The experience of awareness
I’d like to talk about the experience of awareness. What it feels like from the inside. In particular what it feels like to become aware. This is probably the one philosophical/spiritual phenomenon I’ve thought the most about. I think that’s because I was deeply unaware of my feelings and internal experience when I was a teenager and I’ve been struggling for 50 years to come to terms with that.
I’d like to make a distinction here between awareness and consciousness. I’m not sure that distinction is legitimate lexicographically, but in terms of how it feels on the inside, they seem different to me. For the purpose of this discussion, by consciousness I mean the capacity for putting experiences into words. Awareness, on the other hand, is pre-verbal. It’s certainly true for me that consciousness and awareness sometimes happen at the same time. Sometimes I’m not even aware I’m aware of something until I talk about it with myself. On the other hand, I’ve had many experiences of awareness without words or concepts. I don’t want to argue about the distinction I’m making. Again, I want to talk about actual experiences.
In what ways am I aware – intellectually, emotionally, physically, perceptually, spiritually. What else?
I’m probably the most aware intellectually. I think that’s both because of my natural capacity and inclination and the fact I’ve been an engineer for 30 years. I have visual images of how the things I know and understand fit together. I can see the universe – everything, stars and electrons, love, god, macaroni and cheese, my brothers - as a cloud. When I am putting ideas together to describe what I know or make an argument, I am very aware that I am putting together a story and I see a curve, a narrative arc, that shows the sequence of facts, ideas, and conclusions I am using to make my case.
When I was a teenager, I was almost completely unaware of what I felt emotionally. Worse, it didn’t seem like I felt anything. I felt inauthentic in a fundamental way. Numb. Frozen. It made it incredibly difficult to have healthy relationships with others – family, friends, lovers. Now, I spend much of my attention on what is going on inside me. I often find myself stopping what I’m doing or thinking to figure out what I feel about something. Given where I’ve come from, it’s an incredibly freeing experience. It’s so much fun.
I could go on – but I don’t like long original posts. I have more to say, but for now I’d like to hear what others have experienced.
I’d like to make a distinction here between awareness and consciousness. I’m not sure that distinction is legitimate lexicographically, but in terms of how it feels on the inside, they seem different to me. For the purpose of this discussion, by consciousness I mean the capacity for putting experiences into words. Awareness, on the other hand, is pre-verbal. It’s certainly true for me that consciousness and awareness sometimes happen at the same time. Sometimes I’m not even aware I’m aware of something until I talk about it with myself. On the other hand, I’ve had many experiences of awareness without words or concepts. I don’t want to argue about the distinction I’m making. Again, I want to talk about actual experiences.
In what ways am I aware – intellectually, emotionally, physically, perceptually, spiritually. What else?
I’m probably the most aware intellectually. I think that’s both because of my natural capacity and inclination and the fact I’ve been an engineer for 30 years. I have visual images of how the things I know and understand fit together. I can see the universe – everything, stars and electrons, love, god, macaroni and cheese, my brothers - as a cloud. When I am putting ideas together to describe what I know or make an argument, I am very aware that I am putting together a story and I see a curve, a narrative arc, that shows the sequence of facts, ideas, and conclusions I am using to make my case.
When I was a teenager, I was almost completely unaware of what I felt emotionally. Worse, it didn’t seem like I felt anything. I felt inauthentic in a fundamental way. Numb. Frozen. It made it incredibly difficult to have healthy relationships with others – family, friends, lovers. Now, I spend much of my attention on what is going on inside me. I often find myself stopping what I’m doing or thinking to figure out what I feel about something. Given where I’ve come from, it’s an incredibly freeing experience. It’s so much fun.
I could go on – but I don’t like long original posts. I have more to say, but for now I’d like to hear what others have experienced.
Comments (150)
Quoting T Clark
Yes, I agree. At times it is an exhilarating experience to read phenomenology and come across a perfect description of an experience that was previously clouded and ambiguous.
Isn't what you call awareness of the "there is" really a lack of awareness of anything? No, I don't think that's right. It is possible to be aware of the unspoken wholeness, but I don't think people generally are. Certainly not most of the time and often never. I can be, sometimes, but not for long.
Isn't the lack of awareness of anything just unconsciousness?
By "unconsciousness" do you mean knocked over the head unconsciousness as opposed to a lack of personal reflection? If the first, then no. I think some animals are probably aware - they direct their attention at important aspects of the world. But animals are not generally conscious in the way we usually think about it. If the second, then yes, lack of awareness is unconsciousness as those words are most often used. As I discussed in my post, I am using them somewhat differently here.
I think that I was too aware of my emotional state as a child and teen, or rather that I felt things to strongly, and this resulted in anxiety problems in later life. I’ve had to work at unraveling the emotional tints in perception that were created in early development. That’s been liberating but I can’t say it’s been fun. Perception without those tints is enjoyable, as is meditative experiences and mindfulness.
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I know that “awareness” and “consciousness” are often used interchangeably, and that different people use them differently from how other people use them.
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Nisargatta’s meanings for those words was similar to what you said. It seems to me that he meant “consciousness” to be about concepts, where “awareness” is general.
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Maybe it’s convenient to give “consciousness” its conventional meaning of “waking consciousness”.
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So then there isn’t consciousness in deep sleep, but some say that there’s awareness. Well, there must be, at the periphery of deep-sleep. Difficult to say unless there’s memory of that state. Some say that there sometimes is, at least at its periphery.
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A subjective meaning for “awareness” is more difficult, because it’s so basic to us. Maybe it can’t even be defined or described, for that reason.
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Conditioning by others (parents, culture, teachers, other kids). The difference now is that you've had time to overcome the conditioning. Also, we're born dependent on parents, regarding the matter of how things are, sand what life is about. ...and that's often thoroughly destructive to a person's life..
I don't know the person who I was, as a teenager or before. I know what some of the feelings were, and notions of what was important. But I have no idea how I arrived at those notions of what's important. Conditioning, I'd guess, at the emotional level, starting early in pre-verbal age.
Michael Ossipoff
If it's not prying and you think it might be relevant, can you describe the emotional tints.
I'm not sure I'm talking about the same thing you are - I have always felt cut off from the person I was before maybe 15 or 16 years old. I remember disconnected things that happened, but not how my life fit together and not much about my internal life. As I have become more self-aware, I find that my connection to that boy is becoming stronger - he feels more like me.
I never pondered this subject till I came across the book, "The Power of Now", by Eckhart Tolle. My life has never been the same after reading the first four pages of that book. Allow me to describe, briefly, a couple of terms, before I get to my experiences.
Eckhart defines consciousness as "thoughtless awareness". In other words, it's perception prior to the first thought about what you are perceiving. If you think of consciousness as a blank canvas, all your thoughts and feelings are colors and shapes drawn on that canvas. Pure consciousness is stillness, it is tranquility, it is peace.
That said, my own life, like most others, is dominated by thinking (98% of it useless/repetitive, like in almost all humans), but I welcome brief gaps in that thinking whenever they occur. For instance, let's say I'm out on the porch in the morning with my hot chocolate, and a blue jay lands on a nearby branch, there is a brief moment of absolute stillness ... no thoughts, no ideas, no judgments, just perception. And, that is very refreshing and peaceful, given how much thought dominates human existence.
People who meditate are chasing this gap in thinking, with the goal being stillness and peace. But, I think that it's the practice of meditation itself that gets in the way of that goal, because the pursuit of something creates thoughts about it, which doesn't help when what you are trying to do is stop thinking. Eckhart says, "You cannot cause it to happen, but you can allow it to happen" (referring to thoughtless awareness)
It sounds like the same phenomenon. Disconnected things happened--disconnected for lack of any notion of the principle or purpose behind one's life. It never occurs to a small kid (or even a teenager, in my case) to sit down and say, "Wait a minute! What's going on here? What's my purpose and priorities for this life?" I acted on my already-acquired priorities about what was important,but there was no understanding about, or connection with, or even awareness of, the matter of what it was really about. That sounds like what you said about how a person's life fits togeteher, and internal life.
In that regard, as a kid, I was more like the non-human animals. I guess that's natural, and it makes kids particularly vulnerable to conditioning and bullying by parents and culture.
Part of the value of getting older is an opportunity to maybe understand something about oneself as a kid, and what happened then, and how & why. I can't understand myself at those earlier ages, how I arrived at my priorities then, because I was a different person then. But I can deduce some things about the kid and what happened, but more in an objective way, something like when a scientist tries to explain an animal's behavior..
Michael Ossipoff
What you are calling "consciousness" I have been calling "awareness" and vise versa, which is fine. I don't care about the terminology much. It's the experience I want to get at. It's that "prior to the first thought" experience.
Quoting Aurora
I have friends who meditate and they would disagree with you vigorously. I know them well enough to see they have gotten something of great - life changing - value out of meditation. Personally, my experience is more like yours. When I try to meditate, all I can do is think that I'm not supposed to think. Trying not to try seems to be one of the ironies of the Eastern approach to philosophy. I believe it can work, but I have never had the discipline to make it work for me. Seems to me that is a flaw in my ability to surrender to what meditation has to offer rather than a flaw in the method.
It's sad, or maybe funny, that it's taken me 50 years to get to the point where I can sit in the same room with that 15 year old boy.
Tolle's description of that problem was excellent, and a wake-up call. ...how people's internal conceptual narrative about description, evaluation, & classification--and the related or resulting perpetual postponement of satisfaction (the present is just something to get through, for something better later)--displaces actual genuine experience.
Quoting Aurora
That was how it felt to me, and so I never could get anywhere with meditation. But I never really made a full project and practice of it.
Michael Ossipoff
Well that's one good reason why I'm glad to have lived as long as I have. For whatever reason(s), a kid just doesn't doesn't have that capability of critically-understanding his life. Later we benefit from learning-experience, and getting farther from the early conditioning.
And it's definitely important and helpful to have some understanding now, about what happened and how. ...even though of course it's too late for it to help the kid of that earlier time. Too soon old, too late smart.
Michael Ossipoff
That is very well put :) "perpetual postponement of satisfaction". English is a beautiful language, isn't it ? At least it was, till the internet came along and began contaminating it with pseudo-verbs like "Google" and "friend" ("friend me on Facebook").
Glad to know that someone else here has read Tolle :)
And yes, it is counter-intuitive, as is a lot of spirituality, but the real meditation is in the present moment and nowhere else. When you put aside a specific 10 minutes for it, you are already lost because you are no longer in the present ... you are chasing something in the future, and using the present as a means to an end, as you mentioned.
I doubt that's how the Buddha saw it.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one :) The moment something is a "method", it is already an obstacle to awareness/presence.
Now, there are certainly ways (physiological/neurological) to reduce mental noise. Why do people drink or take drugs ? What is, ultimately, the "high" about ? It is largely about the lack of those pesky thoughts that dominate our existence. But, these are crutches at best, in my opinion. Meditation is one of them.
