goldisheavy

Interesting. This made me recall that the manifestedness of things is not a binary state in my view; it's not an exclusive either/or term as in "it's either manifest or it's not." In daily experience manifestation occurs viscerally as in the case with the bottle of ginger ale, then slightly less viscerally as is the case with your ongoing thoughts about that bottle, and even slightly less viscerally as is the case of the subtle impressions that hover underneath your thoughts (it's possible to become aware of some of these), and smoothly down to the point where we are not overtly aware of knowledge. In case where we are not overtly aware of some knowledge, it's still possible to become aware of it through heavy duty analytical contemplation, by making a valid logical inference. I don't think the unmanifest arises at all. I described the unmanifest as a set of all possible experiences. These possibilities cannot be said to arise or subside in the grand scheme of things. Of course in a practical sense falling down while walking on the street is more likely than floating upward into the sky, and this has to do with our own conditioning and habit energies. In the grand scheme of things every experience is possible because there is nothing in the sense fields that blocks or disallows certain experiences. To use a metaphor, the movie screen doesn't block or disallow any specific kind of movie. So if we notice that most movies tend to be action movies, we can't blame the screen for it and we can't say the movie screen is limited. Our sense fields allow for limitless possibilities and it's only our habit energies, beliefs and intent that keep our life in a relatively confined and predictable way. Now the materialist here would say that the world itself has built-in limitations, such as laws of physics, and that these limitations are external to mind, etc. I reject all such talk.

Ralis, why do you care what his past is like? What if he was a God in his past life? How should it matter? It's true that many people use such intimations to enhance their personal status and to lend more credence to what they're saying. However, as long as we all know that the imagery of the past is playful and empty, why do we still need to curb it? There would be a problem if Vajra was denying you your "high" memories while simultaneously asserting his own "high" memories. I don't think he's doing that. It would also be a problem if Vajra said something like, "Because I have more past memories than you, I am better than you, so you should listen to me and not the other way around." I don't think he's saying that. When I hear Vajra talk about his past lives, it doesn't bother me. I can neither prove or disprove any of it, and it all sounds to me like music that's occurring to a deaf man. Anyway, the past memories don't make one special or better, even if your past memory is of being a 5th Dalai Lama. You can still be a moron. Also, because identities are empty, it's very possible for multiple people to have the same past life memory. In other words, it's very easily possible for one Dalai Lama to have 1 million reincarnations. This certainly takes the shine off it, doesn't it? When the commodity is no longer scarce, the price drops.

I mostly agree with you here Lucky, but I have to say that I am manifest and unmanifest at the same time. Without my unmanifest aspects my manifest aspects make no sense. So I cannot view myself as merely the manifest portion. Of course the manifest is the most obvious and prominent feature of who I am to myself, but it's not all. I don't have firm and clear delineations about myself.

It's an infinite set of all possible experiences. ... which cannot be established as having inherently existed and thus is simply the empty nature of reality. When it comes to this infinite set of possibilities, there is nothing that it depends on. So while you cannot establish inherency for it, you also cannot establish dependence, unlike with say a chair, which is clearly dependent on wood, floors and so forth. So this infinite set of possibilities depends on nothing whatsoever. This is why we say the mind is unborn upon the final analysis. Sort of. As long as you don't have a mistaken idea about the character of conditions, it's a true enough statement. If you think conditions themselves are immutable, like say the laws of physics, then that's an obscuration of insight. Forget about the flower. I am talking about something vastly more abstract than a flower. I'm talking about an infinite set. It can't be analyzed in the same way as a flower.

It's an infinite set of all possible experiences.

The unmanifest potential is shared. Of course potential is not a thing per se, but it's wrong to say we don't share anything.

No problems. It's actually a good thing. If you never disappointment me, then I could accidentally mistake you for an inanimate object. It's good to know your friends are alive.

