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Post by someNOTHING! on Oct 25, 2022 6:00:22 GMT -5
I'm talking about unconditional love (Love) versus conditional love (love), I assume you got that. And I'm suggesting that in ATA-T, any love you feel for your partner above and beyond that which you would feel for the stranger you meet on the street is open to question because conditional love is associated with thought. Oh, well, I wasn't commenting on your dialog with sree about ATA-T, I was just ribbing you over expressing a psuedo-pardoxical statement.  I had read it as taking off a layer (i.e., of possession/duality) and expressing Isness in an ever-so-slightly (and cleverly) different variation. |
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Post by sree on Oct 25, 2022 11:38:56 GMT -5
He is embarrassing to you, Laffy?
In India, a devotee like ouroboros would pierce a skewer through his cheeks right across his mouth to celebrate Thaipusam. No, not at all, and you have this perceived relationship in your mind between myself and 'bouros all wrong. It's just when you have a measure of mutual respect then this sort of joking around is possible.  Yes, but in that joke is a snicker of conspiracy in the absurd. |
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Post by ouroboros on Oct 25, 2022 11:51:50 GMT -5
I'm talking about unconditional love (Love) versus conditional love (love), I assume you got that.And I'm suggesting that in ATA-T, any love you feel for your partner above and beyond that which you would feel for the stranger you meet on the street is open to question because conditional love is associated with thought. What I have gotten is your presentation of two kinds of love. One is conditioned and the other is not.
I am avoiding word salads and will use everyday terms that everyone can understand.
Let's consider what I am about to cook for dinner: fish. It is unseasoned fresh from the store. I am going to sprinkle some salt, sugar, and pepper on it. Once I have done that, the fish becomes seasoned. Unseasoned fish and seasoned fish. Can I use this analogy?
Okay, (and to borrow heavily from a member who has moved on) … Conditional love is the relatively shallow love that we put conditions on and as such tends to be primarily based on the fulfilment of needs. Conditional love is a personal love, often based on an idealised image of another and certain (perhaps largely unconscious) expectations which have to be met. On some level it might be acknowledged that there has to be some measure of compromise in the relationship, but also a degree of compatibility. Therefore, conditional love is often largely characterised by what the other is doing for us. Conditional love is associated with thoughts and emotional feelings and temporary highs and lows and as such often begins quite intensely and then tails off. It's pretty default stuff, and probably fair to say is the basis for most [consensus trance] relationships. I assume most will at least have a reference for this sort of situation. Conversely, unconditional love (or Love) is that which we do not put conditions on, but really it is more fundamental that that. Unconditional love is impersonal and can be envisaged as a fundamental facet of our very nature, the substratum of our collective being. In fact, Being/Peace/Love can be viewed as facets of the same stateless state. Really Love is absent conditions that would define it. Unconditional love is prior to thought and not merely a 'feeling' in the conventional sense, although it has to be said that it is felt experientially. Or rather realised. That is to say, like TPTPAU, it becomes more prevalent in the absence of that which obscures it. If we get out of our own way, Love 'moves through us'. Flows through us. Unlike conditional love, Love can't be held onto or given, and isn't dependent on an idealised image or the fulfilment of needs, but rather is devoid of judgment and expectation. Unconditional love is exquisite. Unfortunately, few will have reference for it. To summarise, whereas conditional love tends to be predominantly superficial, unconditional love is something more fundamental and innate, and as laffy rightly pointed out, conditional love is only ever a shadow of unconditional love.