I will copy here what I wrote in my response to Michael Ossipoff ...
"It is counter-intuitive, as is a lot of spirituality, but the real meditation is in the present moment and nowhere else. When you put aside a specific 10 minutes for it, you are already lost because you are no longer in the present ... you are chasing something in the future, and using the present as a means to an end."
It's my understanding that, if I reach enlightenment just 10 seconds before I die, I win.
I can't speak for the Buddha; only for myself :) I don't know what he experienced, but I will say this with almost absolute certainty ... if someone comes to you and tells you that, from 2:00 pm to 2:10 pm everyday, he/she has the exact same experience, and that that experience never changes from day to day, that no thoughts ever occur, then, what you are being told is boldfaced lies.
Interesting OP. Speaking from psychological science, what you are noting - in my view - is that the ability to introspect on "the contents of the mind" is a learnt and linguistically-structured skill.
So first up, introspection is not some hardwired biological brain capacity - intrinsic to "being conscious". It is very much a learnt skill that we pick up as part of our cultural upbringing and made possible because self-directed speech does allow us to focus our attention and create a narrative story of "what is going on inside".
So it is therefore quite easy to miss stuff in our own heads if we haven't formed the right conceptual structure to notice it. We can be like infants who still find the world a buzzing confusion, or remote tribesmen transported to a big city, who don't quite yet have the eyes to make sense of what they see (any more than a big city person would be able to make proper coherent sense of a tropical forest if dropped straight into it).
We have to learn what to expect when we introspect to actually even begin to "see it". This could easily be something we haven't learnt to do even as teenagers. And then our ideas about what we should find inside are so culturally dependent that we are only going to see what our cultures kind of teach us to see.
Take how dreams were widely thought to happen only in black and white back in the 1950s. Seems ridiculous that this was an academic belief.
Yet I thought that dreams were only visual, so was surprised that once I started asking the question and paying attention, I found there were smells and tastes as well.
Likewise, I believe that there was of course motion in dream images. Yet on closer examination, I realised that there is only a swirling sense of flow or zoom. The image itself was a static single frame with a sense of motion added.
That made scientific sense when I thought about it. Motion and shape are processed separately in the visual cortex. But maybe without this other kind of cultural explanation, I might not have believed the evidence of my own eyes. I might have still reported actual moving imagery as my introspective state.
Generally, my introspective understanding of my own thinking and experiencing processes utterly changed after a few years of studying the neurology of the phenomenology. Once I had learnt the correct constructs, I could know what to expect to see and so actually start to see it accurately. It became a habit to not just think thoughts, but to be also able to catch how a pattern of thought came together.
Quoting T Clark
I was puzzled by this. When you say you see a cloud, do you mean visually see a jostle of images or do you mean something more kinesthetic and visuospatial, like having a sense of all these things "more or less within reach"? So they swim as possibilities on the periphery and can be brought sharply into view as required.
You might indeed be much more concretely visual than me. People do vary.
Quoting T Clark
Again, this sounds odd the way you describe it. It is hard to imagine not feeling things, even if the feelings are confused, inchoate, hard to pin down.
But neuroscience says it is quite possible as reportable emotion does depend on the strength of linkages between the frontal cortex and the limbic emotion centres. There could be biological reasons for a lack of access.
On the other hand, again there is a learning issue. Positive psychology does try to train people to notice the fine-grain detail of what they feel. It is a skill to be learnt, and one that thus involves the learning of a conceptual framing. People might not realise when they feel anxious or tense. Once they start looking, they can see how their body is responding and separate their feelings in that fashion.
So the general message is that all introspection is a learnt art. We have to have the concepts which tell us what to expect before it becomes easy and habitual to see our own internal world in a stably constructed way.
The flip side of that is that we mostly only get to learn the framing of our interior world that comes from our cultural backdrop. Our families and childhood relations can be as distorting as enlightening. Society teaches us the habits that best suit it.
We can broaden our view of what should be going on through art and literature. Books and films paint a picture of what "being a person" ought to be like. But even this is going to be more cultural than accurate.
Then we can start to introspect through the eyes of scientific knowledge. This should be the truest picture. However even psychological science is heavily socially influenced. It perpetuates many of the traditional cultural stereotypes itself. Phenomenology is rather fringe to its concerns. So there are only a few talented folk - like Oliver Sacks - who really get into it.
Another problem for psychological science is that we are all in fact neurologically varied. So there isn't in fact a one size fits all account.
For instance, both my daughters have synesthesia to different degrees. Words and numbers provoke sensations of colour. Neither properly realised it until we happened to be talking about it one evening when they were teenagers.
It is the kind of neuro distinction that society has no use for and so there is no cultural tip-off that warns people it might be a possibility. Whereas kids get tested for colour blindness.
Another interesting one is dyscalculia - a basic problem imagining the kind of visuospatial relations needed to be good with handling numbers or telling the time.
Society took a while to diagnose dyslexia as a widespread "problem". It came to the fore as a literate workforce became a universal educational need. Dyscalculia only started to get the same recognition in the 1990s. Until then, it was OK to just be a lazy maths hater. It was natural and socially quite normal to be bad at sums.
So society really does shape what we believe about what we should find "inside". It is the prime source of any conceptual structure. And it approaches introspection in its own often quite self-interested way.
Sure, but whatever enlightenment we arrive at is largely from the experience of living yogically, conscientiously, unharmingly, self-responsibly, peacefully and considerately to ourselves and others, and open to new experience. ...over some significant period of time.
Anyway, according to Eastern tradition, practically no one achieves Enlightenment--life-completion--in this lifetime. Once in life, we aren't done till we're done.
In any case, that same tradition says that life-completion will eventually be there for everyone, but almost certainly not by the end of this lifetime. I don't even know what it means or would be like. For now, and for the forseeable future, nearly all of us are thoroughly involved with life, due to wants, needs, subconscious predispositions & inclinations, etc.
I agree with the Buddhists and Vedantists about those matters, though it isn't provable.
Michael Ossipoff
I think the best approach to Buddhist meditation is that taught by S?t? Zen, one of the two main schools of Japanese Buddhism (the other being Rinzai). I won’t try and summarise the principles but I found the well-known book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Suzuki, a very effective book for teaching Zen meditation (zazen). The main point is to simply adopt the correct posture and do the practice, i.e. learn to sit on a zafu for some period of time and then direct the attention to the breathing. That’s it. The subtle point of S?t? teaching, derived from the founder of the school, is that ‘to practice is already to be Buddha’. So there is nothing to seek or to gain. This seems counter-intuitive but it is the essence of the teaching.
You expressed it much better and with much more knowledge and insight than I did, but what you are saying is similar to what I was trying to get across.
Isn’t not practicing a method a method? :s
Essentially any inexplicable and maladaptive feelings, usually bad of course, otherwise they wouldn’t be a problem.
The reason I asked is that I sometimes attribute colors or other characteristics to feelings, ideas, or other mental constructs. I was just wondering if you were talking about something similar.
Does it make me New Age if I pick and choose ideas and concepts from different traditions without buying the whole package? As you might guess, I am far from enlightenment, but I do think it is an experience that I can imagine and might be able to achieve. On the other hand, I don't believe we get more than one lifetime to get where we're going.
I love reading your stuff. You always put so much thought into what you write that it's a bit overwhelming to respond.
Quoting apokrisis
So, I've talked about consciousness and awareness. Is introspection something different? How is it different? If I remember correctly from other threads, you do think that consciousness is hardwired.
Quoting apokrisis
Isn't the essence of self-awareness an ability to see things we have not been taught to see? Maybe I don't mean "self-awareness." Maybe I mean "enlightenment." Otherwise, how do we get beyond our personal and cultural illusions?
Quoting apokrisis
I'm standing in a dark room. In front of me, maybe on a stage, is a cloud that fills the whole front of the room. It's lit from within. I don't see any specific details of what makes up the world, but I can feel that they're there. Although everything is there, things I am more aware of are in better focus. Things I'm less aware of are hidden in the haze. When I hear a new idea of any kind, I get a feeling of whether or not that makes sense to me. When I do that, I imagine taking that new idea into the room with the cloud and holding it up against it to see if it fits. If it doesn't fit, I don't believe it. If it does fit, I get that feeling that it has the ring of truth.
Quoting apokrisis
I was talking to a friend of mine of about the same age as me - 65. She told me she had just realized she is one of those people who have no mind's eye. It is very difficult for her to see images of even things and people she knows very well. Once she became aware, she realized how she had had to struggle to compensate for this her entire life without even knowing about it.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, it is odd. Actually, it's terrible, horrifying. Of course there were feelings, I was just not aware of them. Did you ever go to the bathroom in a public toilet and have trouble peeing because others were around? Imagine if you felt that same panic every time you were with other people and might have to provide an appropriate emotional response.
Quoting apokrisis
I come back to what I asked before - isn't it possible, even if only for Buddha, to go beyond that cultural conceptual structure.
Again - thanks for the great response.
No, what I meant is experiencing a new place or thing and for no apparent reason getting a bad or generally anxious feeling about it. That sort of thing.
To quote Nike, 'just do it'. Literally. The way to practice, is to practice. There are plenty of teaching centres around nowadays, unlike when you and I were teens.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, as I've said before, a key plank in diverse philosophical traditions, is that of 'the unconditioned'. That really is understood to be independent of social conditioning and social structures as a matter of definition - social mores being one form of conditioning.[sup]1[/sup] This understanding is explicit in Indian traditions as they have a long history of renunciation. Those who dwell 'in the forest' are understood to be outside social structures; this is what 'the forest' represents in that cultural context.
In any case, preliminaries aside, Buddhist philosophy and meditation is aimed at reaching or realising 'the unconditioned'. If you search on that term in the early Buddhist texts, you will find numerous passages aimed at elucidating the nature of the unconditioned, what it is, where and how to find it (e.g. here). It goes without saying, it's a very elusive idea, but one way of conceptualising it, is that it represents the unconditioned aspect of awareness. This is why, for instance, there are teachings in Buddhist meditation on 'bare awareness', through which the student is trained to simply notice the habitual reactions and thought-formations that arise more or less automatically in the mind. That act of noticing is 'seeing how things truly are', which is the basic practice of liberating insight, insofar as to directly how reactive emotions occur is to lessen their hold.
That kind of introspective discipline is scientific in one sense, in that it is repeatable and that there are well understood learning pathways to higher degrees of insight; that has been the subject of some analytical research into insight meditation and it's affects on personality and behaviour, for example at the Oxford Mindfulness Centre among many others.
But the point I want to make is that we're not socially conditioned all the way down; we're the artefacts of something more than simply human culture.
