stirling

My dear Robert, they are not platitudes, they are highly practical instruction IF pragmatically practiced. They are only platitudes to those too fearful to try.

Dharma(s) is/are teachings, not rules or regulations. No person created it/them. You can actually reduce the causes of suffering to a simple formulae: What are you attached or averse to? If you are in the world and have no attachment or aversion there is equanimity. You are in alignment with the Dao, and generating NO karma. Congratulations, you are actualizing the fundamental point. "Free will" is a mind generated fantasy created the moment we imagine that we are a separate person and experience attachment or aversion to our delusion of a reality with separate things. Look for "free will" when your mind is still in meditation. Look for "self" when the mind is still. How about "suffering"? If you are looking closely you will see that none of these appear in consciousness when it is still, just blissful being-ness. How is this possible? Where did it all go? Watch what happens when your thinking process comes back online - there is suddenly and "I", and all of your suffering, attachment, and aversion to separate things begins anew. The suffering has always been "yours"... so also the "liberation".

...or realizing that we have missed a trick and there isn't one.

Good luck rooting out evil in others! Changing ourselves changes the world.

One definition of "doing evil" from a Buddhist perspective:

He's not kidding, it has been requested to be reviewed.

Annnon, While I appreciate your sentiment, threads such as this are no longer welcome here - not due to any particular political allegiance. Please read, or re-read this thread: After consultation with the various mods, this thread is now permanently locked. _/\_

Yes, the common metaphor amongst the Advaitans is that of a fountain - the non-duality creating the illusion of duality moment to moment. In Buddhism this is the Dharmakaya the moment to moment arising and passing of all phenomena that we label. Intent, like any other thing that arises, including what you might think of as "your' thoughts, also arise from this infinite field of possibility impersonally.

Creating an image in your head seems like imagination to me? The imaginal is necessarily "self" bound and dependent, not the deeper reality on the non-dual. For example, while I also have my own imagination and things imagined, they do not include "sense organs on every plane and subplane". This is an imaginal realm that makes sense to you, but not any kind of reality that we could discuss on equal footing. If you had insight in the the non-dual nature of reality we would have no trouble talking about it and understanding one another because it is possible to see RIGHT here RIGHT now as the salient quality of reality. While I have had experiences seeing things some might label gods, goddesses, angels, demons, etc. I gnow that they don't have any permanence or any real separateness of their own, because even THEY have non-duality as their obvious salient quality.

This would be an act of imagination, is that correct? By "inner plane" we are again talking about imagination, correct?

I guess I'm not clear what you are proposing here, could you clarify?

The science that pointed to the brain being where the experience of being originates is known to be flawed, and has been for many years, so yes. Here is a nice article on this topic: https://tricycle.org/article/six-questions-b-alan-wallace/ ...or, if you are more science minded: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9490228/ - Setting that aside for a moment - if you were asleep and based your reality on experiments done in your dream, your experiments MIGHT have some sort of seeming circular reality, but when you finally woke up you would dismiss them outright. The same goes here - it is entirely possible to "wake up" from the dream of duality and see that there is a deeper, more real level of reality that includes and suffuses the reality you already experience.

Did you read the supplied link? Yes, believing that they have any intrinsic reality would be a mistake, but denying their occasional appearance in consciousness would be a mistake. From the link: Non-duality is a deeper level of reality than the duality of God/devil/angel and man. Testing IS important, but using other dualistic phenomena to determine what is "real" is a flawed process. The realization of the non-dual reality is a complete perspective shift - the litmus test of what is "real" afterward happens in comparison with that STILL VISIBLE realization.

Demons and voices are "makyo": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makyō They are distractions that come from the thinking mind. If your mind is still, they aren't there by definition. The stillness is the deeper reality of these experiences - the thing that is ALWAYS there when the mind is allowed to stop. Many experiences of all kinds occur during meditation. Most of them are blissful. Some people have supernatural experiences, some don't. It's good to have recourse to a proper teacher to check in with who has seen and understands these experiences, so that when things like this happen they can be framed in their proper perspective and there is some tuning of your practice where problems arise. @Cadcam, if you are continuing to experience anhedonia you should really be in contact with a mental health professional.

The Tao isn't knowledge in a book and is inexpressible in language, thus an intellectual understanding of it is NOT it.