goldisheavy

I had an interesting friend here who was USA-born, learned Chinese and then learned various internal arts from old Chinese grandpas living around South California area. From his words, these grandpas couldn't even speak English and they only taught people who spoke Chinese. As far as the mindset goes, I'd describe my friend as a simultaneous and mindblowingly paradoxical mix of a physicalist and a deeply spiritual person who believed in realities beyond the physical ones. But when it came to martial arts, I think he was more of a physicalist and tended to view everything in terms of biomechanics. Anyway, my friend looked big, if not healthy, and he sparred with some MMA celebrities. He never showed me anything like Fa Jin, but he did show me something very weird. He had me put my hand on his shoulder socket and then he proceeded to voluntarily move the shoulder bone out of its socket, without using the other hand or anything else. It was like his shoulder arm bone floated out of its socket. From my point of view it defied all my understanding about how the anatomy and body works. I didn't think what he was doing was physically possible, but there it was. And his explanation for why he needed that skill? It allows the arm to move faster with less friction, or something like that. So there is no way around it. There is definitely some interesting weirdness being taught, but at the same time my friend said that if I just want to learn how to fight, I shouldn't waste my time with taichi. He said, learn boxing or kickboxing. It works every time. He said that the stuff he studies works too, but it takes decades of practice and there are roughly 20 fake teachers for every real teacher in his estimation. Basically he said that most people are fakes and that he tests all his would-be teachers by physically attacking them. I am not shitting you. And he said that all the real taichi teachers, including grandpas, would allow him to try to attack them. So I tend to agree with what my friend said. Basically if fighting is what you want, taichi is a waste of time. The chance of fakes, plus the decades of study are not worth what you get for them. So it has to be a labor of love, or an obsession, but it cannot be a pragmatic pursuit for a fighter. All pragmatic fighters just go for jiu-jitsu and they are absolutely right to do so. But yes, weird grandpas do exist and they do teach really strange stuff. That doesn't mean you have to be attracted to it. Let the shiny things shine, leave them alone, and move on with your life. Just because something is shiny doesn't mean you need to appropriate it.

I agree that the universe is wondrous. I mean the term wondrous literally. If the brain is merely a CPU in a computer, then physically wrecking the brain should break the person in every case, no exceptions. I'm talking about the Intel, AMD, VIA, various ARM CPUs and so on. Just imagine drilling a hole through the center of the CPU. Is it still going to work? Obviously not. So the brain is not like the CPU chip. But many people think the brain is exactly like the CPU, only more complicated.

OK, but when you're talking about transforming one into the other, isn't that more or less one and the same meaning? So when people talk about transforming or purifying the three treasures, do they possibly mean very different things?

Interesting. How do you explain the different ways of using these terms? Is it a result of various philosophical splits in the Daoist community and its freewheeling spirit? Is it something else?

Good point and I agree. But from this point of view quantum mechanics effects would be considered paranormal in the 19th century.

Paranormal just means something beyond the normal. So for example, it's not normal for human beings to dead lift 1000 lbs, so that ability can be called paranormal, even though people who get to that level do so with learning and practice. So when Sergei Bubka vaults over 6 meters, we can call that paranormal too. I really don't think paranormal is anything other than this. This is good and bad. The intention is kind, but avoidance of confrontation produces the discussions you're now part of. I agree. At the same time people have a right to be skeptical.

Marble, did you read the link about the implications of hydrocephalus? Don't you think it's interesting that while it affects some people negatively, some lead normal lives with most of their brain tissue missing?

Coal is denser and harder than wood. Diamond is even denser and even harder than coal. Shen on the other hand is more like space. Some would say it's insubstantial. So shen is like space. Qi is very subtle and can only be felt privately in the private space, and jing is something that's dense enough to become public and can be felt by people other than the originator. Here's what I found after a quick search:

I believe you Steve and Myth. As I said, I don't doubt paranormal power exists. But at the same time I sympathize with people who want to learn how to pragmatically beat people up. Steve and Myth, you guys are lucky and have access to something most people do not. Most people have access to a boxing club. Please be honest and tell me: if someone asked you "How can I learn to beat people up in the most effective way possible?" Would you respond "taichi?" You probably wouldn't, right? In terms of pragmatic utility let's be generous and say there are 1000 real taichi people in the world who have strange powers that can actually be used in real combat. Then let's say there are 1 million MMA people. So just because those 1000 people exist and they are amazing, would you pragmatically recommend that approach? Wouldn't you recommend something that is known to work for millions of people worldwide without any weirdness?