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1. Having said that, there is a controversy around this point in academic comparative religion, with one side arguing that there are no socially-unmediated experiences, and that mystical experiences always reflect the culture in which they're situated, vs the universalists, who say that there is a common core (see Common Core Thesis; google Katz-Forman debate for more details.
Well, I would describe it as the difference between biological consciousness and culturally produced self-consciousness.
So animals are certainly aware of the world in a direct or "extrospective" fashion. They are wordlessly plugged into the here and now in terms of how they are feeling, thinking and reacting.
Then humans have a speech-structured mind. Language is a machinery that allows us to step back and comment on the further fact that we are "selves" doing all these things. Language creates a distance from just the doing and so makes the doing reportable, controllable, memorable, interpretable.
The real mystery of consciousness is the biological one - why brain activity would feel like something. Then self-consciousness is just a linguistic trick. Language allows us to develop the habit of turning our attention inwards on the flow of action, seeing it all as something happening to a self. Then responding to that meta-view in terms of thoughts, feelings and actions.
Quoting T Clark
Talk about enlightenment or higher states or whatever would be more cultural framing. Every religion - as a cultural practice - has to invent a suitable view of what it might mean to have a certain kind of mind. And then that is what we would learn in that culture. It would become the social script to which we would try to live up to.
So if you are Catholic, you will look inside and see your beastly self in conflict with your purer spirit. You will be trying hard to feel guilt at the right things. You will be looking for evidence of sinful desires. Your introspecting may become very focused on a particular social role it has to play.
And just the same if you are brought up in a completely different culture - like say Buddhism - where a different model of your internal workings will become the lens through which you see yourself.
And yet again if you are a modern neoliberal aetheist, or a wet PoMO liberal.
All cultures promote some model of how your mind ought to be inside. You learn those concepts and apply them in a way to gain some proper control over this introspecting "self".
Quoting T Clark
Yeah, that does sound interestingly different from me. There is the same sense of a peripheral feel. But I guess I conceptualise it more in terms of the neuroscientific models I know. So I am quite aware of switching between a focused goal-pursuing left brain attentional state and an open vigilant right brain one. There is a different feeling when you are still searching for the connecting elements versus when you are working through the details of a path that you already expect to fit together.
So maybe you are talking about the same general thing, but conceptualising it in metaphors, like a room with a glowing cloud before you. My conceptualising doesn't have that habit of imagery, but I do conceptualise it in terms of a familiar brain process.
Quoting T Clark
Yep. It seems like a Bell curve distribution. So 10% of people are highly visual, 10% are surprisingly lacking in such imagery.
Two points. The difference is easy to explain as it relates to how far down the visual hierarchy you can push an idea so that it becomes fleshed out in concrete detail. The high level impression of a giraffe would be highly abstract - hazy. But if we focus for half a second, we can generate some particular giraffe experience that is "painted" across the primary visual cortex. Although people vary in how easy they can do that.
Then also, the visual pathways are strongly divided into separate object recognition and spatial relations pathways. So you can be highly visual in terms of one and not the other. One path would generate the concrete pictures of actual scenes. The other would generate a "concrete" sense of some set of objectless spatial relations or transformations. So if you are good as an engineer, its important to flip shapes around in your mind and really feel how the spaces fit together, or put different forces on each other.
Quoting T Clark
So it sounds like you just didn't have the "right" training in how to conceptualise that part of your experience.
If you are good at compartmentalising your thoughts - another attentional skill - then it is easy to make that kind of disconnect a habit.
One of the things you have to teach young kids is to recognise their emotions. They are quite confused until they have learnt some concepts that explain their rapidly changing shifts in state. After that, they can start to regulate and feel in more socially accepted ways.
If they see someone get hurt, what should the feel? Physiologically they may feel a natural aversion, an anxiety, an urge to move away or even laugh. We want to teach them instead to feel a suitable empathy. Their fluttering nerves and shock can be reframed as being natural to wanting to help rather than being natural to wanting to flee.
Arousal is just arousal. Then we learn to frame it in a socially correct fashion.
Quoting T Clark
Well my answer is only going to be that Buddhism is just another form of social mind-control. It is a model of how to be a self that is promoted within a certain culture as it is pro-social for that culture. It serves that society's organisational interests.
But then I'm also arguing that we are only ever creatures of our cultures. So it is not a bad thing in itself that we are culturally programmed to have a particular view of our "selves".
And some cultures of "self" may be better than others in long-run evolutionary terms.
So there is no going beyond some kind of conceptual structure. There isn't any truth to be found in being a human that isn't somehow a reflection of a culture.
Yet we certainly these days can make some choices about the cultural framings we allow ourselves to be most influenced by.
Yep. But I question the view by which being apart from society is in any way an improvement on the human condition.
If your culture is somehow bad or toxic, then you might want to escape its constraints. But you would still need some new culture within which to flourish.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, I don't see this as a stepping up to anything, more a regression ... unless it is the unlearning of habits that allows for the learning of some new and more pro-social set of habits.
So as a social practice, I can see it may have merits. But as a theory of mind, it is quite wrong.
Quoting Wayfarer
Alternatively, human nature is fundamentally a social construct and so humanity is quite concerned with "taming the beast within". It wants to put a distance between its cultural self and its biological roots.
So philosophy - east or west - makes sense in this context. It is the next step in breeding a detachment from "the beast within". It makes us more social in being more rational and less emotionally driven.
Letting go of "yourself" and "the world" is only a cultural injunction to transcend whatever biology that society wishes didn't dominate your thinking so much. And once you have been trained to let go like that, you can start to fully participate in a calm, rational, linguistic culture where all actions become pro-socially reasonable.
So it is just another cultural game - and one actually designed to strengthen culture's hold on your thought patterns.
That’s what Freud says in ‘Civilsation and its Discontents’, but again, I see another dimension to human existence. But it’s certainly true that not everyone does. (Freud certainly didn’t.)
Do recall the account of the legendary meeting of Jung and Freud:
Freud’s ‘black tide of mud’ extended to anything he designated as religious or spiritual. It’s a major reason he and Jung fell out.
Are you aware of your experience, or experiencing being aware? Does it make a difference? If not, then I would say that it would be simpler to say that you are aware of being aware.
If I'm not mistaken, human nature according to the Eastern social construct doesn't contain a "beast within." Rather, the true nature of sentient beings is that of emptiness, according to Eastern philosophy, and it is social constructs like the concept of self that obscure this nature.
Quoting apokrisis
Generally speaking, religion is just another cultural game which binds groups in thought and purpose. Transcendence, which may or may not be achieved via a religious practice, isn't about transcending biology. It's about transcending the conceptual construct of self.
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What does that even mean - thinking that you are more than what you are - a delusion of grandeur?
In my experience, being aware is not the same thing as being aware of being aware.
Hi Apokrisis, I always enjoy reading your posts. Do you have any literature for this claim?
I respectfully, and completely, disagree :)
Language is only required, in my opinion, when something needs to be communicated to another person ... because, when two people communicate, without language or another communication protocol, the two parties will not be able to agree on what is being said. This communication could be a sentence in Russian or just a smile or a kiss on the cheek.
However, if it is just you wanting to be aware of something, you don't need language at all. In fact, I would go so far as to say that language sometimes gets in the way of understanding something. When you label something as "tree" or "rock" or "elephant", you convince yourself that now, you understand whatever you are labeling. Do you mean to tell me that there is nothing more to a tree than the English word "tree" or the German word "Baum" ?
Labeling (i.e. language), often, is a reflection of our laziness to really understand something. It is necessary, but not always sufficient.
Yeah, you're right that the beast within is the Western view. If we are talking Buddhism in particular, that agrees with social constructionism in that it teaches that the self is an over-concrete illusion we hang on to.
So that part of the psychology I agree with. But where I disagree is then treating the social ground of this selfhood as also an illusion to be dissolved away.
My argument is that society and self form a complementary interaction. Each is busy producing the other. And together they make something more complexly developed.
It is natural and right that human existence is a balance of competitive and co-operative actions. There is nothing wrong about becoming individuated as a striving self, so long as there is then also the balance of the socially co-operative self. Whereas the Buddhist ambition would seem to be to dissolve both aspects of being human back into detached nothingness.
So for me, sentience is the delicate and complex balance - mastery over instability. Whereas the Buddhist view is that things that arise and become complexly individuated should return back to the undivided vagueness from whence they came.
Quoting praxis
Well the question would seem to be what functional role does some set of cultural beliefs play in the flourishing of that society?
The Western model of mind has evolved to produce people with a striving and competitive mindset. To be individuated is the highest state of development.
But Eastern cultures were appropriate for their time and place. A stoic collectivism gives a different social dynamic. It puts the emphasis on the compassion and co-operation.
Either way, what matters is putting human biology in its place and allowing a rationalising culture to be in control of things. Culture comes to encode the behaviour that works. And culture produces a model of the ideal self as the way to shape up those habits in an individual. We learn to be self-regulating according to a general social script.
Thanks. One slightly mad yet really excellent collection of phenomenological descriptions of dreaming is Andreas Mavromatis's Hypnagogia.
But try it yourself. Next time you catch a dream, ask yourself if anything about each "frame" was in fact moving.
There is always a sense of moving, panning or zooming. But it is like the kind of giddy feeling we get when getting off a roundabout and the world still swirls as an after-effect.
That wasn't my question. I wanted to know the difference between experiencing awareness and being aware of your experience.
And, how can you know that you are aware without being aware that you are aware? How do you know that you are aware? Your awareness (or your mental processes) are the focus of your awareness at the moment. What you are aware of at any moment is what your awareness if focused on in the moment, which could be your mother, music, or your mental processes.
What kind of knowledge do you acquire from experience as opposed to awareness?
You underestimate the effects/affects that language has and the different ways it's used.
The mode of engagement with an object characterised by intellectual variation of its sensible properties does not derive necessary sensible properties of the appropriate kind as the necessity is of a justificatory rather than perceptual character. It is imposed rather than implicated in the perceptual object.
And that completely blew me away. If Heidegger's method of thought could in some manner get around the problem - providing the right kind of entailment or suggestiveness in the description of phenomena to their fundamental constituents -, it was something worth studying. So I spent a year or so reading through Being and Time and secondary/tertiary literature, writing rough notes on the sections in the first part (no temporality). It helped a bit with the problem, as instead of focussing on particular objects or areas of study, it took (what was allegedly) the entire environment of a person and implicated a kind of hierarchy of concepts (say, tools->signs->language->propositional-as-structures, hermeneutic-as-structures with anxiety->my self as mine-> facticity->horizonal temporality->originary temporality for a rough discretisation of the book) which were holistically implicated in each other. In a certain sense, the broadness of scope allowed a big chunk of what mattered to stay near the concerns of the analysis (the obsession with 'thematisation' for those who know Heidegger).