The idea of an entity tends to carry two attendant ideas. One attendant idea is that entities are the way they are in and of themselves. So for example, a table is just inherently a table. And a chair is inherently a chair, independent of anything else, such as context or a state of mind. Second idea has to do with delineation. So for example, a chair is not a floor because the floor starts where the chair ends. The chair is also not air that's around it, because the air starts where the chair stops. And so on. I have problems with both of these implications of "entity-ism", but not in equal amounts. The first idea can be rejected easily and comfortably. There is nothing inherent in a chair that makes it a chair. The second idea I cannot completely reject. Why not? Because while I do see that delineations are arbitrary and mind-made, as long as you recognize that fact, they aren't false. Delineations bring trouble if we assume they are more solid than they are. If we assume that reality comes with prepackaged delineations, that's a problem and I reject such an assumption. Nonetheless delineations are an inescapable fact of mind-life. After all, if you ceased delineating, how would you know it? You'd know it because you'd recognize a difference between delineation and non-delineation. In other words, you can't cease the process of delineation, you can only see it for what it is and regulate it responsibly, if you wish. Delineation itself has two subdivisions. Mundane and rarely understood. Mundane delineations have to do with separating one manifested thing from another manifested thing. So for example, separating the chair from the floor it rests on is a mundane delineation. Rarely understood delineation is separating manifest from the potential. So for example, I feel warm now, but I could also be feeling cold. I don't feel cold right now, but I know what feeling cold is like. So by feeling warm, even though I don't currently feel cold, I have established a delineation between the current warmth and the potential cold. So in this last sense mindstreams are individualized because for each possible sequence of experiences there exist infinite other sequences that could have happened, but didn't. From this point of view mindstreams are personal. However! If you can include the field of potentiality into the mindstreams, in other words, to include the umanifest together with the manifest into the mindstream, then you can see we all have different manifest aspects, but we share one common pool of the unmanifest potential. Since there are no different all-potentials for each and every person, since the all-potential is one, the mind is ultimately one. That doesn't mean that the people who talk about the cosmic mind aren't full of erroneous fantasies. In practice it's possible for two mindstreams to never intersect in their manifested aspects and the idea of one common cosmic mind fails to convey and appreciate this possibility of constant non-intersection. So in short, the cosmic mind is somewhat wrong, but it's not as wrong as you imagine Xabir. Sadly this is absolutely false. If you kill someone, you'll immediately affect all kinds of people around you. If you kill someone, many people are affected far beyond just you and the victim. There are no thick walls surrounding each mindstream.

Steve, it's a figure of speech. I wasn't actually apologizing. I just used that expression to indicate that I disagree with your understanding of what a mindstream is. Although I did put it that way because in general I tend to like what you write and I agree with you a lot and often. So perhaps it also means I am disappointed that one of my favorite people is saying stuff that I consider to be very close to nonsense. So perhaps I am sorry for myself and my idealized image of wise Steve.

Interesting post, although I think you're being more kind to religion than it deserves. Religions, for the most part, lead people away from truth. That doesn't mean that all methods are the same. A good method must have an antidotal quality. If you have a presupposition that closes-off your view of reality, a good method has to either challenge that presupposition, or at least help in doing so. So methods aren't supposed to be random. A good method is tailored to the ignorance that a person might have. Because all people have slightly different assumptions and presuppositions, different methods are required for each person if enlightenment is your goal. I think religion is simply trash. This is especially true of the three big Abrahamic religions, and especially Islam. All of them are pure garbage that drives people into ignorance and hell. They're based on and fervently promote dogma and dogma is nothing other than a package of assumptions. Spiritual and non-religious people are slightly better, but they too fall into "one size fits all" method nonsense. For example look at the obsession with kundalini. How does kundalini challenge assumptions? I doesn't. In fact kundalini systems are themselves based on assumptions and presuppositions about mind and reality. It's much better to actually explore one's own mind via a testing than to assume something about it, and just keep doing it over and over as a daily practice. For example, "When the crown chakra opens, one becomes wise." What's that? It's an assumption. In fact, why tie wisdom to any element of experience? Why not this, "When your toes fall off, you become wise?" It's arbitrary. Of course people love their toes, so they're not going to tie wisdom development to their toes falling off. Still, it's arbitrary bullshit. So people who consider themselves spiritual are most often what I would call "spiritual." In other words, they're materialists who don't have a spiritual bone in their body and who simply take the assumptions about what they believe is a physical world and extend those same assumptions into the spiritual world (about which they have no clue whatsoever, as is evidenced by the fervent desire to find a Guru). Beliefs shouldn't be discarded. They should be examined and seen for what they are. No more. No less. Taking a negative attitude toward beliefs is the wrong way. Offering aversion as an antidote to attachment is a dangerous game. It can work and it can be effective, but you're playing with fire.