I've never heard of this formulation. Usually jing is said to be rarefied to become qi, which is then rarefied to become shen. And the opposite is shen condensing to become qi, then qi condensing to become jing. At no point anything "reaches" Tao, because Tao is simply the way of all things, and jing, qi, and shen are always "in" Tao, and so are all their transformations.

That's a good point. I think a huge part of the problem is that some people are looking for most effective ways to beat up other people, and other people are looking for wisdom and enlightenment, and the subsection of people who belong in both camps I think is a very tiny one. I think from a pragmatic point of view if you want to become skilled at physically beating and subduing opponents you're better off studying arts like: boxing, kickboxing, muay thai, judo, jiu-jitsu, sanshou, sambo and perhaps systema (if you spar every day for 10 years against non-cooperating opponents, otherwise systema is useless, imo). Boxing and kickboxing/muay thai, judo, jiu-jitsu deliver proven results. While you are at it, if you are serious, I suggest buying a gun and spending time at the gun range as well. And taking a knife defense/offense class is probably a good idea as well. This pragmatic bunch of people is rightly going to be incredulous when confront with paranormal distance power projections. By its very definition paranormal is not normal. We call something paranormal because it defies expectations. Personally I think paranormal powers are real, but at the same time I think everyone who questions these powers is very smart, because it's better to have a closed mind that hasn't been swindled than to have an open mind that's been taken advantage of. Of course the best case scenario is an open mind that cannot be swindled, but that's not easy to achieve. I think it's important to realize that paranormal abilities generally do not come from sparring or from training how to beat people in sports or in a real struggle. If paranormal is what you're after, neither yoga nor taichi is an ideal practice. By yoga I mean all the yoga studios around the country. I don't mean Yoga Sutras of Patanjali which aren't discussed in more or less any yoga studio. Most yoga is about destressing and health, and those are very good and valid purposes in their own right. I think most taichi helps with destressing and health as well, which is completely valid if it's advertised as such. But just like in yoga there is Patanjali who is nothing like what most yoga studios teach, I am sure in taichi there is a transcendent and barely reachable equivalent who is nothing like what most taichi studios teach. Paranormal abilities can be used in combat, but as the name implies, it's not normal. So if you want to win fights, paranormal is really a dumb way to go. But if paranormal itself is your goal, I think you should think twice about taichi or yoga. Try chaos magic, philosophy, meditation, going on retreat, things like that, and be ready for insanity and death.

In our realm we can't even conceive of a being without a brain. So in our realm removing the brain ejects the being from our realm. But there is a difference between ejecting the being and destroying awareness. We tend to think that unless a being experiences objects in our realm, it is non-existent. Ejecting the being means losing logical connection to it (alternatively, some personality passes beyond our ability to recognize). We can't send and receive mail to/from the ejected being. Still, we overestimate the brain's importance: http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/science/is_the_brain_really_necessary.htm And of course the guy in the video at the beginning of this thread has 1/3rd of his brain disabled by a stroke and he's doing fine with 150 IQ, although he did have to train his mind to regain its agility in this realm.

What's interesting is that I've never seen Systema people do push hands. They just spar, spar, spar. I don't think they have forms either. What they have are abstract principles which they teach through verbal explanations and then lots of sparring.

Even considering something to be outside of awareness is an object of awareness. It's all worked up intentionally within awareness.