So after studying Heidegger for a while I turned to Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, who apparently noticed that intersubjectivity and the body respectively appear in incredibly impoverished forms in Heidegger's analysis. It rang quite true, the Other in Heidegger is mostly a normative-linguistic structure that distracts us from our own lives, and the body is little more than the vessel for Dasein.
Levinas remained a pure phenomenologist, but implicated in his phenomenology is a kind of limiting process and the revealing of my limits that allows a place to be other (and be other than me). Merleau-Ponty's (early) methodology is far more radical however, as it studies perception as the body varies, using case studies from brain damage and amputees.
Hubert Dreyfus places the breakdown of everyday phenomena as a disclosive frontier for phenomenology; like, you're playing your guitar, a string breaks, for a second or two you're treating your guitar like an object that doesn't make much sense (oh shit, it broke), much different from the flow state of playing it. Merleau-Ponty does a similar thing with perception - what happens when the body varies, how can we speak of the sensation of the phantom-limb and the kick-in-the-nads in the same breath?
What Merleau-Ponty and Levinas showed, methodologically, was that phenomenology cannot just proceed from the every-day to thematise any (perceptually derived) concept and its ontological ground, we have to take a methodological breakaway to unusual circumstances of our being to study its structures comprehensively; and treat that heterogeneity with both intellectual and practical respect. There can be no privilege of 'internal' ontological inquiry over the 'external' ontical conditions that constrain it.
There’s a modern Western modification of Advaita Vedanta, called (by its critics) “Neo-Advaita”. Google will bring up a number of articles about it, by its critics.
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Buddhism, too, probably has modern Western versions.
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All versions, traditional and modern Western, place great emphasis on the goal of the final outcome, life-completion (also called Liberation or Enlightenment), the end of lives. Because of that emphasis, many Westerners want the end to arrive at the end of this life, instead of after lots of lifetimes.
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Additionally, of course reincarnation conflicts with Materialism, our culture’s dominant (but unsupportable) metaphysics.
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It seems to me that the emphasis on life-completion and the end-of-lives is unnecessary and premature. We’re all in life, and the end will just happen when it happens. Meanwhile, we all have things that we like in life.
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It’s said that transcendent experiences often are temporary, and don’t necessarily indicate life-completion.
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I can’t prove that there’s reincarnation. Little can be said about the end of this life that isn’t speculative.
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On that matter, I don’t suppose much can be said with assurance that wasn’t said in Hamlet’s Soliloquy.
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If there’s no reincarnation, then the endless sleep arrives as soon as this life ends …even for those who aren’t really feeling very restful, contented, quiet or peaceful. Maybe. As I said, what comes at death is speculative.
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It’s really rather amazing and surprising that this life started. We’re used to it by now, of course, but why and how did it start?
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Unless you believe Materialism’s brute-fact, and its unverifiable and unfalsifiable claim about the objective existence of this physical world and its things, if you don’t believe in a brute-fact, then maybe this life started for a reason. Well then, what if that reason remains at the end of this life?
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I’m just saying that endless sleep at the end of this life is far from certain, and shouldn’t be taken as the default presumption, since it’s a conclusion from the questionable metaphysics of Materialism. It’s one of several suggestions.
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The matter is speculative.
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Michael Ossipoff
Granted the language is a bit grandiose, but what it signifies is merely a subduing of the neural activity associated with the self-concept, or rather a particular brain state where a sense of self has diminished or is altogether absent.
It seems the negative side of developing a self-concept, and other concepts such as life, death, the future, etc., is that it tends to breed existential anxiety. Subduing the sense of self tends to relieve this anxiety, and may also facilitate other beneficial psychological and social developments.
That's what science has always sought to do - looking for the limit conditions (what you call unusual circumstances) of theories. Seeing farther than Newton's theory of gravity involved the limit case of non-euclidean geometry and so on.
It isn't what philosophy has always sought to do, though. The empirical character of phenomenology let it internalise that kind of dialogue between liminal phenomena and pre-developed theory.
What it seems like you're saying is that we need to think like lower animals which have no concept of their own death, or their future. How is thinking like lower animals transcendent?
The fact that we know we can die is knowledge that enables us to avoid death. It is the basis of all our medical knowledge in understanding how our bodies work and their relationship with the rest of the world. What you seem to be arguing is that we should try to attain a state of ignorance instead of knowledge.
Quoting T Clark
What does it feel like to become aware? For me, becoming aware of any aspect of myself usually takes place over an extended period of time. Often, the recognition that I am aware comes on suddenly, by surprise, fully formed. I have had one experience where I was actually aware of becoming aware as it happened.
Fifteen years ago I started to study Tai Chi. I'm a pretty stiff person. Historically, I haven't been very aware of what is going on in my body, although that has gotten better over the years. As I studied Tai Chi in class and practiced at home, I at first felt very clumsy and off-balance. I watched more experienced students and teachers who seemed much more graceful and in control than I was. They were clearly getting something I wasn't. The movements felt mechanical. I felt as if I were throwing my body around - as soon as I started a movement, it was out of my control. Like jumping from one (metaphorical) platform to another - in the middle of the move there was no control at all, sometimes I was lucky enough to land on the other platform in the right position to continue. Often not.
0ne day in my bedroom I was practicing the beginning move in my own stiff way. I remember feeling something, I call it a tickle, but that’s not what it was. It was something faint, I wasn’t sure if I could feel it at all. I didn’t know what it was. The only other similar experience I remember is when taking a hearing test. Sitting in an insulated room while they play sounds with different frequencies intensities. It starts with very soft beeps, which they increase in loudness until you can hear them and push a button. Many times just before I pushed the button, I felt something. It wasn’t a sound I could differentiate. I wasn’t sure it was anything at all. And then I heard the beep. Clearly, that tickle was a sound right at the edge of my hearing.
After I felt it a few times. I started paying attention. No words, no thoughts. Like unfocusing my eyes, but still looking, watching. Like looking at something in my peripheral vision. Looking back, I think that way of paying attention is the primary skill of awareness. I use it all the time now. Someone will ask me something about what I am thinking, feeling. I unfocus my mind and let the radar work. It’s funny, sometimes when I do this, my eyes move back and forth, like I’m looking for something. It is interesting to me that I often don’t know what I think or feel until I pause for a second.
Over time, the feelings became stronger, paying attention became more effective. At first, the awareness was of feelings in my abdomen and shoulders. That spread to other muscles. It also spread to other Tai Chi moves. Then to other movements that had nothing to do with Tai Chi. There is a feeling of sinking into myself, becoming more stable, balanced. After about five years I stopped doing Tai Chi. I’ve thought many times about going back and doing it again. Even now that feeling of lowering myself, become balanced is still there.
That all depends upon what one is becoming aware of, doesn't it?
The implication here is that we cannot derive the necessary properties of an object by talking about the properties of the object, because talking is justification not perception, and only properties of a perceptual character are appropriately called "necessary sensible properties".
Talking imposes our own thought and belief about an object upon the object... I guess we could say that. We could also say that talking about an object allows us to know things about it's elemental constitution that we could otherwise not become aware of via brute perception alone(absent language).
In my experience, the process of becoming aware and what it feels like to be aware are similar for all kinds of awareness. For me, that's the point of this whole thread.
Quoting T Clark
Becoming aware of something horrible makes one feel quite differently than becoming aware of something wonderful.
Right?
I have become aware that some of my behavior has been hurtful and self-serving to people I like. That made me feel bad, but it was important that I know it. I have become aware that someone I have known for years is a true friend. I don't have that many friends. It made me feel really good. Most of the things I am aware of are not emotionally charged. Whichever, the emotions may be different, but in my experience, the process and experience of the awareness itself is similar.
I'm not sure which of my comments this is responding to. As I see it, what I have been writing goes right to the heart of self-awareness. Please explain what you mean.
Quoting creativesoul
Is this what you were talking about? These are among the things I am talking about becoming aware of.
Poorly expressed on my part. Self-awareness it is then. That's the way it seemed.
But I'm not talking just about self-awareness, what's going on inside myself. I'm also talking about awareness of things going on out in the world. Like the example of the hearing test.
As I think about your comment, I think that, in a sense, all awareness is self-awareness.
Right. I was just answering the question about what becoming aware feels like. I took feels to mean emotional 'feelings'.
Don't think it would make much sense to say that all awareness is self awareness. It requires us, but's that's different. We become aware of things. Not every thing is us.
Lower animals don't have these concepts to transcend. Obviously, we can't eliminate these concepts, but we may be able to loosen their grip on us, and in so doing relieve the anxiety they may produce.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Animals seem to avoid death well enough. In fact, they normally strike a good balance with their environment, whereas we tend over manipulate our environment, to the point of the extinction of countless species, and perhaps our own in the near future.
To be clear, I was talking about a temporary meditative state. This isn't a condition that can be maintained in day to day life, assuming that were even desirable. Being mindful is something that could be practiced in normal life.
So it sounds like it's merely a way of deluding ourselves into forgetting ourselves for a time. What you seem to be calling transcending, I call deluding. Delusions are a means of alleviating stress associated with ideas that produce anxiety. They cover up reality with fancy ideas that make one feel good, but aren't objectively true. I really don't understand what it means to transcend our self, or our idea of self. It's just another form of religion, which itself is just another kind of delusion to make us feel better about our existence, but isn't necessarily true, or the way things really are.
Quoting praxis
Animals seem to avoid death, but death is not something that they are aware of to avoid. They are simply engaging in the instinctive behavior of flight when they are aware of a predator.
Other animals have devastated their environments too. Other animals have become extinct, long before humans arrived on the scene, at the hands of newly introduced predators or diseases into their environments. You need to acquire the context of natural selection over the eons to see that humans are really no different from other animals in this respect.
Being mindful is the same as being aware. What is it that you want to be aware of - truths or delusions?
The way things really are is individuated? In reality, my keyboard is really separate from the desk it sits on, and the desk separate from the floor, etc... That how reality really is?
I've thought a lot about the things you've written as part of this thread. I went back and reread your posts. I'm working on putting what you say together with what I experience to see if I can get a match. I'm going to put down my thoughts about things you have written in various posts. Some of them I have responded to before.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't have any argument about this. I don't think the Buddha's mind became like a feral child's. How can we know we are enlightened without a cultural context and conceptual structure?
Quoting apokrisis
I think it's more than that. The subconscious isn't just stuff we haven't learned or learned to see, it's also stuff we've hidden or whose signal is too weak for us to detect.
Quoting apokrisis
There have been some really interesting discussions on this forum about consciousness and awareness and the neurological basis for them. That's really changed the way I intellectually understand the phenomena, but it hasn't changed the experience for me. It's interesting that it has for you. I don't envy you, because my way of perceiving them is part of me. It fits me. On the other hand, it would be fun to be able to experience them both ways.
