-path. Besides, "this moment" is just a narrowing of focus in time just obstructs a wider perception of reality. What you perceive "right this moment" is only a slice of your perception, and is different from the next slice, next moment. Surely, there is also this phenomenal memory you have that allows you to recall tons of quotes, that may or may not be fully accurate, and your interpretation is definitely subjective, picking only one possible layer from the multi-layer symbolism they provide. Everything is multi-layered symbolism. I believe that to understand the wider-reality you have to "realize" that there is no objective reality that one perceives. It is like you have to look from the other side of the concept ... It is called wider-reality because what you consciously perceive is a narrow sliver of it. We are now-when-alive in the same reality that we ever were and ever be, dead or alive, awake or dreaming or sleeping. There are only differences of perception. There isn't another part of us much smarter, there isn't a possible sudden comprehension of everything. It isn't possible that an uneducated teenager to suddenly realize the full complexity of the wider-reality. Although tempting, I won't go further into details of my view because it is futile, as it is of no real interest to others here, and because I advocate for everybody not following anybody else's views, as they are inherently subjective interpretations / distortions. With no intention to offend anybody, it keeps coming into my mind a comparison to Masaru Emoto's pictures of water molecules reacting to thought: one thought creates a beautiful crystal, while another a black-hole like form. Ok. I understand where you're coming from, but what if we kept things much much simpler than that? What if we simply looked at the world without any ideas of "objective," "subjective," "slice of time," "different modes of perception," etc? What I'm pointing to is beyond dualistic ideas of any kind, but I have to use words to point to it, so it's a bit tricky. Yesterday I drove to a construction project I'm working on in total mental silence. No thoughts at all were necessary for driving the car or looking at the world and understanding what was seen. The understanding was direct because there were no thoughts at all. This character can do that because it practiced shifting attention away from thoughts for many years, and now there are long periods of internal silence. There is awareness and awareness is aware that there are no thoughts at all. Anybody could learn to attain that kind of mental silence, but very few people are sufficiently curious about what the world would look like in mental silence to spend the time necessary to find out. Being able to function in total mental silence reveals how incomprehensibly intelligent reality is, and what we ARE is that intelligence manifesting in human form. When a human becomes detached from ideation, various realizations can occur. One of those realizations is that time and space are cognitive grids that the intellect imposes on reality, so they are meta-realities similar to lines of longitude and latitude, and they are not actual in any sense whatsoever. All other thoughts are exactly like that. In short, most humans see the map but not the territory, they see the menu but not the food. The search for absolute truth is often triggered by an intuitive sense that the consensus paradigm is in some way fundamentally flawed. Initially, it seems as if there is a separate volitional entity at the center of the search, but this is also an illusion, just like the illusion of time and space. What's actually happening is that Reality/Source/THIS/God, or whateverwewantocallit, wants to wake up in human form and see into it's true nature. As numerous cognitive illusions are seen through, more and more ideas are seen to be false, and eventually the mind/intellect understands its relative insignificance, and is put to rest. In the process, life becomes simpler and simpler, and ultimately it feels like returning to a child-like state of mind (while retaining full adult intellectual capability). Niz once told a seeker that he and the seeker lived in two different worlds. That's a pretty accurate summation of the situation. A sage lives in what we can call "the absolute non-dual world" whereas most people live in what we can call "the mind's dualistic relativistic world." Only one of those worlds is real.