It wouldn't lose these qualities. It would be as always. What you describe is a real object that's knowable in contradistinction to all the ordinary objects that tend to appear. And vice versa. The reason we know these various mundane objects here is partly because we also subconsciously know the state of all-potential. The contextual relatedness that defines meanings stretches into the realms of mystery and unknowing, but these realms are within awareness and are accessible. Transitioning in and out of that state demonstrates a meaningful relatedness between all possible objects. This non-division is also a kind of division because it appears as an experience that's distinct from one of diverse multifarious mundane objects. So in this sense, nothing is destroyed when the non-divided all-potential object presents itself to the conscious awareness and the various diverse objects retreat into the subconscious. And when the all-potential object recedes into the subconscious and various diverse objects appear once again, nothing is created. So there is a division between a state of division and a state of non-division. And even if you could unify these two states, this union would still be divided from the case where it's not unified. So division is always there when it comes to experience. The only true non-division is not something experiential, but a realization of an enlightened being that transcends all possible experiences, including all possible mystical experiences. Of course there is always awareness. That state is also intentional. Just the fact that you're talking about it now demonstrates it is within the scope of awareness. Exactly. "Awareness" is just a tool concept. But as a tool, it is the best tool. A tool par excellence. At first it doesn't change much of anything, because beliefs and habits have force that has to be coped with in terms of pragmatic reality. Later on it brings the experiences that are inconceivable from the point of view of the ordinary mindset. These experiences at first elicit great fear and a feeling of insanity. Eventually this can be overcome. This stage can be called "tolerance of the inconceivability of phenomena." At that point your life cannot be described except as one of freedom. At some point you might even get bored of being free and wish to be limited and stupid once again so you can re-experience it all over again. Well, this was very impressive. You seem to understand my view pretty well.

Mumble, grumble. You're talking about intelligence. It is intelligence that is neither uniform nor randomly non-uniform. Sounds like God. There is still a good reason to ignore this. Why? You cannot distinguish this sort of influence from internal movements of awareness. There is no criteria you can establish for differentiating internal causes from external. Not only is it a whopping assumption that there is a permanently external-to-awareness intelligence in the form of unaware matter no less, but you then must invent some ad-hoc way of differentiating this influence from everything else that happens as a natural permutation of the state of awareness. It's a weak position that puts you at a disadvantage. (you're sharing your power with something that appears as if outside your intent) You should first assume that there is no such external meddlesome influence and try living that way. If you fail, then downgrade. Starting with the downgraded view on your first try is a mistake. Assume the best, and go forward from there. I know that awareness is not generated by anything that appears within awareness. Knowing this alone is more than enough. I know for a fact that awareness is not generated by the brain, for example. Why not? Because the brain appears to us as a concrete object that's contextualized by the state of awareness. The brain is a reification of something that we know doesn't exist as anything more than an illusion. There is nothing advantageous in considering a less empowering position before you consider the most empowering one. Remember, if you really believe some external-to-awareness reality generates awareness and then interferes with it in some intelligent and non-trivial manner, this influence is permanently beyond your intent. So this position puts you into the role of a victim. You're at the mercy of this other reality and you can't inspect it directly. If it turns out you can completely figure out how to work with this permanently external-to-awareness reality, then guess what? It's not outside awareness after all, if you can be aware of it. But if it's an object of awareness, it's not able to generate awareness. So if something permanently and fundamentally external to awareness generates it, it must be completely foreign and opaque, or it must be completely transparent, ending up being irrelevant either way. This is completely wrong. There is a reason why awareness is grander than any one object. Whatever object appears to your conscious awareness only has meaning to the extent it's being contextualized and defined by meanings and relations of other objects that do not appear to your conscious awareness. So for example, if I enter into a perfectly dark room, I know it is dark because I know what light is like and this isn't it. So I need the knowledge of light to be available to my subconscious mind in order to perceive darkness. So even if the object of perfect darkness is completely at the forefront of conscious awareness, it's only dark to the extent the object of lightness exists in my subconscious awareness. That's a simple example. Other examples are dramatically more complex. So seeing a blade of grass means you have the entire known and unknown universe in your subconscious mind, or else you wouldn't know what grass was and wouldn't be able to recognize it as such. This is a difficult topic. To fail to understand what I am describing above is very very common and expected. So in short, things only have meaning thanks to context. Nothing has its own meaning. There is no forkness in the fork and no horseness in the horse. No grassness in the grass. Etc. No object brings its own meaning along with it. Meaning is relative to context and context is infinite. That's why awareness is not just objects that appear in it. Awareness is a living breathing intentional context together with objects that appear thanks to that context, intent, beliefs and habit. It's all of that. And you are that. You can't infer anything outside your own awareness. You can only assume it. Inference only works on things inside awareness (conscious and subconscious minds are both game for inference). Definitely. Such inference would castrate you as a being and make you stupid, helpless, confused. It's the stripping of your power. Awareness is permanent necessarily. Why so? Because things have meaning only within context. Context cannot have a beginning. Context cannot be established. There is no way to start a context. Context is eternal. So if something exists permanently outside awareness generating it, then both awareness and this something must be permanent because we know awareness is permanent due to its endlessly contextual nature. All your life you've experienced modifications of the state of awareness. You've never experienced generation or creation of awareness. If you believe in creation or generation of awareness, it's not because you have personal experience of such things.