Just to recap, we had been talking about the extent to which thought and perception go hand in hand, right. Both Tenka and yourself seem to take the view that they are fundamentally inseparable. Other posters sometimes appear to take the opposite stance, i.e. to give the impression that the full range of experientiality is available absent thought. I perceive myself to be somewhere in the middle and that's what I've been attempting to outline with both my, 'pre-thought tree thwacking' scenario: designed to demonstrate that sensory perception is available absent thought. Along with my query about whether ones experience of their partner in a state of ATA-T could be only Love, and not love: designed to question to what extent the 'thought-associated conventional' may still be (unconsciously) being lumped in with the unconditional. Tbh I'm still trying to put my finger on the best way to articulate what my actual concern is on that last one. So anyway, I'm not sure whether you, or anyone for that matter is actually following all that. I'm just trying to organise a rough model, to set the stage and begin to be able to formulate the conceptions, in order to be able to have a meaningful conversation about the relationship between thought and perception, and perhaps some other stuff that ties in. Maybe that’s all too much word salad for you. Your seasoned fish analogy is fine enough, but it's a fairly involved topic. |
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Post by ouroboros on Oct 25, 2022 11:56:21 GMT -5
I'm talking about unconditional love (Love) versus conditional love (love), I assume you got that. And I'm suggesting that in ATA-T, any love you feel for your partner above and beyond that which you would feel for the stranger you meet on the street is open to question because conditional love is associated with thought. Oh, well, I wasn't commenting on your dialog with sree about ATA-T, I was just ribbing you over expressing a psuedo-pardoxical statement. Ah okay yes. I must admit God did give me a bit of a dilemma there!  |
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Post by ouroboros on Oct 25, 2022 12:00:40 GMT -5
Oh, well, I wasn't commenting on your dialog with sree about ATA-T, I was just ribbing you over expressing a psuedo-pardoxical statement. I had read it as taking off a layer (i.e., of possession/duality) and expressing Isness in an ever-so-slightly (and cleverly) different variation. There is a bit of an issue when we try to frame things in terms of a distinction between what is and isn't to be considered divine. Anyway, I've neatly sidestepped that now by framing it in terms of conditional and unconditional.  |
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Post by sree on Oct 25, 2022 14:41:18 GMT -5
Good, down-to-earth stuff, ZZ. I'd like to see more of what's under your hood. Not much to see under the hood. Like I've said before. I'm a student of the game of chess, not a very talented one so I trade down in the middle game to keep things simple. Pretty much how I live. Take what life offers, ignore the rest. Drama is interesting, but only at arm's length. Three things I do to keep my sanity and because I have faith in the sages like RM, Niz, JC and ZD. I meditate, breath focus. I do ATA or mindfulness and some sort of self-enquiry. It's really an internal debate about whether the individual "I" exists. The outcome varies on the day, lately I've been leaning toward "yes." Based on this argument: if you look in the mirror, there you are. But who is perceiving the image in the mirror? But if I choose to move my arm, the image in the mirror moves as well. But where is the I that moves the arm? But if I cut off the head, the arm doesn't move so the I must be in the head. That last one kind of settles it for now. It might change tomorrow.
There are four things I do to stay healthy: exercise ( weight training, tennis, and boxing -- heavy bag). Yoga ( hatha). Tai Chi ( yang style, every night) and wim hof stuff ( really works). Other than that my life revolves around my four birds and three dogs. I walk my dogs four times a day and play with them twice, every couple of hours. If I'm not playing with the dogs I'm messing with the birds, playing, cutting up fruit, cleaning cages, etc. Life just carries me along. I mostly kick back and have fun. Fetch wood, carry water. For entertainment, I come here and hang with sree, sdp, Laffy, ouro, zd, farmboy, satch, gopal, lol, reeforoni, rk, zin, Sharon, you and a few others. Youtube pranks and ST are on equal footing. Of course, I share all this with my beautiful wife. It doesn't get much better. Except when there's a hurricane. Not much I can about that except vote, which I do. Oclassically life throws me a curve ball. Sometimes I hit it and sometimes I whiff. But mom always told me to get back in there no matter what. I do. I'm certainly not free or enlightened. Hence the curve ball whiffing. This is the way to do spiritual inquiry. Keep it simple and direct. Even a child can do this, and I did when I was 8. I got scared when I looked into my eyes and stopped right there. I was looking at nothing. A couple of years later, a duck swam up to me at the water’s edge thinking that I would throw him food. He looked at me from the side of its head where his eye was. I looked into its eye and got the same jolt of fear. Nothing was looking at nothing! I never tried looking at my parents that way. Mom was mom. I kept the hairdryer on high when relating to people; especially, my parents. The sound from the hairdryer shaped my perception of who and what I was: American, son of Joe Blow, human being on planet earth.