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Post by zendancer on Sept 13, 2021 7:53:45 GMT -5
SDP: Those are some curious comments to make considering what's been posted here over the years. Most of us have talked about practices (ATA-T, zazen, shikan taza, staying in the I Am, contemplation, etc), and most of us have talked about the correlation between those kinds of practices (which often lead to mental silence), and realizations. We've also talked about experiences, and particularly woo-woo experiences. Reefs and I have written about kensho events and how significant kensho events (or experiences if one wants to call them that), can result in major realizations. You say that you consider understanding more significant than a realization, but realizations are what inform understanding by revealing what is NOT true. As someone driven almost solely by intellectual curiosity, all I wanted to understand was, in essence, "What's going on?" I knew, intuitively, that the consensus paradigm didn't make any sense, and I had no idea what I would need to discover to resolve all of the existential questions and paradoxes that plagued me. The first big woo-woo experience/event that occurred clearly answered 7 of my main questions, and that's what I used to argue with Enigma about. He dismissed ALL experiences, even non-dual kensho kinds of woo-woo events/experiences, because, from his POV, they have what he considered a beginning, middle, and end, and he rejected the idea that there could be timeless seeings into our true nature that were worth having and would yield important insights. People in the Zen tradition contemplate dozens, if not hundreds, of existential questions in the form of koans, and they resolve those koans simply by sitting in silence. In my case, solving one or two dozen of the simpler koans quickly showed me that I could find the answer to any existential question by simply bearing in mind what I wanted to know. Understanding increased as various realizations revealed that various deeply ingrained ideas about the nature of reality that I believed were true simply weren't. That's why many sages describe the path of Self-discovery as one of subtraction rather than addition. Ideas cease to have importance as we discover that they are all cartoons that keep us distracted or separated from the absolute truth of "what is." As far as I can see, there's no taboo against saying anything on the forum that one wants to say, but whatever is said is certainly open to challenge. I primarily challenge you because you seem to have so many ideas ABOUT the nature of "what is," and there's a huge difference between ideas ABOUT "what is" and what "what is" is in itself. You frequently list idea after idea that you seem to be attached to, and none of them have anything to do with what's right in front of our eyes right this moment. They're all abstractions, but "what is" is not abstract. This (post you replied to) was mostly for inavalan, and wally, and a few others, zazeniac. I have told you at least 2 dozen times over the years, I agree with you up to here, but there is more... You always/(mostly) disregard this. There is what we know. Things that work in daily life, that which is repeatable. Example: the Periodic Table and how it forms everything in the physical universe. There is what we know that we don't know, known unknowns. Example: Dark Matter and Dark Energy (We don't know why galaxies rotate faster than they should; we don't know why the expansion of space is accelerating). Unknown knowns. Example: Penzias and Wilson won a Noble Prize in Physics for discovering the Cosmic Background Radiation. But at first they didn't know what they had found. They had a white noise hiss from their radio telescope which they were actually trying to eliminate because it was interfering with their research (I don't even recall what it was). They thought it might be Pigeon crap and tried to clean their telescope out. Then down the road they heard about two physicists who were trying to find the Cosmic Background Radiation and realized that's what their white noise hiss was. Probably few people remember that they backed into a Nobel Prize by accident. There is what we don't know we don't know, unknown unknowns. Example: Black Swans Your claim seems to me to be there are/cannot be any unknown unknowns because there is one Whole of All That Is. At minimum you seem to indicate it doesn't matter even if there is more. I disagree. That's as simply as I can say it. Anybody can get stuck at not knowing that they don't know by assuming they already know. It's difficult to move from that position. But people have to recognize their own stuck-ness, it does no good to even tell them. Our search is only as good as our questions. I've never said that there's an end to Self-discovery, but after the mind is put to rest (by recognizing it's appropriate function in the scheme of things, and by discovering that all separateness is an illusion), whatever unfolds from that point on is just what unfolds. One lives without expectation or desire for anything other than what's happening here and now. The idea of "more" is just another idea that obscures what's already here/now. Hakuin claimed that his deepest satori, triggered by the sound of falling snow, occurred long after his initial satori. I can only assume that he was referring to a CC because CC's are usually triggered by a sensory event. It's hard to imagine any seeing that could be deeper than what was seen by this character via a CC in 1984, but anything is possible. If a future ultra-deep CC occurred, ok. And if nothing else of a similar nature ever again occurred, that, too, is ok.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 13, 2021 8:59:35 GMT -5