Quoting apokrisis
In another post on this thread, I wrote about what it feels like to become aware. What I wrote is consistent with what you say above, although I think it is seen from a different angle.
Quoting apokrisis
Oh, good. We've found something on which we can really disagree. I'm from science. It makes up a big part of my world view, so it obviously effects how I am aware of the world. The metaphorical cloud I wrote about previously is completely consistent with my scientific understanding of the world. Our disagreement relates to whether or not science has a privileged view of reality. I believe strongly that it does not. Science does not provide "the truest picture."
Quoting apokrisis
As I said, I don't disagree with this.
Quoting apokrisis
Looking at my own experience of awareness, I think there is something between the animal's "wordlessly plugged in" and the fact that healthy adult humans are selves. I'm not claiming that experience is not culturally mediated. I'm still thinking about that. I don't meditate in any disciplined or consistent way, but I have experienced the world without words or concepts - my metaphorical cloud is one example but certainly not the only one.
For better or worse, much of what I experience is fully immersed in words. I am a very verbal person. On the other hand, I can see people without words as a patchwork of my own feelings and images about their personalities, characters, and temperaments. Sort of like a smaller version of my universal cloud. I'm not talking about telepathy or anything supernatural. My feelings and images are sometimes, often, wrong. I'm not claiming special knowledge, just a particular way of seeing. The same is true of some other aspects of the world at certain times.
From comments you make in other posts on this thread, you seem to be suspicious of that way of looking at things. You characterize them as some sort of formless forgetting. That's not true at all.
Quoting apokrisis
As I said previously, not being aware is not just a matter of training or social conditioning. I can recognize what anger, shame, and fear feel like, but I sometimes get caught by surprise when I realize that I have been feeling that way without knowing it.
Quoting apokrisis
This is the thing you have written in this thread I have thought the most about. I'm not sure what to do with it yet. My first impulse is to disagree, put it all on your lack of imagination or empathy, but I'm not sure about that at all. I need to think more about it.
Thanks for giving me so much to think about. I may want to respond or re-respond to some of your other posts too.
(Eckhart Tolle says what I have to say far more eloquently, but ...)
It can be, but there is something to be said about religion in general, whether it's Buddhism, Christianity, or whatever.
All religions, at their absolute core, contain the same fundamental (and simple) truths that are universally applicable. For instance, the truth that all physical forms are impermanent - this holds true whether you're Buddhist or Christian.
However, over time, this core of wisdom at the heart of each religion has been repeatedly misinterpreted, added to, and consequently obscured, either by selfish people seeking to promote their own beliefs, or by those simply not able/willing to understand those core truths. In other words, noisy human minds were applied to those simple truths which then became what you, Apokrisis, described.
This is why there are many religions and many offshoots of each. They all started pretty much in the same place, and diverged over time, farther and farther away from the truths they intended to teach.
If you take away all the obscurity, you will find those few priceless pearls of wisdom at the heart of any religion. It's just that most people are unable to see them, because of the depth of the obscurity and because the so called "experts" are "teaching" and "preaching" all the wrong things about the religion.
Go to any church on a Sunday ... are they going to be talking about impermanence ? Or that life exists only in the present moment ? Or that all suffering can be tied to desire/fear ? No ! They're going to be talking about anything but those simple truths. They will "teach" anything but what really matters.
Religion, today, equals obscurity, and like you said, a form of mind-control. But, if one looks deeper, there is truth/wisdom to be discovered.
The beautiful irony is that one does not need to be "learned" to know those simple truths that each religion intends to teach. It's only because of that obscurity that we have "priests" and "ministers" who read chapter after chapter of obscurity and bullshit and pass it on to others who listen spellbound. The real truths don't require any reading or learning ... just the realization of one's consciousness.
Real spirituality/religion has nothing to do with weekly trips to a building or the reading of books or donations or rituals or ceremonies .. in fact, all of those are nothing more than a charade that gets in the way of the ultimate goal. All that's needed is a seeing beyond the obvious.
I think I'll let Christians tell me what their fundamental truths are. I'm pretty sure you're not qualified. From my perspective outside all recognized religions, I think what they have in common is two things - 1) a common (universal?) human experience of being part of something larger than oneself and 2) the human capacity and compulsion to tell stories.
Quoting Aurora
So, if I may be allowed the hyperbole, all people who don't share your view of the fundamental truths of the world are either selfish or stupid.
Quoting Aurora
They're going to be talking about God, strangely enough, and right and wrong, heaven, the four noble truths, and how to treat your neighbor, etc. Go figure.
Quoting Aurora
My wife is a smart person. She was raised Catholic. She rejects a lot of the things the church doctrine says, but she values the experience of fellowship with God. She takes that weekly trip to the building and participates in the rituals because it helps put her heart and mind in a place that is receptive to God's presence. I'm not Christian. I don't go to church, but I wouldn't have the nerve to tell someone they're wrong and that I'm the one who knows what they really should believe.
What's the ultimate goal?
To realize that you're a conscious being, given a temporary form to dwell in.
This may sound exceedingly simple or trivial or insignificant, but there is a vast depth to what can follow from this realization.
Sure, fine, but there's a difference between conceptual understanding and experience. Meditation or other forms of manipulating awareness are designed to experience this lack of separation and transcend our own worldview or interest, and view the world from a vantage point that is, in Thomas Nagel's words, "nowhere in particular."
That's an odd goal, quite frankly.
Ok, well then please enlighten me ... what kind of goal would you find less "odd" ? Perhaps one about money ? Or politics ? Or global warming ?
You're right. You seem to know it all. What can I say that will further this discussion ? Probably nothing, so I won't bother.
I'd like to plumb the depths a bit. When you say a conscious being with a temporary form to dwell in, are you suggesting that the conscious being is independent of the temporary form and may not be temporary itself?
Happiness is a good goal.
The consciousness that animates every living form is eternal, but the form that it animates is temporary. So, when one is born, it is the one (eternal) consciousness manifesting as a form, but when one dies, the consciousness doesn't die with that form. In other words, you can think of the form as a channel for the consciousness to pass through. So, each form gets an opportunity to "live" through that consciousness.
If this sounds like bullshit, ok, it is not the easiest thing to see.
Just try this one thing ... let's say that someday, you are overwhelmed with anger or some powerful negative feeling/emotion, and suddenly you find yourself stepping back from that emotion and seeing it instead of getting lost in it ... just as an observer, without any judgment of thought ... totally neutral ... and the turmoil suddenly turns to peace. What is that place you are watching those negative emotions from ? Is it the mind ? Or is it something outside the mind/body ?
Or, let's say you find yourself staring at something beautiful, like a sunset or a bird on a tree branch, and suddenly, you find yourself at total peace. There is no mind involved, no body involved. Just a perceiving without imposing any ideas/thoughts on it. What is it that perceives ?
Sometimes, even after a loved one dies (or simply leaves, as in a breakup), the survivors say, "I still feel his presence around the house." The form is dead/gone, so what is it that lingers ? (And no, I'm not alluding to some horror movie crap).
What this is really about (and spirituality, in general) is giving a person a new perspective from which to look at life and the world. One might think that this esoteric abstract bullshit has no practical purpose, and that it is just for the books. On the contrary, when you are able to distance yourself from your mind and body, when you realize that your identity is no longer just your mind and body and other forms like material possessions (which is to say, how good you look, how much you know, how much money you make, etc, etc, etc), think about how much it simplifies your life and how much peace is to be had from that realization.
But of course, nothing anyone says or does will convince you, nor should it. You have to see it for yourself. Convincing is utterly futile. And, if you don't see it, that is perfectly ok. Life continues solely on that other plane - the plane where only form is honored. That's fine too.
That's the best I can do to try and explain it. Language is really quite inadequate when it comes to these things.
Quoting praxis
"I plan to be happy on Friday at 5 pm" :)
Yes, a good goal ... and quite naive. If you're talking about true happiness, you cannot aim to be happy; you can only be happy now (i.e. in the present moment). When the future comes, it will also be now.
(When I say "now" for conciseness, I mean "in the present moment", just to be clear)
Have you ever planned a kickass vacation with a lot of great anticipation ? And then, when the vacation actually came, it sucked ? Or you were anticipating a great date with a hot new girl/guy ? And it turned out to be crap ? Think about it for a minute - what does that prove ?
You enjoyed the anticipation of the future event, not the future event itself, and you enjoyed that anticipation now. You cannot plan to be happy :) ... for the simple reason that you cannot predict the exact circumstances or "form" a future moment will take. You can only react to the form of the present moment (by being happy or sad or whatever). So, you cannot plan to be happy in the future, because the future may involve a divorce, bankruptcy, an earthquake, or a black ant in your food (or a million other things you cannot possibly foresee).
If you really want to "plumb the depths", ask yourself what real happiness is. Is it the temporary ego satisfaction that comes from a new car or a raise at work or how about a sexy new partner ? Or is it something deeper. And, if it is something deeper, does it need to be planned for ? Or enjoyed now ?
I'm going to borrow a beautiful expression from another forum member here. I think his name is Michael Ossipoff. Hope he'll be ok with me borrowing his words.
The "perpetual postponement of satisfaction" that we constantly engage in is the reason we are eternally miserable. That is what we get for having happiness as a goal :)
Said another way, the "goal" is to "have no goal" ;)
If none of this resonates with you, any further words of mine will likely be futile.
It’s the mind.
Ok :)
As I mentioned, it is not my place to convince you and doing so would be futile anyway.
If you believe it's the mind, who am I to tell you otherwise. You know yourself best.
That is something like the Vedantic view - that there is an inner being that migrates from life to life, undergoing the experiences caused by previous actions until such time as the goal of mok?a (liberation) from the cycle is realised.
Buddhism teaches something similar, but also very differernt, as there is no innermost being or everlasting essence which migrates from life to life. Rather intentions give rise to consequences, which themselves perpetuate future existences, up until the time one realises that there is nobody driving the process, and it abates through the recognition of ‘no self’.
Even as a child, my dreams were brilliantly colored and, as today, I had several every night. But, beyond this, even when awake,I could close my eyes and watch a kind of inner video that progressed in various unexpected ways that were entertaining. I have been surprised to discover that other people do not experience this. After a good many years of wondering about this and reading about how various thinkers made sense of reality I have come to a general guess about what is going on in my head.
The brain itself has no direct contact with reality. Its only contact is with its several basic sensory systems and these systems send nerve pulses identified by the brain with their origins to differentiate them.The nervous system in humans and in other animals was developed with the basic agenda of life to survive and reproduce so our reality is actually an inner construction of the brain to model the necessary abstracted version of what goes on out there so that we can survive and have kids. There is a great deal going on outside that is of no use to us in the basic agenda so our genetic design and our experience tosses away the huge bulk of stuff that is irrelevant and what we get at end is a matrix of useful abstracts that we call reality. There is a huge dynamic library in our brain that saves all this input to be available on needed demand. But the self, the me that we each believe to be who we are,is an instrument that the brain places in its limited internal construction of the outside world and that is what each of us identifies as reality. We don't see, hear, smell or feel with our nerve inputs.We do all these things with the brain. It puzzled me for years as to how a hypnotized person could actually "see" what thee hypnotist suggests.That's because none of us sees with our eyes. We see what the brain constructs from its impulses.