OK, I decided I should share this really weird dream I had recently. I was chilling and doing my thing when suddenly a huge dog-sized rat appeared. It was ugly and I didn't like it. I was not in a panic but I had a slight fear of it. I felt it was sneaky and dirty. So at first I decided to ignore it and this rat was just hanging out and annoying me by not removing itself from my experience. Then I tried to throw it away. I would pick it up and throw it as far away as possible. Annoyingly it would come back again and sort of thumb its nose at me, kind of like a rat's version of "fuck you" in my direction. Next thing I tried to do was throw it over a balcony. As soon as I thought this way, I was on some balcony with the rat. I would throw the rat overboard and it would hover in the air instead of falling to its death down below. Now I was getting really annoyed. I'll be honest -- I'm usually the only one with magical powers in my dreams and this rat was pissing me off by not falling down. Then I decided I had to shoot it with a gun. As soon as I thought this, a gun materialized in my hand. And here's the really weird and cool thing. I tried to aim at the rat, and my hand would refuse to follow my intent! I've never seen anything like it! I mean, I know myself. I know I am aiming straight at the rat but my hand is like 5 or 10 degrees to the right. I tried to move my hand left to correct for this aberration, and my hand would just jump over to the left of the rat. So no matter what I did my hand refused to follow my intent and I couldn't take a straight aim at the rat. So this was really interesting. I could see how my intent was generally manifesting. But somehow it was being modified by my subconscious mind. I feel like that's the main message of the dream. It's trying to tell me something about how intent works, because that last experience was one of the most stupendous ones I've ever had. Also, I had quite a bit of garlic right before that dream happened and I thought it's possible this rat was some kind of garlic spirit trying to teach me something. I'm trying to understand the nature of intent right now, so this dream really puzzled me. I feel like I should be able to understand what happened there when I couldn't aim at the rat, but I don't understand it. That's disappointing.

Myself for the most part. I also thought it was something entertaining and funny, so if anyone got a laugh out of it, that's great. I was just getting some free advice here while posting something I thought might be funny to some people. Killing two birds with one stone. Free advice for me and a few laughs for everyone else.