It won’t change for you tomorrow. You will be with deaf dogs till you die. You are on a leash like they are. Dogs cannot survive. They are domesticated. The consciousness that has become “domesticated” cannot turn feral. It is permanently deformed: like the bounded foot of a woman in traditional China.
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Post by sree on Oct 25, 2022 18:36:56 GMT -5
What I have gotten is your presentation of two kinds of love. One is conditioned and the other is not.
I am avoiding word salads and will use everyday terms that everyone can understand.
Let's consider what I am about to cook for dinner: fish. It is unseasoned fresh from the store. I am going to sprinkle some salt, sugar, and pepper on it. Once I have done that, the fish becomes seasoned. Unseasoned fish and seasoned fish. Can I use this analogy?
Okay, (and to borrow heavily from a member who has moved on) … Conditional love is the relatively shallow love that we put conditions on and as such tends to be primarily based on the fulfilment of needs. Conditional love is a personal love, often based on an idealised image of another and certain (perhaps largely unconscious) expectations which have to be met. On some level it might be acknowledged that there has to be some measure of compromise in the relationship, but also a degree of compatibility. Therefore, conditional love is often largely characterised by what the other is doing for us. Conditional love is associated with thoughts and emotional feelings and temporary highs and lows and as such often begins quite intensely and then tails off. It's pretty default stuff, and probably fair to say is the basis for most [consensus trance] relationships. I assume most will at least have a reference for this sort of situation. Conversely, unconditional love (or Love) is that which we do not put conditions on, but really it is more fundamental that that. Unconditional love is impersonal and can be envisaged as a fundamental facet of our very nature, the substratum of our collective being. In fact, Being/Peace/Love can be viewed as facets of the same stateless state. Really Love is absent conditions that would define it. Unconditional love is prior to thought and not merely a 'feeling' in the conventional sense, although it has to be said that it is felt experientially. Or rather realised. That is to say, like TPTPAU, it becomes more prevalent in the absence of that which obscures it. If we get out of our own way, Love 'moves through us'. Flows through us. Unlike conditional love, Love can't be held onto or given, and isn't dependent on an idealised image or the fulfilment of needs, but rather is devoid of judgment and expectation. Unconditional love is exquisite. Unfortunately, few will have reference for it. To summarise, whereas conditional love tends to be predominantly superficial, unconditional love is something more fundamental and innate, and as laffy rightly pointed out, conditional love is only ever a shadow of unconditional love.
Just to recap, we had been talking about the extent to which thought and perception go hand in hand, right. Both Tenka and yourself seem to take the view that they are fundamentally inseparable. Other posters sometimes appear to take the opposite stance, i.e. to give the impression that the full range of experientiality is available absent thought. I perceive myself to be somewhere in the middle and that's what I've been attempting to outline with both my, 'pre-thought tree thwacking' scenario: designed to demonstrate that sensory perception is available absent thought. Along with my query about whether ones experience of their partner in a state of ATA-T could be only Love, and not love: designed to question to what extent the 'thought-associated conventional' may still be (unconsciously) being lumped in with the unconditional. Tbh I'm still trying to put my finger on the best way to articulate what my actual concern is on that last one. So anyway, I'm not sure whether you, or anyone for that matter is actually following all that. I'm just trying to organise a rough model, to set the stage and begin to be able to formulate the conceptions, in order to be able to have a meaningful conversation about the relationship between thought and perception, and perhaps some other stuff that ties in. Maybe that’s all too much word salad for you. Your seasoned fish analogy is fine enough, but it's a fairly involved topic. You are doing fine. I understand you perfectly. Perceiving yourself somewhere in the middle puts you in the safe spot of an observer, a non-committed inquirer, someone that cannot be targeted for a head shot.