It depends on what you mean by "known." If you include the potential of knowing as "known", then yes, you're right. If you don't include it, then your mistake is failure to include such understanding. For further discussion I will define "known" to include potential for knowing in addition to manifested knowing. This is an appeal to ignorance since you can't possibly know if something exists outside mind. You have to take this statement on faith if you believe it. Awareness is self-animated. If you mean there is something unaware that animates awareness, then we are all doomed. Sorry, Steve.

You remember your yesterday, right? Roughly? Two weeks ago? Two years? Well, that's basically what your mindstream is. It's the stream of your mind as you live it, your inner life, which ultimately is all life. Where is the sensation of the car going down the street? The car is gown down the street, but where is the knowing of it? It's intimate, right? The car you saw, just how you saw it, is yours. No one else can talk about it in exactly the same way. That's mindstream. As for the real vs unreal debate, it's simple. It all comes down to disappointments. If you latch onto a description and demand more from it than it can give, you get a disappointment. If you do this habitually, that's called Samsara in Buddhism. So Samsara is essentially a stream of disappointments. The exact same mindstream, or mind life without disappointments, is Nirvana. Disappointments have to do with expectations and expectations have to do with the attachment to concrete and specific. When people think that the concrete things are real and the abstract is unreal, they become dedicated to the concrete, they become disappointment. When people treat abstract things as if they were concrete, they also get disappointment. If you don't take anything to be anything, but just leave it be however you please, then you get nirvana and no disappointments. This goes all the way from little freedom all the way to miraculously traveling through stone and all such things. So most real is in essence that which is more reliable and thus, least disappointing. Illusion is that which disappointments. Of course illusion is also that which entertains too. But illusion is only entertaining when you know it's an illusion and don't burden it with crazy expectations and presuppositions. Illusion without presuppositions is reality. Honest illusion is the truth. That's why it's a personal matter. Honesty is personal. When you're kidding yourself, only you can know it.

So what are they losing exactly?

I'm explaining the relevance of moods to ornaments. I'm not talking about liberation. People are interested in both. People want to be free and they want their lives to be beautiful.

When I sit in my chair, I feel pressure on my behind and my feet. That's feeling. To me all is a type of feeling, including what you refer to as "physical." As for the moods, it's hard to say. You can say they are feelings, but it's also equally correct to say that moods are abstract summaries of experience. When you listen to a song, you hear individual notes. However, it's possible to discern a general mood of the song. For example, some songs are nervous and jumpy. Others are leisurely. Some songs change in mood, some remain relatively constant. People who add music to movies and games are very sensitive to this and use this to highlight various moods in the movies or games. But what is a mood? Is it really its own feeling? I am not sure. I can say "I feel the mood" but then, it's not some feeling that's on par with all the other feelings I feel. It's a higher-order feeling, it's more general, and it can be said to be a general description or a summary of all of its constituent feelings. What is the feeling of a peaceful mood? If you say "I feel peaceful" what does it mean? Actually if you think about it, it doesn't mean anything specific. And yet we know what we mean, right? Peaceful can be someone sitting in a chair, or someone working a lathe, or someone who is running a marathon. It can be a deaf person and it can also be a quadriplegic who can't feel anything below the neck. That's what it means for something to be abstract. We know what it is, but we can't pin it down to anything concrete, nor to a combination of concrete perceptions. Because abstractions come in levels, smaller moods can be combined into a larger more overarching mood, and none of this is fixed. Moods are subject to change, if you wish.