Anyone who has ever suffered has (or had) a pain-body. If one doesn't suffer any more, most likely the pain-body is just buried deeper and it will take a ton of a s**t-storm in life to make you suffer again. Life will usually accommodate you. Never say never. I would say the pain-body pretty-much = vasanas and samskaras. What most of you here don't seem to get is that as long as there are vasanas and samskaras left in(as) the pain-body, these will necessitate another incarnation. Even if choice is involved, one will choose to come back because only in a physical body can vasanas and samskaras be dealt with. But of course you ("most of you here") will all say, nope, I'm good. But a few here I see continue to tackle their s**t. If you have a problem with anything in life, you're not done (life is not done with you, as was said above). Let's recap: ND101: 1) there is only what you are, which in practical terms means... 2) there is no self and no others that are separate, there is only the appearance of a separate self and others, which means... 3) whatever such an appearance does or whatever happens to such an appearance as a separate volitional entity is not real. LOA101: 1) that which is like unto itself is drawn, which in practical terms means... 2) you get what you think about, whether you want it or not, which means... 3) the more you think about it the more active it is and the more active it is the more it comes to you and the more it comes to you the more you count it as evidence and the more you count it as evidence the more you believe it and the more you believe it the more you come to expect it – and you always get what you expect! (that was actually an A-H quote, hehe) Now, I hope you can see that Tolle's pain body makes no sense from either perspective. From the ND perspective it is unnecessary TMT, and from the LOA/deliberate creation perspective it is unnecessary self-torture. Because where both teachings agree is that suffering is optional. The difference is that from the ND perspective suffering is not real because the separate volitional entity that is believed to suffer is not real to begin with; and from the LOA/deliberate creation perspective suffering is not real because absolute well-being is the basis of this universe, aka our natural state. Which makes suffering just a really dumb personal choice, because you could as well believe in a well-being body and make that your truth, instead of believing in a pain body and make that your truth. Makes no difference to LOA. LOA will assist you in manifesting whatever truth you choose. So why choose hell on earth when you could as well choose heaven on earth? Some food for thought. There is a difference between: 1. Wallowing in pain, for the ego. This will attract more of the same, true. 2. Being honest about possible "negative" feelings or pain. Not to wallow, but to bring them into the light of consciousness, to let them be. They might transform or dissolve. I'm not sure if you acknowledge this difference. I suspect #2 can be done privately, without talking about much of anything. But it could also involve expressing feelings. I think Tolle was aimed at #2. If your point is that it too often becomes #1, okay, point taken. Jung talked about the "shadow". If repressed, the whole psyche suffers. Creativity and "positive" feelings can also dry up. You become fake. But of course you don't go seeking pain. If you have none, that's great! You mentioned Niz. He did talk about this. He talked about the pain of existence, despair (leading to earnestness), and about the unconscious becoming conscious and dissolving. Edit: I admit, I have too often done what you describe - been stuck in a negative cycle and attracted it to myself! So I don't mean to deny much of what you wrote!
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Post by shadowplay on Sept 13, 2021 9:52:53 GMT -5
What if we simply looked at the world without any ideas of "objective," "subjective," "slice of time," "different modes of perception," etc? Yes! ND is prior to/beyond those kind of concepts. There’s no requirement whatsoever to determine whether THIS is subjective or objective or something else entirely. Those are structurally dualistic philosophical questions - which can be fun to explore but tend to incline towards TMT. ND is simply a realisation that THIS (whatever THIS is) is not-two. The rest, the implications of this, how it appears in the world etc. is a kind of ongoing work in progress. Yesterday I drove to a construction project I'm working on in total mental silence. No thoughts at all were necessary for driving the car or looking at the world and understanding what was seen. The understanding was direct because there were no thoughts at all. This character can do that because it practiced shifting attention away from thoughts for many years, and now there are long periods of internal silence. There is awareness and awareness is aware that there are no thoughts at all. Anybody could learn to attain that kind of mental silence, but very few people are sufficiently curious about what the world would look like in mental silence to spend the time necessary to find out. This is where we differ slightly - but I suspect, only in how we express it. It’s clear that some sages have a dramatic ‘response’ to the end of seeking. Some report how thinking completely falls away. (In each of the dramatic cases that I know of I note that prior to the shift thought was overwhelmingly oppressive.) So, yes, mental silence can clearly act as a welcome and useful respite from the ongoing mental chatter which upholds the dualistic paradigm. But I don’t see a requirement for ongoing mental silence.