A spiritual forum can be an insane asylum where inmates are committed to their hallucinations which they regard as fundamental existential truths. Are you sure your are "in the middle"?
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Post by laughter on Oct 26, 2022 5:34:16 GMT -5
Oh, well, I wasn't commenting on your dialog with sree about ATA-T, I was just ribbing you over expressing a psuedo-pardoxical statement. I had read it as taking off a layer (i.e., of possession/duality) and expressing Isness in an ever-so-slightly (and cleverly) different variation. I think you might mean what 'bouros had to say about ATA-T and "Love/love"? How to describe the instant of THIS! ..  Passion's hurricane halted in the sublime, eye Sometime in this past year it dawned on me that re-heating coffee with the milk in it allows for a much hotter cup (because I like alot of milk) vs luke warm if you add it later. So I've come to understand why they make cappuccino machines .. but I'll never buy one 'cause I actually like the slimey little film that forms .. but that's not the point of this rambling mini-anecdote.  I use a saucepan - because the point is you don't want to reheat the whole pot unnecessarily, nor do you want to add milk to a peculator ..  .. So's anyways, for awhile I was measuring out the cups in the saucepan. Eventually though, I just stopped doing the measurement because it's too much of a pain in the ass, just poured in some coffee, then added some milk. Several months ago, I noticed - without looking for this - that I always get exactly one full cup out of the saucepan. ..  .. Now, I know that the machinists can explain this in terms of sub-conscious learning and "blah blah blah", but dude.  It's kinda' creepy. please send help! oh, that's just perfect!  bumbling into accidental zen  |
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Post by laughter on Oct 26, 2022 5:48:36 GMT -5
No, not at all, and you have this perceived relationship in your mind between myself and 'bouros all wrong. It's just when you have a measure of mutual respect then this sort of joking around is possible. Yes, but in that joke is a snicker of conspiracy in the absurd. Believe or not Mr. Ripley, not everything written on here is 'bout sree. |
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Post by laughter on Oct 26, 2022 5:50:25 GMT -5
Oh, well, I wasn't commenting on your dialog with sree about ATA-T, I was just ribbing you over expressing a psuedo-pardoxical statement. Ah okay yes. I must admit God did give me a bit of a dilemma there! Yeah, that guy, right? |
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Post by laughter on Oct 26, 2022 5:55:59 GMT -5
I had read it as taking off a layer (i.e., of possession/duality) and expressing Isness in an ever-so-slightly (and cleverly) different variation. There is a bit of an issue when we try to frame things in terms of a distinction between what is and isn't to be considered divine. Anyway, I've neatly sidestepped that now by framing it in terms of conditional and unconditional. "hierarchies" has too many syllables for a pithy poem but "tangled webs" is both cliched, leaves too much meaning on the floor, and misses the opportunity of the implication of "intertwining" suggested by " entangled". I'll blame the dilemma on, .. you now .. that guy. |
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Post by zazeniac on Oct 26, 2022 9:15:46 GMT -5
Jesus purportedly said a very interesting.thing. The two commandments. Love God completely (which to me means creation--don't know why, probably my conditioning, my predilection for Assissi) and to love your neighbor as yourself. From an ND perspective did he mean the individual self? If he meant the big "S" self then the first part is the same as the second.
Had an interesting discussion with a Christian who was trying to save me from hell. When I told me him my version of God wasn't a being, an object in time and space, but the creator and container of time and space. And that creation wasn't a one and done event, but a continuous affair, an ever present re-creation, kind of like keeping three balls in play while juggling. He was very smart and caught my drift. But it didn't sway him. He still wanted to keep me from hell. I think to sree this might be hell.