And the inner brain is continuously constructing all sorts of possible realities we never experience when awake because what we experience is the highest probabilities it can infer from its sense impulses which it continually upgrades. When we sleep with our eyes closed the brain gadget we call ourselves experiences the fantasy reality constructions that the brain is manufacturing all the time as dreams.
At least,that's what I think is going on.
I like the way you've put his all together. Some of the internal experiences you describe I have felt also. A lot I have not. Generally, yours seem more intense and well defined. In particular I like this:
Quoting Jan Sand
I think that's a good way to look at reality, by which I mean it is consistent with how I do. It also clashes with a more common understanding that reality exists independent of human participation. If you look back over my posts on metaphysics, you'll see that everything I say eventually comes back to my understanding that the universe is essentially human. That you can't separate some sort of objective reality out from our understanding of it. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth if that's not how you see things.
I really like this description. The image I use is of a spring - water bubbling up to the surface through the rock from an underground source. Just about everything I feel or want comes up out of that spring and goes directly into action. There is rarely any mediation from conscious processes except to say "no." That's where everything I write comes from. Everything I feel. That's what I think of when I read about acting without acting in the Tao Te Ching.
By the way, if you are responding to a quote from a specific post, you can highlight that quote. A tag that says "quote" will pop up. If you click that tag, the quote will be copied down to your response along with a link to the quoted text. That makes it easier for everyone to know what you are responding to.
https://jansandhere.wordpress.com/
Yes, I believe so. My view has been influenced by Eckhart Tolle who has studied all those schools of thought. He puts the whole thing in very simple words, but that's where his knowledge derives from - Buddhism especially.
I wrote about it in depth in my previous post (I'm guessing you didn't read it ?). Take a look there. I'll summarize it again:
Consciousness is the primordial life force that animates all forms. So, consciousness is entirely formless (no mind, no body, no thing). It is the awareness that allows you to perceive whatever you perceive (those perceptions then lead to thoughts or physical actions).
It's not something that is easy to describe in words (precisely why science is irrelevant here). It needs to be experienced and felt by you. Unless you experience it, you'll have no clue what I mean.
According to what you describe I experience it quite frequently, as in the your example of observing negative emotions.
Ok, good, so then, going back to the original point of my post that led to this discussion, it is precisely that experience of consciousness that is the "goal" (if you can call it that) of true religion/spirituality.
True religion does not aim to, and nor does it need to, teach one about "how to treat one's neighbor". Religion shouldn't be an ethics course :) It only needs to point to that state of consciousness that we, as humans, have "forgotten about". Our minds have evolved to a point where that primordial consciousness is all but entirely obscured by the mind. We know how to send vehicles into space, we can cut open a human heart and fix it, we can write highly sophisticated computer programs for any and all utilitarian purposes, but something has gotten lost along the way - our state of consciousness. It has been obscured by the mind.
The only aim of religion, in my humble opinion, is to point us back to, i.e. remind us of, that state of consciousness where true peace and "salvation" lie. Everything else that is "important" (morals, ethics, whatever) will automatically follow from that state. Treating one's neighbor with respect then comes naturally, not needing to be taught and then artificially played out like a charade.
Well, your opinion isn't really humble at all, is it. You are telling billions of people who worship Jehovah, Allah, Vishnu, and all the rest that they are misguided and that you've seen the only true way.
Let's talk when you've cooled down and when it's not just your emotion that's talking ? Maybe come back to this in a couple of days ?
There is nothing personal to be gained/lost here, for any of us.
I'm not angry or upset. I stated a fact - you are telling billions of people that they are wrong and you are right about the most important thing there is. I can't think of anything less humble to say and I think it deserves a pointed response.
No, I'm not. If you think this, perhaps you don't understand the meaning of the word "opinion".
[b][i]opinion |??piny?n|
noun
a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge[/i][/b]
When I say, "in my humble opinion", (and even if I don't explicitly say it) it is implied that I am not claiming that what I have to say is factual.
No one here or on any other forum needs any particular "qualifications" to express his/her opinion. Isn't that what free speech is about ? And isn't that what the internet and social media are all about ? Or, are you telling me that everything everyone says here and on Facebook is factual ?
It is always wise, even when someone claims something is "fact", to take it with a pinch of salt. It goes without saying :)
So, perhaps ask yourself why you keep attacking me when it is clearly implied that anything anyone says here (or anywhere else) is, by definition, just an opinion.
I think that what I'm saying (about religion) is setting off some kind of emotional trigger within you, i.e. you feel the need to strongly defend your viewpoint even though I am not even attacking your viewpoint. I am simply stating mine.
You are fighting a fight that hasn't begun. You are fighting yourself, really :)
Please point out anywhere I have attacked you. I have tried hard to change my way of arguing to take out all personal attacks and to focus on the argument, not the person. Sometimes I fail and it's good to point that out to me.
Here is my statement - You (Aurora) have said that billions of people are wrong about the basis of their spiritual life and that you are right. Is that true or false?
If my statement is wrong, then I've misunderstood. If it is correct, then, in my opinion, what you've written is very arrogant. It is not humble at all.
That's it ! Thanks for making it even clearer this time around :D
Those words I quoted are what I'm talking about. Is that not a personal attack ?
I didn't say anything about you. I said something about what you said. I attacked your statements and ideas, not you. If you're going to make statements on this forum, you should expect to have to back them up, put up your rhetorical dukes.
You are manufacturing this "arrogance" out of what I said. You are taking something quite simple (a viewpoint) and adding your own interpretations to it. i.e. you are putting words in my mouth. This is what convinces me that you have some sort of personal vendetta/agenda here. This is your emotions reacting, not you responding.
I never said that the other 7 billion people are stupid for doing what they do. I only said what I think true religion is. You then took that and added on your own interpretations.
If I say, "I think that apples are tasty", that is NOT me saying, "I think people who don't eat apples are idiots." :) If you make up a 100 page story out of the 10 words I say, it's your problem, not mine.
If this doesn't make any sense, let's not bother with this anymore. I've got better things to do.
This happens from time to time. I find myself at odds with another forum member on what I consider pretty fundamental philosophical issues. What I generally do then is to back off. Try to avoid that poster on issues where we are likely to clash. Not get tangled up in something that raises hackles. In this particular case, I take a certain parental interest since this is a thread I started and that I care about. I can assure you I will not follow you around the forum looking for things to disagree on, but I can't promise we won't hiss and bark again.
Yes, I get that. I'm used to it too. And yes, it is perhaps best for us not to speak about this topic again, because we're getting nowhere good.
With all due respect, it doesn't matter to me whether or not this is your thread. If you don't want responses, don't post a thread. So, in other words, I'm not going to back off this thread, just because you authored it. I may still respond to others, if I feel like it.
Likewise, if I start a thread, and we have a little tussle there, I can't expect you not to post there anymore. You can post; I just won't respond to you.
Have a good one.
I wasn't suggesting you shouldn't post, only that I am less likely to back off on this thread than I might be on others because of my personal interest. Please, post wherever you please. I will not go looking to tangle with you.
False. Because of the definition of the word "opinion", which I included previously.
THE END
Great. I think we have an understanding :)
Incorrect. That opinion was clearly and explicitly stated as an opinion. ...not as a fact intended to correct or criticize everyone who believes something else.
I'm posting my reply to this point in the argument, because this is where the big misunderstanding happened.
No one (other than a few Atheists) is saying that Literalists of all religions and denominations are misguided. Literalists believe some doctrinal details that i don't believe, but I feel that there's usually also (in my opinion) validity in what they feel, more fundamental than their Literalism doctrianal details. I don't criticize them.
...except when they themselves reject that commonality, and emphasize how wrong their doctrine says I am, and get critical and ugly if I don't accept their doctrinal teaching. ...as of course is pretty much always the case, with the door-to-door denominations. (I won't name them, but you know who they are). That's why I no longer talk to them.
I don't even criticize Atheists, except for their manners. Their beliefs are their business, not mine. It's nice that they don't go door-to-door.
Michael Ossipoff
(Y) (Y) (Y) :D
I say what I have to say about this, not just as some obscure theory I read/heard somewhere and arbitrarily decided is true. I'm quite a practical person; theory doesn't appeal to me much without practical application. So, whatever I speak about here, almost always, is the result of direct practical application in my own life, i.e. based on my experience. Although I have been greatly influenced by one spiritual teacher, I don't take everything he says for granted ... some of what he teaches proved true in my life and some didn't. Needless to say, I'm talking about the part that proved true for me.
The function of consciousness/awareness is mainly a shift in perspective - to show us where everybody and everything fits in. How important is my job ? My home ? My marriage ? How important is food and water ? How important are this mind and this body ? What are we relinquishing our sanity for, each day, dealing with the traffic and the meetings and the bills and the stock prices ? And, is what we're getting in the end worth losing our sanity ? What are we chasing in the end ? How important is it for me to prove to this person that I'm "right" ?
... a shift in perspective. That's all. And, if it can achieve just that, it is a huge step forward, for most people, because most are entirely unaware of the formless realm. Form is all they see ... money, job, car, home, spouse, cell phone, computer, and their thoughts and judgments about all those things. They're too zoomed in.
There is much peace to be (potentially) had, if one can simply step back, and take a look at their life from that place.
Please explain the difference between these two statements:
Statement 1 - Frank Smith is an asshole
Statement 2 - In my opinion, Frank Smith is an asshole.
Statement 1 implies that you're wrong if you don't think Frank Smith is an asshole.
Statement 2 doesn't imply that.
Statement1 states or claims a fact.
Statement 2 merely states the speaker's opinion.
Either way, Frank Smith won't like you, but there's still a significant difference in what you're saying.
Michael Ossipoff
Now, that is a fact ;)
What a bunch of bullshit. You guys should have the nuts to take responsibility for what you say and not hide behind that sorry excuse.
Be that as it may, this is a thread about the experience of awareness, not dumbass language games.
Sorry to break it to you, but no one is obligated to explain/justify anything to anyone. You can have that expectation, but then also expect to be disappointed and angered (as you clearly are). Furthermore, also realize that not everyone finds it important to explain their views to others and "prove themselves right". It may be important to you to always be "right", but not necessarily to others. Others, such as I, may consider it an utter waste of time arguing over who is "right" and who is "wrong". For some, as for me, the exchanging of ideas is what is the motivation to come to a forum like this, not some illusory sense of "I'm right, you're wrong."