I think what hurts us is not so much the focus on karma, but a really simplistic and wishful-thinking revenge-fantasies based karma. But, what's easier: to get people to develop a more realistic view, or to get people to drop the whole issue altogether? It may be easier to drop the issue of karma altogether as an expedient means. However, people still want to have a sense that their practice and life is not wasted, that in the next life, they'll be less stupid and better off than in this one. How can we support this narrative of improvement and continuation? Also, many people are uncomfortable that evil people get away with their evil without punishment. That's where the transcendent karma concept comes from. So if you want to get rid of the transcendent karma concept, you have to speak to all those concerns satisfactorily. The key word is "satisfactorily" as opposed to say, dismissively. In my opinion, the easier option in this case is not a better option. I think our ideas about karma are idiotic for the most part, especially when we think of concrete ways of how karma might manifest. But the idea of a mood is not a bad one I think. If you don't like the idea of a mood, why don't you like it? Can you explain it? I notice that there is definitely continuation between my day awareness and my dream awareness. If I am agitated during the day, my dreams can become agitated too. If I am peaceful during the day, my dreams tend to be peaceful. I notice that the mood has a continuation. To me that's a beneficial knowledge. I don't consider myself to be chained to my past. No way. All of my being is ready to change at any moment. But if I don't actively intend to change, what happens? Inertia. Inertia is intentional and meaningful too. So there is no bondage and neither myself nor Buddha believed in permanent accumulations of any kind. Buddha believed that karma was flexible and fluid and you could alter it significantly in one life. Karma is intent and the only limit to altering intent is one's beliefs. So I think for people with enlightened and examined beliefs, there is a possibility of fast change. For people with dogmatic and inflexible beliefs which result from lack of examination, there is a lesser possibility of change. But all in all the possibility for change is huge.

I agree. I see a lot of problems with many interpretations of karmic systems, including Buddhist ones. However, what I would say is that thought and actions produce a mental scent, or a general attitude of mind, and this general attitude sticks around after death and colors the events that happen later. So for example, if you commit many violent acts, it's not that people will be violent to you in turn in the next life, but there is a violent attitude coloring the life. Perhaps you will be violent again in the next life. Etc. So I don't see it as a tit-for-tat system. I see it as a kind of mood that developers in the mind and sticks around. So having, let's say a violent mood, results in a life where violence is common. It doesn't necessarily gets distributed in a fair manner. So karma, in my view, has nothing to do with fairness or getting one's just deserves. Overall negative moods are less pleasant than positive ones, so in a way a person who develops a negative mood does experience a negative side-effect, but it's not as obvious and as simplistic as people often describe, like if you kill in this life, in the next one you're killed in the same way. These descriptions are mostly childish fantasies in my view. Still, the moods are real. They're not permanent, but if the person persists the mood can be maintained for a while, whatever the mood is.

There is no such thing as "rapture". It's all religious bullshit. However, changes are happening, of course. But what time is free of change? Changes happen all the time. Someone could have said that the times during Martin Luther King Jr.'s activity were rapture. You can pick a lot of times in Earth's history and call them "raptures." It's meaningless to single some change out to call it "rapture." Let go of the religious bullshit and start using your own brain for a change. Think critically. Please!