I don't think there is anything wrong with asking. But for the most part you'll just get whatever you believed confirmed to you. For example, I don't believe in ghosts. And guess what? I don't see them. Ever. But I do believe in weird stuff, just not ghosts. So guess what? I've experienced weird stuff that I believe in. I don't believe in God, so God has never talked to me. Someone who sincerely believes in God probably had days when they could swear they heard God's voice. A hard physicalist like the Amazing Randi will confirm his physicalism everywhere he goes. A global climate change denier will find confirmation that climate change is a giant conspiracy no matter how hard he or she searches for evidence. It doesn't mean anything is wrong with any of these people. The universe is a projection of one's own mind. You experience whatever you believe in. The world reflects your worldview. It's not right or wrong. It just is. The decision here is this: what do you want your life to be like? Do you want more magic or not? If you want more magic, then the approach is to soften up physicalist beliefs, open one's heart, and try to live life with more wonder and you'll get what you want to get. If you don't want magic, then just ignore all the magic mumbo jumbo, perform your crafts, enjoy your hobbies and have a drink on Friday, etc. Neither approach is inherently right or wrong. As for the martial applications, I think if taiji practitioners were serious, they'd be joining MMA competitions in droves. They don't join. This alone should tell you something. When Gracie wanted to prove to the world that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was the best, he entered all kinds of competitions to represent his club and he put Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu on the map. He gave a dam, he believed in himself, and got it done. Is this happening for Taiji? No. And there is a reason for it. So there is no need to demand proofs. Accept that taiji has nothing and move along. Taiji is yoga for health. It's not a combat art. You can probably (99.9% chance) walk up to Michael Phillips and knock all his teeth out in a few quick punches to his face. Taiji people like to be rooted. Well, imagine them getting kicked viciously by a kickboxer whose legs have been kicking tires and wooden dummies for years? Are they going to maintain root? No, they'll get their legs broken and scream in pain because they've never practiced meeting this kind of thing. They only practice with soft pudgy cuddly cooperating students who probably can't even press a kettlebell or do more than 20 pushups in a row and can't do one pullup and they go around talking about li being inferior. I went to a taiji class and the instructor was showing me some form and was telling me how his qi was moving things out of the way, etc... well I held my arm out strongly and guess what? He almost crapped in his pants. He couldn't move my arm at all. And I am not even a strong man at all. I'm just not a metrosexual they've come to expect. I just held my arm and he couldn't move neither my arm nor me and he had to tell me to relax and to start cooperating to get his show back on the road. That's my personal experience. Since then I don't bother with Taiji. But I still believe in paranormal power. It's just that to learn it you don't do Taiji. You have to learn it through philosophy, meditation, visualization, facing fears, etc... they don't teach any of that crap in any taiji class. I mean, not seriously. Do you learn to be insane in taiji? No you do not. What paranormal power can you exercise while maintaining sanity? Answer: none. If you maintain the mindset that ordinary people call sane you are impotent and hopeless. Tell me one taiji class that encourages people to abandon sanity and to leap off into the abyss? None that I know of. Any taiji class that warns people, "be ready to die and leave it all behind all ye who enter here"? None that I know of. So what paranormal power do you expect then? None. You come in ordinary and you leave ordinary. Does taiji training teach you anything wild or extraordinary? No. It does not. It teaches you really safe things, like feeling "energy" in the body. That's not a threatening thing. It's safe. You still get to hang on to your body. You still get to believe that the brain is where the mind is. You basically retain all your idiotic beliefs, plus you now believe in energy on top of the old rusty pile of useless limiting beliefs. See? So there is no point in demanding and proposing anything. Everyone knows what's up. You know what you want is futile.

I don't think every exercise is a waste of time if it doesn't have a martial application. A lot of the exercises are beneficial for learning about various aspects of our own minds, even if they cannot be directly and easily carried over into the combat application. I think the main thing is to just be honest. If you're in the business of self-discovery, call it that. If you're in the business of combat readiness, then call it that, but also live up to it. If you claim both, then it's fair to investigate the combat readiness side of the endeavor. So a really easy way out for many Taiji teachers is to simply not claim any combat benefits. Bring Taiji closer to the meditative experience and if any combat benefit arises from it, call it a fluke or a rare happening, whatever. My impression of Michael Phillips is that he's never actually sparred with anyone for real. He's always demonstrating things against cooperative opponents. And hypnosis is a damn powerful powerful, and once again, powerful thing. I've been hypnotized before, so I know from personal experience that a skilled hypnotist can hijack one's mind without anyone noticing and only a bare minimum level of consent is necessary. Sometimes just being in the same room as the hypnotist demonstrates sufficient consent to get hypnotized. But this brings me to another topic. Hypnosis can have real combat application. So just because something is hypnosis does not mean it's fake. The trick is to see how effective the hypnotic techniques are against uncooperative opponents. If they are effective, they should be considered real and effective. Psychology is a huge part of combat. When we watch MMA matches being commented on by various commentators, they often talk about the mind game. There are some things that are completely paranormal. For example, hypnosis doesn't work outside a sound-insulated room when the hypnotist is inside such room and the test subject is outside. But the chance of encountering paranormal events deeply depends on one's worldview. If you are a physicalist there is 0% chance of encountering paranormal events. In other words, the world generally reflects your own deeply engrained beliefs about reality back to you. So if paranormal is what you want to experience, you have to take a personal initiative to invite it. You'd invite it in two ways: internally and externally. Internally you invite paranormal by changing your worldview to one within which paranormal events are no longer nonsensical, impossible, or contradictory to logic. Externally you invite it by treating paranormal with some degree of respect. You don't have to respect any specific teacher, but you should at least minimally respect the paranormal reality. And you don't have to prostrate yourself before the paranormal realities of life, so worshiping is not necessary and can actually hinder things. The best attitude is to treat it as real, but without an exaggerated hoo-haa type stuff. If you go around challenging people to prove paranormal events to you, that's not the right attitude to invite it. Paranormal events are voluntary. Physicalist lifestyle is also voluntary. Someone who leads a deeply paranormal life can change the mindset to a physicalist one and the paranormal events will stop. And vice versa. You can embrace the mindset that will unleash the paranormal. It's all voluntary and intentional.