THIS (Reality, Source) presents HOW IT IS. There are no special circumstances or set of conditions required AT ALL. And though I agree that there is no thought involved in, say, driving the car, I would argue that mentation* is present to some degree. Right now if someone asks where you live. You can answer without thinking. But mentation is employed in the very mechanics of knowing this - even though this might not be obvious. What most sages are referring to when they profess an absence of thinking is the incessant voice in the head generating continuous narrative - in particular self-referential thoughts. This is what falls away in ‘real-time present actuality’. But mentation (just like blood flow or DNA replication or digestion) remains mostly unobtrusively active. * I agree that Reality is incomprehensibly intelligent - it needs no help from an imagined separate entity. But the very mechanics of that intelligence are employed in the (apparent) biological organism VIA functional expressions such as blood flow, DNA replication, digestion and mentation - there’s no divine intervention going on.
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Post by zendancer on Sept 13, 2021 12:29:08 GMT -5
What if we simply looked at the world without any ideas of "objective," "subjective," "slice of time," "different modes of perception," etc? Yes! ND is prior to/beyond those kind of concepts. There’s no requirement whatsoever to determine whether THIS is subjective or objective or something else entirely. Those are structurally dualistic philosophical questions - which can be fun to explore but tend to incline towards TMT. ND is simply a realisation that THIS (whatever THIS is) is not-two. The rest, the implications of this, how it appears in the world etc. is a kind of ongoing work in progress. Yesterday I drove to a construction project I'm working on in total mental silence. No thoughts at all were necessary for driving the car or looking at the world and understanding what was seen. The understanding was direct because there were no thoughts at all. This character can do that because it practiced shifting attention away from thoughts for many years, and now there are long periods of internal silence. There is awareness and awareness is aware that there are no thoughts at all. Anybody could learn to attain that kind of mental silence, but very few people are sufficiently curious about what the world would look like in mental silence to spend the time necessary to find out. This is where we differ slightly - but I suspect, only in how we express it. It’s clear that some sages have a dramatic ‘response’ to the end of seeking. Some report how thinking completely falls away. (In each of the dramatic cases that I know of I note that prior to the shift thought was overwhelmingly oppressive.) So, yes, mental silence can clearly act as a welcome and useful respite from the ongoing mental chatter which upholds the dualistic paradigm. But I don’t see a requirement for ongoing mental silence.
THIS (Reality, Source) presents HOW IT IS. There are no special circumstances or set of conditions required AT ALL. And though I agree that there is no thought involved in, say, driving the car, I would argue that mentation* is present to some degree. Right now if someone asks where you live. You can answer without thinking. But mentation is employed in the very mechanics of knowing this - even though this might not be obvious. What most sages are referring to when they profess an absence of thinking is the incessant voice in the head generating continuous narrative - in particular self-referential thoughts. This is what falls away in ‘real-time present actuality’. But mentation (just like blood flow or DNA replication or digestion) remains mostly unobtrusively active. * I agree that Reality is incomprehensibly intelligent - it needs no help from an imagined separate entity. But the very mechanics of that intelligence are employed in the (apparent) biological organism VIA functional expressions such as blood flow, DNA replication, digestion and mentation - there’s no divine intervention going on. No disagreement with any of that. I wasn't suggesting that mental silence (no voice in the head) needs to occur. I was only stating that for those people who can be silently aware without the voice in the head, it becomes obvious that 99% of conscious thought is an unnecessary overlay that for most adults tends to obscure the difference between "what is" as opposed to the meta-reality created by ideation. Yes, we could say that subconscious mentation is occurring when driving a car in the same way that blood circulates or cuts in the skin automatically heal (an extremely complex biological phenomenon). All of the intellectual distinctions and body-knowings that we learn growing up are internalized in the mind/body organism so that for an adult conscious thought is rarely required. If it does occur, it is what the Buddha called "thinking that is not-thinking." I usually use the term "subconscious mental processing" rather than "mentation," but we're both pointing to the same thing. During a zoom satsang with Norio Kushi, Paul Rezendez, Tyler Tarrant and 30 or 40 serious seekers I once said that 99% of conscious verbal thought (the voice in the head) is