The view of renunciation is not to be underestimated. I would say that anyone who promotes a positive view of the body doesn't really sit at the same level of insight as someone who promotes the view of renunciation. It's only after you completely exhaust every merit you possibly can glean from the view of renunciation that you can take up the ornamental beauty of phenomena as a view. For most people who are deeply, profoundly attached and in love with their bodies, the view that the body is a beautiful thing is a completely spiritually counter-productive and binding view. The only people who can beneficially consider the body to be a beautiful ornament are those who have matured their renunciation to utmost perfection and who hold to absolutely nothing in this world, including their own bodies, their family and nothing else. I will say without hesitation that for the vast majority of people renunciation is the skillful and expedient view that leads to liberation and insight development, not to mention siddhis if you care about such things. Renunciation is a powerful medicine and like with all medicine, overdoing it can be bad for you too. But considering that most of us don't suffer from aversion to our bodies but instead suffer from a super-strong attachment to our bodies, it's a good risk to take compared to lazily viewing the body as a wonderful thing.

It's interesting to watch, but what is there to say? "Nice form?" That's not a meaningful comment. Also, when it comes to yoga, I much prefer Jnana Yoga to Raja. If you posted something like a translation to Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, that would be more interesting to me than watching contortions.

When I said "a touch less" I really meant it. I know Wikileaks does need some level of hype for what they're doing, but I do think they could create a slightly more somber and less excitable atmosphere. Getting everyone's panties in a bunch 2 weeks before the leak has benefit and drawbacks too. It raises the profile of the Wikileaks project, but it also creates a false impression that more damage has been done in those minds that don't like Wikileaks. Compare it to cryptome.org. Cryptome also releases leaks, but it's very very low key. Thus, there was never any media hoopla about it and you might not even know about it. I think cryptome is too far on the "low key" end of the scale and wikileaks is too far on the "mega hype" end of the scale. There should be some entity that leaks things somewhere in the middle. It shouldn't be as low key and as invisible and under the radar as cryptome, but it should be less circus-like and melodramatic than Wikileaks. Because cryptome is so low key, no one thinks it's damaging anything even though it's been leaking all kinds of stuff for a very long time. At the same time, no one knows who or what cryptome is, and that's bad too. A fine balance is needed. Just my 2c.

For the most part I love Wikileaks and I support their overall mission. I only wish Wikileaks would be a touch less dramatic in their execution. I hope this will happen soon with the recent change in management. Julian just liked to get everyone riled up a bit too much for my liking. He liked to build tension and create hype. I think he was doing that to maximize exposure and impact, but this has also had some drawbacks to the mission of Wikileaks. I still like Julian even with his flaws as I see them.

What you fail to understand is that everything is a play of consciousness or mind. Even these words or the feelings of your body, such as the pressure on your butt when you sit, seeing cars roll down the street, and so on. All such sensations are the play of awareness. It's described like a blind man seeing rainbows, or like a deaf man hearing an orchestra. That's exactly how the world works, put simply. It's a bit more complicated than that, because experiential patterns have levels and structure based on your beliefs, and this structure can be discussed in more detail, and that's where it can get complicated. But if you step back from all that, the simple and honest truth is that all experience bar none is nothing more and nothing less than a play of awareness. This applies to dreaming and to waking experiences equally. So depending on how profound your understanding of imagination is, you can say that yes it's all imaginary. Kundalini is imaginary but so is this computer here.

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/12/07/lind_american_people/index.html

Couldn't agree more. I think somehow the USA government is becoming more distant from the people than ever and less beholden to the people. It's almost like a kind of mini-monarchy of sorts. Sure, certain people can get elected into it, but the field is not wide open, to say the least. It's an exclusive club with a lot of secrecy and while it should be serving the public, it feels like it's trying to rule the public instead, at least on some days. It's very disgusting. But then again, I was shocked back when they created "The Patriot Act" followed by FISA. This video just adds insult to injury, and I am not surprised to see the cocksucking Walton family assist the government in this. I hope they choke on their billions which they've earned on the backs of many wages slaves and many real Chinese slaves living in barracks and making Walmart products.