In a courtroom, when a lawyer shouts, "Objection !" to what the opposing side is claiming, yes, the other side needs to justify/validate what they're saying. But, this forum isn't a courtroom, is it ? If it were, it would hold little interest for me (and likely most others). Nothing here (or anywhere else, for that matter) is that deadly serious, nor does it need to be.
This simple premise is the reason why so many choose to join forums such as these ... and is what makes the internet so popular as a place to hang out. Anonymity, and no obligation to explain/justify anything to anyone. I can state my opinion and walk away, explanation and "right/wrong" be damned.
Ask yourself what the ultimate goal of being here is ... what are you trying to get out of being here ? It can be a helpful way to solve these communication blocks sometimes. Zoom out of the little argument/debate, and look at the bigger picture.
I'm noticing more and more, that perhaps, it is best we not communicate with each other. Our goals on this forum seem to differ greatly.
This 'experience of consciousness', as you call, is typically referred to as mindfulness. It's been very fashionable in recent years. There's no religion built around it that I'm aware of. Mindfulness is an important practice in Buddhism but that's not its goal. The goal in Buddhism is basically to experience emptiness.
Quoting Aurora
The purpose of religion is to supply meaning. A system of meaning binds a community in common values and purpose. That is its essential purpose and anything else like 'true peace', salvation, or the experience of emptiness is entirely optional. Religion isn't needed to find peace, salvation, or emptiness. It may help in achieving those goals, or it may be harmful.
:)
Right.
And how's that for an irrefutable argument? :D
Thanks for demonstrating that you really don't understand the difference between an opinion and a fact.
T. Clark is demonstrating a common practice--Expressing an opinion as if it were a fact.
You'd be correct if you'd said, "In my opinion that's bullshit." You'd be correctly expressing your opinion. I'd then reply that I agree that that's your opinion., and of course you have a right to express it.
But you're incorrectly presenting it as a fact.
Do you see the difference yet, between a statement of opinion and a statement of fact?
I admitted that Frank Smith wouldn't like you even if you said that it's your opinion that he's an asshole.
But it remains true that there's a big and obvious definition between stating a fact that Frank Smith is an asshole, as opposed to stating an opinion.that Frank Smith is an asshole.
Yes, strictly speaking, of course when you state an opinion, you're stating a fact about your opinion. But you aren't stating a fact about what your opinion is about.
And that distinction can have a lot of practical importance too:
Say, after parking on a hill, you think you set the parking brake (or turned the wheels to prevent rolling), but you aren't sure..
The person who rode with you asks if you set the parking brake.
If you're honest, you'll say, "I think I set the parking brake." Your friend will go and make sure.
If you state an opinion as a fact, you'll say, "I set the parking brake". Your car ends up rolling past a stop sign, into a busy 50 mph highway.
Sorry, T. Clark, but there's a big difference between an opinion and a fact, sometimes with dire practical consequences.
Good point, T., don't say things that you can't support, or will regret later.
See above.
The dumb-ass language game started when you confused a statement of opinion with a statement of fact. You initiated the dumb-ass language-game.
Michael Ossipoff
I'm beyond the end of my patience trying to explain myself on this subject. However, it is one of the few threads on this site that addresses a subject I actually care about, which is why I've been so prolific on this thread. But, I don't think I can do any more of this, so I think I will take a break and listen to what others have to say :)
This is a public forum and you're welcome to poke your nose anywhere you want. As I said before, if you don't use quotes and links it's really hard to know what specifically you are responding to. I'll assume you are responding to the general tenor of the discussion between Aurora and me.
Aurora and I had discussions on another thread before this one. On that thread and this one, I have responded harshly to what I see as the contemptuous and condescending way he talks about other people - the general public in the previous thread and people who have different views on religion than he does in this one. In those discussions my comments have been about what he has written and not him personally.
I appreciate the sentiment behind your comment.
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Much or most of it is. But often we state true facts here.
Interesting that you should ask, because my metaphysics is an Idealism based on abstract if-then facts.
(Below, I mention Michael Faraday's mention of that sort of metaphysics.)
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I guess most of what’s said here is in the form of stating a fact. …and a (maybe large?) percentage of those statements of fact are incorrect. In that case, instead of stating a true fact, they merely indicate an opinion—expressed in the form of a (incorrect) factual-statement.
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The term “fact” has been defined here as “a state-of-affairs”. It could also be called “an aspect of how things are”.
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I define a statement as “an utterance (maybe true, maybe false) about a fact”.
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In metaphysics, it’s certainly possible to state undeniable, uncontroversial facts.
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In fact, I claim that my metaphysics is entirely uncontroversial. I state it as facts.
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Certainly. In this forum too. It’s my opinion that there’s reincarnation, but I can’t prove it, and I can’t call it a fact.
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I try to say when I’m only expressing an opinion.
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And religion is about feeling or faith, not about provable facts, provable in a debate. My feeling that there’s good intent, benevolence, behind what is, is a factual impression that I don’t doubt. …but not one that I can prove to someone else, or an issue for debate.
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A fact is a state of affairs, an aspect of how things are.
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(“Things” are whatever can be referred to.)
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Well, one use of this forum is the pointing-out of facts. But, of course, also the sharing of opinions, speculations and conjectures (labeled as such).
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Yes. But, in my opinion, the authority of academic “experts” doesn’t count for much in philosophy. My impression is that there’s a lot more value in the discussions here, than in what we get from academic philosophers…who are at least partly motivated by the “Publish-Or-Perish” incentive. …resulting in endless reams of vague inconclusive debate and speculation. Chalmers, if I remember correctly, admitted that there’s no indication that the (ridiculous) “Hard Problem Of Consciousness” will be solved anytime soon, because no progress has been evident over the past millennia.
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And didn’t Wittgenstein renounce academic philosophy as the BS that (in my opinion) it is?
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Certainly much of it isn’t fact. …even when stated as fact.
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But equally certainly, some of it is fact.
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Agreed.
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But that can be useful discussion, because someone might tell about a fact, regarding a matter that others haven’t looked at much. Someone might emphasize an issue or a fact that hasn’t gotten the attention that it deserves.
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For example, in 1844, the famous physicist Michael Faraday said that there’s no reason to believe that our physical universe is other than a complex system of relations among logical and mathematical facts.
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I say that what he said is clearly factual.
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My wording is that there’s no reason to believe that our physical universe is other than a complex system of inter-referring abstract if-then facts (logical and mathematical) about hypotheticals.
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Not when it’s clear from context. But in metaphysical debates, facts should be distinguished from opinions or speculations.
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Of course when someone states something as fact, it might be a fact, or it might just be an incorrect opinion. If the speaker knows that it might not be a fact, then it should be labeled as opinion (if strongly-felt) or speculation (if not as strongly-felt)
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In this instance, regarding the argument between you and T. Clark, you did indicate that what you said was opinion.
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It’s often clear from context, but in metaphysics or physics, the distinction should be explicit.
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Michael Ossipoff
I do agree that my referring to the masses as "idiots" was condescending ... no question about it. Perhaps, I should have used different words. I can see how this might have offended you and others. Thank you for the honest feedback. It has been noted, and I hope to do better next time.
I like a lot of what you have to say (in general ... also counting previous posts I've come across by you). There is a lot of depth and substance to what you write, which I find generally lacking in posts here (and elsewhere).
It is easy to write a totally meaningless post with big fancy words and quotes from famous people (and I find a lot of folks doing that), but not as easy to write in a way that demonstrates a true/deep understanding of whence those words originate.
I'm curious about your background ... occupation / life phase ... answering is totally optional, of course :)
Thanks for the response to my questions about fact/opinion. It's nice to have crossed paths with you here.
And BTW, I kind of plagiarized you earlier in this thread (maybe 2 pages back). Specifically, your phrase "perpetual postponement of satisfaction". I gave you credit as best as I could, not knowing the proper "format".
The entirety is quite complex. My inherited DNA deals with living cells and as I developed from a single cell the various varieties of different kinds of cells were produced to manufacture a cooperative community that could deal with basic necessities to process food for structure and nourishment and produce the nervous system to relate to outside demands on survival. The brain is intimately connected to all parts of the body and has automatic functional relationships with everything. It has established patterns out of its genetic inheritance which generally is below the level of consciousness although signals, such as hunger, thirst, pain etc. do prompt the consciousness to react. Beyond this the body welcomes very large numbers of non-human cells which have been domesticated to aid in basic functions known as the microbiome which also can influence the emotional and other basic reactions of the central nervous system. Although all parts contribute their necessary functions to the whole, people in general accept the false premise that the consciousness is the central controlling focus of the totality whereas it is just one small aspect of brain function which is designed to operate within the immensely simple model of the outer world . This does not denigrate its importance, which is great, but places it properly in its relationship to the whole.
Since the advent of the computer which deals with many of the same problems as the living brain, the similarity has led to speculations as to how similar the digital machine is to a thinking brain. Experts in the field have even proposed that a human mind might eventually be transposed into a computer so that it could continue to live within the machine far beyond the life of a normal human. As fascinating as this concept might be it seems to me that it neglects very basic differences between a computer as it is now constructed and a living animal such as ourselves.
I am quite old and my wife died some time ago and almost all of my friends and relatives also have ceased to exist. But all of these people still exist in my memories. And these memories are quite different from the kind of data storage one places in a computer. As an artist and a designer I deal, to a large degree, in various kinds of patterns. And it seems to me that the brain in general seems devoted to pattern recognition, construction, and association. But these patterns are not just visual, they contain input from all the body sense mechanisms plus associations from emotions and past experience. And beyond that there are patterns dealing with time and procedures. The sense patterns are abstracts of reality in color, shape, motion, etc. and the can associate across senses such associating numbers with colors, sounds and other ways to form very complex memories.
The fundamental difference between computer data and living memories is that, in life, each pattern and pattern template is a living cell function and possesses a self- coherence which remains active as a living thing continuously below the level of consciousness. This living data therefore is more like a zoo than a library. In effect, my wife still is quite alive within my brain structure and when I dream of her all the characteristics that I have acquired of her when she was alive reacts with me in my dreams, which is radically different from the way computer data is obtained and stored. And not just people, but all brain data is dynamic and makes associations and changes below my level of consciousness. Thus, a brain is quite different from a computer as they are now constructed. I have no idea as to whether data can be made to come alive in this manner within computer technology. It probably would entail all data to contain active algorithms in rather special ways that probably would make the computer unpredictable in the same way that people are unpredictable and most likely would be an unsatisfactory tool.
I experience not being separate by simply eating and breathing - consuming things that are not me so that I may continue being me.
I don't understand what a view from nowhere means. It seems like a contradiction as a view is always from somewhere which is why it is subjective in the first place. Views are subjective because they only contain a certain amount of information about the world as opposed to all of it (which would be an objective view, or a view from everywhere). A more objective view (a view from everywhere) is what I try to attain in my thinking.