unnecessary. One of the seekers asked Tyler, "Do you agree with that?" Tyler smiled and said, "No. I'd say it's more like 99.5% of conscious thoughts are unnecessary." Yes, for some people the voice in the head suddenly stops, completely, right out of the blue. Gary Weber comes to mind as one example, but he had been a long-time meditator and yoga practitioner. It also occurs for some people with no background in meditation or existential seeking. The first guy that comes to mind in that regard was a supervisor of air traffic controllers at a large airport. Some sort of serious computer problem occurred, and while this guy was trying to resolve the issue and people in the tower were frantically running around, his internal narrative suddenly went silent. I met him later at a TAT retreat because that experience had gotten him interested in spirituality and non-duality. He told me that he was able to figure out how to resolve the problem at that time even though his mind remained totally silent. He said that he had felt like laughing at all of the people freaking out because he said, "I knew what to do without having to think a single thought." His silence lasted about a day before the internal narrative returned. I later met him again on a retreat near Lake Tahoe, and during that retreat his internal dialogue stopped for a much longer period of time. I suspect that most long-time meditators experience a more gradual reduction in thoughts rather than a sudden cessation. As you noted, various realizations can bring an end to particular patterns of thought completely, and especially self-referential patterns. Other types of thoughts can also simply cease after seeing their illusory or obscurational nature. Aside from conscious planning of future activities related to running a business, the primary thoughts that I entertain these days are, ironically, thoughts about how to use words more effectively for waking people up to THIS!
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Post by zazeniac on Sept 13, 2021 13:48:33 GMT -5
Even among the anointed, if they are honest, which is rare, you'd not gather a single mustard seed.
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Post by inavalan on Sept 13, 2021 14:05:38 GMT -5
What keeps bugging me into coming back to comment on some of your posts is that I find you using some terms that suggest some commonality with my understanding of the wider reality, while also interlacing them with statements that contradict. For example, " what's right in front of our eyes right this moment", to my understanding is all-wrong. What you "see" doesn't objectively exist, it is only a subjective interpretation, different from anybody else's. Even more, what you "see" with your eyes isn't even what your subconscious creates, but one step further "down" distortion-path. Besides, "this moment" is just a narrowing of focus in time just obstructs a wider perception of reality. What you perceive "right this moment" is only a slice of your perception, and is different from the next slice, next moment. Surely, there is also this phenomenal memory you have that allows you to recall tons of quotes, that may or may not be fully accurate, and your interpretation is definitely subjective, picking only one possible layer from the multi-layer symbolism they provide. Everything is multi-layered symbolism. I believe that to understand the wider-reality you have to "realize" that there is no objective reality that one perceives. It is like you have to look from the other side of the concept ... It is called wider-reality because what you consciously perceive is a narrow sliver of it. We are now-when-alive in the same reality that we ever were and ever be, dead or alive, awake or dreaming or sleeping. There are only differences of perception. There isn't another part of us much smarter, there isn't a possible sudden comprehension of everything. It isn't possible that an uneducated teenager to suddenly realize the full complexity of the wider-reality. Although tempting, I won't go further into details of my view because it is futile, as it is of no real interest to others here, and because I advocate for everybody not following anybody else's views, as they are inherently subjective interpretations / distortions. With no intention to offend anybody, it keeps coming into my mind a comparison to Masaru Emoto's pictures of water molecules reacting to thought: one thought creates a beautiful crystal, while another a black-hole like form. Ok. I understand where you're coming from, but what if we kept things much much simpler than that? What if we simply looked at the world without any ideas of "objective," "subjective," "slice of time," "different modes of perception," etc? What I'm pointing to is beyond dualistic ideas of any kind, but I have to use words to point to it, so it's a bit tricky. Yesterday I drove to a construction project I'm working on in total mental silence. No thoughts at all were necessary for driving the car or looking at the world and understanding what was seen. The understanding was direct because there were no thoughts at all. This character can do that because it practiced shifting attention away from thoughts for many years, and now there are long periods of internal silence. There is awareness