You didn't abbreviate. You saddled me with an assumption that I didn't make. That's worse than an abbreviation. Don't do this again if you want me to respect you and continue to act friendly. You can curse me and maybe throw a rock at me, and I'll be your friend. But if you screw around with my arguments in an unfair way it's over. I don't tolerate such things. If I explored some possibility (however poorly you think I explored it is irrelevant) then I didn't make an assumption. So if I explored the possibility that something exists outside awareness, then I didn't assume that nothing exists outside awareness. So don't you dare call this "abbreviation." You should accept responsibility for your screw up here. What you did is misrepresent my side of the argument. I don't define them as irrelevant. I analyzed them in one of the posts and concluded they are irrelevant. Whatever is fundamentally and permanently outside awareness either has influence on the contents of awareness or has none. If it has none, it's ignorable. If it has influence, to the extent the influence is uniform, it's ignorable, and to the extent the influence is non-uniform it renders the contents of awareness immune to reason and the entire discussion moot. Why is that? Because in order to reason we assume all the relations that we hold in our minds for analysis are relatively stable and trustworthy. If there is a fundamentally and permanently beyond perception non-uniform influence on all the contents of awareness, then since we can't reason about that which is permanently obscured and non-uniform, we cannot reason about anything that has such an influence as a significant component. It's obvious why this latter possibility should be ignored. Because if it's true, we can't even reason and everything we know is a meaningless jumble anyway, so there is no point not thinking whatever pleases the person in the moment. And since things appear stable enough, it pleases me to ignore the possibility that I live in a jumbled mishmash of a scrambled mind. In many arguments this would be helpful, but in this specific argument it is not helpful at all. Remember that you are trying to explore the idea that awareness is generated. Awareness is not an object of any kind so many logical rules that would apply to objects wouldn't apply to awareness. Do you know the difference between transformation and generation? In generation you get awareness appear from non-awareness. In transformation the state of awareness is modified. Various causes and effects can indeed modify the state of awareness. What they cannot do is generate awareness from non-awareness. Please understand that awareness is grander than any specific object of awareness and it's grander than any specific modification. So again, you have nothing. If you didn't abuse my position and just stuck with making intelligent comments, I would have explained it to you all the sooner. Instead you've managed to piss me off and delayed the explanation. You're lucky I even wrote this post, because I seriously was considering not talking to you again. I can't talk to someone who warps what I am saying.

It's irrelevant because the effect is small and uniform. Remember we're not talking about the success of any one single action/intent here (when the uncertainty principle would be relevant). We're talking about awareness in general.

I'm ignoring the rest of your post since already you misrepresent my position. I didn't make that assumption. My argument is like this: 1. Maybe awareness has something outside it, maybe not: 2a. It has something outside it. 2aa: Split the outside into two kinds, something that is outside in a fundamental and permanent manner and something that is outside only temporarily. Treat these two possibilities differently. 2aaa: Fundamentally outside -- irrelevant. 2aab: Temporarily outside but otherwise knowable at least in principle -- relevant and treated in 2b. 2b. Nothing is outside it and all things are only inside of it. 2ba: whatever is inside is empty and a fragment of a larger context, thus cannot be the source of that which is larger than itself. The leg of the chair is not the source of the chair, etc... a part of something cannot be a source of the whole. Done. So as you can see, I investigate two domains. What's inside, and what is possibly outside. I don't assume shit. Whatever is inside is empty. Whatever is outside is of two kinds, and I treat both scenarios with strong logic. Since you weren't able to present this properly, I now terminate this discussion. This is not an acceptable way to behave. I will say that what you're doing now is basically either malice or trolling at this point. Because of this I may never want to talk to you again. It's one thing to disagree. It's another thing to butcher what I am saying for your own selfish and myopic jollies.