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Life-Phase: Age 72
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Retired
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Background: As my mother used to say, "Don't get me started." :D
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Theist. Vedantist.
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I’ve like science, but I disagree with the religion of Science-Worship.
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My metaphysics differs from those of the 3 usual versions of Vedanta, but they differ greatly from eachother too.
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I've never understood the writing that I've encountered about Buddhist metaphysics, but there are evidently some mutually-conflicting versions (as is the case with Vedanta too).
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But I'm not criticizing or disagreeing with Buddhist metaphysics. To the extent that I understand what's said about its metaphysics, the differences seem likely to be largely definitional.
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Buddhists have a good point, when saying that we aren't the person that we were at an earlier time of life. I don't know the person I was, in elementary school, junior-high, or highschool. ...when it comes to how I arrived at and justified the misguided motivations, values, and purposes, and view about my life.
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(…but I suspect that I had lots of help from parental, cultural and schoolground bullying.)
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Well, because I’m not the person I was then, then of course I needn’t blame myself for “my” role in what happened.
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Likewise, because that person wasn’t me, then I’m not the one who missed-out because of all that.
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Saying that reminds me of Quintero, in Enemy of the State, when he said, “That ain’t me.”, when shown a video of him violating his conditions of probation by meeting with labor-officials.
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Everything that happened previous is just a “given”, not meaningfully evaluatable as good or bad, loss or gain, or regrettable.
In a meaningful sense, the situation now is all.
It seems to me that Tolle emphasized that too--regret about the past, as well as postponement to the future.
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In the song “Rock & Roll Gypsies”, they say, “The winner takes nothing, and the loser gets all that remains.”
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Nisargadatta said, “From the point of view of the sage, nothing has ever happened.”
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I wasn’t going to get into background, but, once I get started…
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But anyway, even though we aren’t the same person we were at a much earlier time of life, isn't it obvious that, as a practical matter, in a meaningful sense, we're the same person we were yesterday?
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I don't claim to know enough about Buddhism to know whether they're saying that, metaphysically, there isn’t anything, but there’s no reason to believe that there’s anything by the Materialist's meaning of something.
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But I'm not a Materialist, and even though there’s no reason to believe that there metaphysically (discussabley, describably) is anything other than insubstantial, ethereal abstract facts, that structure or system of abstract facts is a person’s life-experience story and the possibility-world in which it’s set. I don’t call that “nothing”.
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So maybe my view that there isn't just "nothing" gives me more in common with Vedantists than Buddhists, as regards metaphysics. But I admit almost complete ignorance about Buddhist metaphysics.
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The subject of facts is of interest to me, because obviously there are inevitable abstract facts. For instance:
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1)
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If all slithytoves are brillig, and all jabberwockeys are slithytoves, then all jabberwockies are brillig.
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That inevitable abstract if-then fact is equally true if none of the slithytoves are brillig, or if none of the jaberwockeys are slithytoves, or if there are no jaberwockeys or slithytoves.
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An abstract logical if-then fact can be true even if its premise is false (of course then its conclusion isn’t true). …or even if the things referred to in the premise and conclusion don’t objectively exist.
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An abstract if-then fact need only have validity or reality in its own context. An inter-referring system of such facts needn’t have validity, existence or reality other than in its own inter-referring context.
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Definitions:
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Let “1” mean the multiplicative identity, specified in the multiplicative identity axiom of the real numbers.
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Let “2” mean 1+1
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Let “3” mean 2+1
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Let “4” mean 3+1
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“If ” premise:
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If the additive associative axiom of the real numbers is true…
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”Then “ conclusion:
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…then 2+2=4.
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That, too, is an inevitable abstract if-then fact.
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A hypothetical set of physical-quantity variable-values, and a hypothetical physical law consisting of a hypothetical relation among those variable-values, are parts of the “if “ premise of an abstract if-then fact.
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…except that one of those variable-values can be taken as the “then” conclusion of that if-then fact.
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A mathematical theorem is an abstract if-then fact whose “if “ premise includes, but needn't be limited to, a set of mathematical axioms (algebraic or geometric).
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There are also infinitely-many systems of inter-referring abstract if-thens like those. Inevitably, one of those infinitely-many logical systems has events and relations that are identical to those of our physical universe. There’s no reason to believe that our physical universe is other than that.
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That metaphysics is based on inevitable abstract logical facts. None of its statements have anything to disagree with. It’s a completely uncontroversial metaphysics, and I state it as fact.
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Regarding the matter of facts, this discussion got me started on something that I have a lot to say about.
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Michael Ossipoff
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We are all one consciousness. That's one helluva self contradictory entity. Insanity.
Quoting Aurora
When we think about our own mental ongoings, we're not watching them, unless we're watching ourselves on something previously recorded. In all cases of thinking about our own thought, belief, and emotions, the place we're watching from is wherever we happen to be at that time. If I'm at the grocery, then that's the place I'm watching from. If I'm at a club, then that's the place. If I get outraged at the club, but do not really think much about how and/or why I became outraged until after I'm at my friend's house the next day, then I'm 'watching' from my friends house.
Quoting Aurora
How on earth do you expect to justify claiming that you can use parts of your body(physiological sensory perception) to stare at birds and sunsets without a body? No body, no physiological sensory perception. No physiological sensory perception, no eyes. No eyes, no staring at anything.
Quoting Aurora
Memories. Thoughts. Beliefs. Feelings. Longing.
Quoting Aurora
One need not invoke the supernatural and/or mysticism in order to change their own personal value system. That's all the above amounts to. A change in what one finds the most important. That change doesn't require invoking and/or believing in the supernatural. Ockham's Razor applies.
Quoting Aurora
So, your argument is that we cannot plan for happiness, because we cannot predict all future events?
That's bullshit. Planning involves expectation. Sometimes expectation is met. Sometimes it's not. When we're lucky, reality exceeds our expectations. Either way, we can plan for happiness, despite the likelihood of unexpected things happening.
I believe views are also subjective because they’re predisposed to particular objectives. Thought and it’s concepts are goal oriented. A view from nowhere has no purpose.
To reiterate, the point of this experience is essentialy to relieve existential anxiety. Though I’ve only achieved a very shallow experience of it to date, I believe it works as promised. I imagine there are many people, perhaps you for instance, who are not in need of this relief.
Is that not what you did with what you have expressed here?
So is your expectation that I will respond to (or even read the entirety of) such a post from you :)
Don't bother responding to any of my posts again. You're the newest member on my shit list. Congratulations ! :)
It might help to flesh out your ideas if you interact with others. creativesoul is no intellectual slouch.
I responded to you because you responded to me in a calm manner that facilitated a discussion as opposed to just shooting down everything and writing as if you were yelling. If someone responds like you did, I'm happy to respond back and exchange ideas. If not, I've got better things to do.
I can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she writes ... that includes the choice of words, the tone, etc. I can tell when a piece of prose has substance/depth and when it's just someone trying desperately to sound intelligent :) I can also tell when someone is in a desperate emotionally supercharged struggle to prove himself/herself "right". I instinctively stay away from such people, because they're "unconscious" - completely immersed in ego. I don't need their drama.
And no thanks, I'm quite confident that creativesoul has nothing to teach me. I'm not a complete idiot. I'm not missing anything
Did you say to whom you are referring somewhere in this thread or did I miss it?
Oh, I mentioned it here and there, but the guy I'm referring to is Eckhart Tolle.
I didn’t say anything about teaching.
I find that discussing things in a forum like this one can help clarify ideas and concepts that may be challenging to grasp or articulate. You mentioned frustration in explaining your ideas. This is a sign that you don’t have a good grasp of them.
I've heard of him quite a bit but have never read him. I suppose that I should? Is he more insightful than the first Eckhart? O:)
Before this gets out of hand, I will respectfully, and completely, disagree, and move on with my evening :)
Hmm, I didn't know the first Eckhart, but I'm pretty sure Eckhart Tolle named himself after Meister Eckhart. Tolle's original name was Ulrich Leonard Tolle, which became Eckhart Tolle.
I'm pretty sure you're referring to the same guy (first Eckhart) that Tolle looks up to.
Yes, ET is quite insightful. I got a lot from listening to him. Have you read/listened to him too ?
Then with the power of now, we agree to disagree.
Yes :D
I can already tell that you probably won't like him.
I have no idea what "new age" is, but he makes a lot of sense to me. He's definitely not everyone's cup of tea.
I hold no firm expectations regarding this.
Thank you. Rest assured, the pleasure's all mine.
Quoting Aurora
More bullshit. One cannot tell another's emotional state by virtue of written word alone.
I think you mean that one needs to detach their emotional investments from what they experience. That would be a more objective outlook if one could attain such a thing.
Views have a purpose and that is to provide knowledge of how things are at the moment. If one already knows how things are in all places and at all times, then one wouldn't need a view at all, would they?
Quoting praxis
Why do you think that there are people that need it and those that don't? What is the difference in those people? What is the difference in those being offended by being called names, and those that aren't? I think you will find the answer to both questions to be the same.
In my previous comments I have noted that the self is a mechanism of the brain which exists within the artificial construction that the brain has assembled out of inputs from the sense apparatus doctored to be simplified to meet the needs of survival. The brain continuously updates this construction to match the new material from the sense apparatus but it is this instrument of the self which seems to generate the illusive present time which has puzzled me. Awareness, then, is the vital illusion of present time.
I'm drawing a distinction between what I'll call the 'experience of emptiness' and general contemplative practices. Contemplative practice may include mindfulness, which is practicing an objective awareness of whatever is going on both internally (including emotions) and extenrally. Mindfully observing emotions doesn't lessen their intensity, if fact they may feel more intense, but they may pass more readily and are less likely to lead to maladaptive emotional responses.
An experience of emptiness is simply a particular brain state. It may be arrived at through other means than meditation. For example:
Quoting Harry Hindu
"How things are" depends on our values, intents, and purposes, doesn't it? If our purpose is to acquire knowledge of how things are in the moment, we're doing that for a reason, and our minds are unconsciously screening a great deal of the information for relevancy.
Rather, I suppose they would have all views. I can't imagine how that's possible.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I think it's much more complex than what you may be suggesting here. Whatever it is that makes a person more or less prone to existential anxiety may have little to do with their self-confidence or emotional intellegence.
Well, yeah - a view from everywhere. I don't know how that would possible either, just a like a view from nowhere. So it seems to me that to talk about view from nowhere and from everywhere is complete nonsense. All that makes sense is a view from somewhere at some moment. A view of emptiness is a still a view from somewhere, as I'm not viewing emptiness at the same time you are. In other words, you are simply looking somewhere that I'm not, from somewhere that I am not.
Quoting praxisGenes and upbringing, then?