and awareness is aware that there are no thoughts at all. Anybody could learn to attain that kind of mental silence, but very few people are sufficiently curious about what the world would look like in mental silence to spend the time necessary to find out. Being able to function in total mental silence reveals how incomprehensibly intelligent reality is, and what we ARE is that intelligence manifesting in human form. When a human becomes detached from ideation, various realizations can occur. One of those realizations is that time and space are cognitive grids that the intellect imposes on reality, so they are meta-realities similar to lines of longitude and latitude, and they are not actual in any sense whatsoever. All other thoughts are exactly like that. In short, most humans see the map but not the territory, they see the menu but not the food. The search for absolute truth is often triggered by an intuitive sense that the consensus paradigm is in some way fundamentally flawed. Initially, it seems as if there is a separate volitional entity at the center of the search, but this is also an illusion, just like the illusion of time and space. What's actually happening is that Reality/Source/THIS/God, or whateverwewantocallit, wants to wake up in human form and see into it's true nature. As numerous cognitive illusions are seen through, more and more ideas are seen to be false, and eventually the mind/intellect understands its relative insignificance, and is put to rest. In the process, life becomes simpler and simpler, and ultimately it feels like returning to a child-like state of mind (while retaining full adult intellectual capability). Niz once told a seeker that he and the seeker lived in two different worlds. That's a pretty accurate summation of the situation. A sage lives in what we can call "the absolute non-dual world" whereas most people live in what we can call "the mind's dualistic relativistic world." Only one of those worlds is real. Some differences ... Thought is more than chatter. Chatter isn't useful; thought is. You see the existence of a physical world that you, or God experiences. There isn't such a physical world. Whatever you perceive is created by your subconscious; the same for everybody. "I" in your reality, is your creation; it isn't the same "I" that exist in my reality. They are connected, and may share or not some commonality function of what each one of us accepts at subconscious level (of which our awake-conscious isn't aware in most cases). You see silence, lack of thought as an achievement. I see it as an impossibility. You can't drive if you don't think. Chatter isn't thinking. Thinking is awareness. You can't be aware without thinking. Even a water molecule thinks, is aware, creates its version of reality. You see an achievement in simpler life. I see a betterment of existence in living lucidly, and expanding the "size" of the sliver of the wider-reality that I consciously perceive. " Niz once told a seeker that he and the seeker lived in two different worlds". I understand it as meaning exactly what I described. Everybody is conscious when awake only of a world his subconscious creates. Those worlds are different both in the sense that they don't overlap, they aren't "made" of the same "material", and in the sense that they differ in content, what I perceive has a different "form" and "content"; our physical perceptions are distortions of our individual and distinct realities created by each subconscious. This is valid for everything, down to the reality perceived by a particle. There is no objective reality, but an infinite number of individual virtual realities, of all "sizes". We all (from particle to human to further more) exist in the same universe of consciousness, from which we perceive whatever we are evolved enough to perceive, and create for our benefit representations we can deal with. We aren't alone in this but are individually guided by an infinite number of more evolved entities, for the purpose of evolving, but not of developing in the distorted terms of physical existence. We are here to practice and learn to consciously create reality from our perception of the wider-reality, and will keep returning until we evolve enough (master our emotions, develop "enough" our intellect and intuition, handle our inner senses). There is no purpose in the betterment of this physical world we experience, because it virtually exist in all its possible versions, the same way the reality of video-game exists. For some players their world is good, for others is bad, for some is a heaven, for others it gets destroyed. When you join it (get born) you can join it in any coordinates of time, space, probability, as it suits your purpose. I understand that you see things differently, and I just share my view with no intention to convince anybody, just present some alternate interpretation for what we experience, and suggest to anyone open to suggestions to tap into their individual inner source of knowledge and guidance, to interpret the symbolism of their perceptions through that. Getting rid of thought chatter and negative emotions is a first step into being able to understand what is beyond, and into tapping into our individual potential.
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