You'd need to first understand my view before you could further it. So far you don't appear to understand it since you don't talk directly to the statements I make, and instead you decided to bring up all kinds of tangential and irrelevant information such as 'uncertainty principle' which is utterly irrelevant in this discussion, since we're discussing awareness which is an exceptional topic and ordinary considerations do not apply. If awareness was an object among objects, we could treat it in an ordinary manner. It is not, so we cannot. Another example of breaking the rules of logic is demanding a positive proof of absence, which is never done in philosophy. You know who constantly requests an absolute proof of absence? Theologists do and they are laughed at (rightly so) when they want people to absolutely positively prove that God doesn't exist. There are excellent reasons to live life as if God doesn't exist regardless of God's true status, but theologists will have none of it. They want a positive iron-clad proof of absence from those who don't accept God. Of course since theologists have been at it for so long, by now they know it's a dumb demand that won't be honored, so they know when to give up and they've learned to simply agree to disagree and they proudly invoke "faith" as the answer to this problem. I've said this before: matter is pysicalists' God. Matter cannot be demonstrated. It cannot be proven. We know concrete objects can't be made of matter because they are empty in the Buddhist sense. So there is no way to establish any kind of substance behind appearances. Scientists simply assume it, but they are not stupid enough to think they can ever prove it. They know it's an assumption. Matter is an article of blind faith among the scientific community. No scientist has ever been able to prove the existence of matter and in fact, the scientists are absolutely baffled by consciousness. Consciousness simply doesn't fit into the materialistic paradigm. Some have even gone so far as to say we're not actually conscious. Your points are all tangential and irrelevant indeed when it comes to contradicting what I am saying. I know what you're trying to say. You're basically saying "you don't know any better than any other human.. how can you be so certain? Can you positively prove non-existence of something fundamentally beyond awareness? No? I thought so. Bahaha... keep an open mind.. anything is possible." That's basically your entire argument. It's full of gibberish and nonsense. You don't engage any specific point I make unless I put a metaphorical gun to your head. Like when I gave you a list of 6 points, you responded to point number 5 in a direct and honest manner. When I countered that equally directly and equally honestly, you responded with evasions, tangents, irrelevant stuff of all kinds. The only thing you said that was even remotely interesting was a psychological concern which has nothing to do with hard logic of the situation. Your psychological concern was "if everything is awareness, why does it seem like my intent has limits? Won't I go crazy trying to exercise intent against objects which are outside my intent?" That was a valid concern but it was not one of logic. It was a reflection of unfamiliarity and fear. It's like a concern of someone who watches a strong man lift 900 lbs and says, "This weight will kill me if I try it." It may even be true. But it doesn't mean that people lifting 900 lbs is an illogical proposition. It just means there is a pragmatic concern.

No, I will not try to reiterate your worldview. I feel like you have no idea what my view really is and you're arguing against straw men of various kinds. In particular, when I read your last post, I found so much irrelevant and tangential information in it, so much stuff I disagree with and want to object to, that I found it not worth my time to respond. I'd have to object to every line of everything you write for many reasons and it's too much and serves no purpose, since you're not really engaging me at all. You don't argue directly against my claims. Once again you're trying to squeeze through the side door. But this time I am familiar with that approach and I'm not going to entertain it. From where I stand, you've offered absolutely nothing, no objection worth even a penny against anything I've proposed. And I've tried to dumb everything down so that even a 12 year old can understand. I gave both detailed expositions and arguments and brief simple mother-approved summaries. I tried everything. I feel like you have no desire to even try to entertain what I am saying. In fact, I have no idea what your goal really is. My goal is to present a view that different from the norm. Physicalism is the norm. I present reasons for rejecting it. That's my goal. My goal is accomplished. So from now on every post I make on this thread is purely extracurricular.