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Post by ouroboros on Oct 26, 2022 9:28:50 GMT -5
... So anyway, I'm not sure whether you, or anyone for that matter is actually following all that. I'm just trying to organise a rough model, to set the stage and begin to be able to formulate the conceptions, in order to be able to have a meaningful conversation about the relationship between thought and perception, and perhaps some other stuff that ties in. Maybe that’s all too much word salad for you. Your seasoned fish analogy is fine enough, but it's a fairly involved topic. You are doing fine. I understand you perfectly. Perceiving yourself somewhere in the middle puts you in the safe spot of an observer, a non-committed inquirer, someone that cannot be targeted for a head shot.
A spiritual forum can be an insane asylum where inmates are committed to their hallucinations which they regard as fundamental existential truths. Are you sure your are "in the middle"?
I don't know about in the middle but somewhere between those positions. From reading around, I generally see thought as being more prevalent in mundane experience than I think some folks realise or give credit for. But not quite as all-encompassing as others seem to see it. Although It's difficult to pinpoint where stuff transitions into other stuff. Where thought could be said to transition into sub-conscious mental processing for example. Where the spontaneous transitions into the habitual. We're dealing with quite abstract terms. What we can say is that thought is associated with certain kinds of experience, for example thought and emotion are inextricably intertwined, and go from there. (Which btw is an interesting statement in itself if you saw some of the mood swings of my cat!) I don't believe the stances I take here are dictated by fear as you imply, but it so happens that the best quality perspectives tend to be the most balanced, so it may come across like that. I am a libra so it may be my nature to some extent. I have no problem committing to stuff I'm sure about. Although there's not much of that to be fair. |
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Post by sree on Oct 26, 2022 14:01:17 GMT -5
You are doing fine. I understand you perfectly. Perceiving yourself somewhere in the middle puts you in the safe spot of an observer, a non-committed inquirer, someone that cannot be targeted for a head shot.
A spiritual forum can be an insane asylum where inmates are committed to their hallucinations which they regard as fundamental existential truths. Are you sure your are "in the middle"?
From reading around, I generally see thought as being more prevalent in mundane experience than I think some folks realise or give credit for. But not quite as all-encompassing as others seem to see it. Although It's difficult to pinpoint where stuff transitions into other stuff. Where thought could be said to transition into sub-conscious mental processing for example. Where the spontaneous transitions into the habitual. We're dealing with quite abstract terms. What we can say is that thought is associated with certain kinds of experience, for example thought and emotion are inextricably intertwined, and go from there. (Which btw is an interesting statement in itself if you saw some of the mood swings of my cat!) I don't believe the stances I take here are dictated by fear as you imply, but it so happens that the best quality perspectives tend to be the most balanced, so it may come across like that. I am a libra so it may be my nature to some extent. I have no problem committing to stuff I'm sure about. Although there's not much of that to be fair. Ok, then lets find out your exact coordinates by triangulation using the planets in the Heaven of delusion. 1. Zero in on me first. I am grounded on terra firma (aka planet earth) where thought is all-encompassing. 2. Since he is my opposite, where would you fix Reefs position? 3. Then, we have the scientist, zendancer. This is the guy whom everyone here swears by? 4. Let's pick one more well-defined heavenly body: stardust. The rest of the folks here are just floating about like space trash and asteroids.
Using those four reference points above as your landmarks, can you tell where you are between those two positions: insanity and reality?
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Post by someNOTHING! on Oct 29, 2022 9:10:39 GMT -5
I had read it as taking off a layer (i.e., of possession/duality) and expressing Isness in an ever-so-slightly (and cleverly) different variation. There is a bit of an issue when we try to frame things in terms of a distinction between what is and isn't to be considered divine. Anyway, I've neatly sidestepped that now by framing it in terms of conditional and unconditional. Divine/conditional/unconditional are thought-derived labels. So, can what's HERE, prior to thought, be sidestepped?  |
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