Nikolai1

In short, mind is not mediated by the senses...never has been, never will be. We do not therefore ever transcend physical mind or the senses. They are already transcended. Mundane existence is itself an OBE.

On any given subject there are four stages in the apprehension of truth. What prompts the growth to the higher stage is a complete mystery in normal empirical terms. It is prompted by a spontaneous intuition. So broadly speaking: Stage 1 This is where the person is aware of only one interpretation of the situation. This is therefore an absolutely indisputable fact, so ingrained in everyday perception that it isn't even noticed. Though there are always alternative perspectives to their own thesis, these neither occur to themselves nor are they witnessed as the opinion so of others. For 99% of the population terms like 'time' or 'space' are still understood at this first stage. Stage 2 In addition to the thesis of stage 1 the person becomes aware of the antithesis - an opposite view - usually through the interaction of another person. This person, however, is still strongly attached to the notion of 'truth'. (It is ironic that those most passionate about the truth are not the philosophers, but rather the unintelligent). The reaction to insurrection of the antithesis into consciousness is either total rejection, or total acceptance (which includes the total rejection of the stage 1 thesis). Their response to the antithesis is justified by some kind of appeal to an outer agency. This is either the convention of their society, or the opinion of some societally sanctioned 'expert' e.g."time is an illusion, Einstein said so" Where this appeal fails to silence the exponent of the antithesis, anger and aggression must ensue. Stage 3 A person at this stage is able to generate the antithesis to any given thesis, within themselves. This shows high intelligence, but at the same time the person is left in a state of limbo. The see the thesis and antithesis as equivalent. The notion of 'truth' becomes inoperable. Truth and falsehood become two sides of the same coin; one not only presupposes, but actually requires the other. This is a very difficult stage for many reasons. This level of intelligence is extremely rare in society and so there is a feeling of both alienation and a very often an attitude of aloofness. Furthermore, most of the world's activities and occupations are based and inspired by opinions formed at stages 1 and 2. This person's intelligence is generally regarded as something quite useless, and so they are often dismissed as being in some way unintelligent. intellectual truth and practical expression are always side by side, but at this stage there is a noticeable divergence. Stage 4 This is the stage I think spotless was referring to. The person no longer expects their behaviour to be rationally based. They no longer try to ascertain the truth about reality and then act in accordance with it. It is the opposite of the scientific approach respected at the lower levels. Behaviour is spontaneous, and, because not based on any putative laws of reality, is unpredictable and unfathomable. Truth is expressed directly as a behavioural response to the moment. Just to clarify: we do not ascend through these stages as one integrated self. Most people are at different stages for different issues. For example, even the unintelligent don't intellectually debate whether the coffee mug is an intrinsically right-handed tool - they just use it, and if the handle is on the wrong side they unconsciously swivel it. But the same person might be at stage 2 when it comes to the best brand of coffee and get angry when people disagree. The highly intelligent, on the other hand, are able to spontaneously express stage 4 truth concretely through their behaviour in a very wide variety of circumstances.

Yes to the Astral Monk posts, Intelligence is the ability to be sceptical of truth. It leads you to see the emptiness of truth, or at least, to realise that truth is not a thing that exists in some situations and not others. We see that truth is something that has no opposite. Truth is always there. Why is accepting this so terrifying? Why is it so depressing? Why do do many of us see the emptiness of truth and still spend years afterwards trying to prove ourselves wrong, and flail around still trying to intellectualy anchor ourselves in a sea that is too deep for our anchor? Why have so many of forerunners been unable to live with this excruciating insight? Whether you go mad like Nietszche or die young like Kierkegaard and Camus, there is a very real possibility that you will not survive this crisis of the intellect. Just living in the truth of the moment is difficult and very scary. It means that we must truly, truly go it alone. A life lived in the wilderness alone is positively companionable if you have the old belief in truth to keep you company. But this is properly going it alone. You must reconcile yourself to each and every moment and not deny nor run from any of it. And you may not gain the comfort of like minds or belief in facts to justify your course through life. You must absolutely and eternally CHOOSE FOR YOURSELF and with ABSOLUTELY NO CRITERIA with which to make the choice. It makes you feel sick just to think of it. I have days when I think I'll succeed and days where I think I'm not strong enough. I comfort myself that Nietszche went mad because he had no one to go before him. I at least have Nietszche's example as a cautionary tale. Nietszche sacrificed himself for me, a form of atonement. But I must not pronounce him holy he would have hated that

Logical truth only comes after an arbitrary decision about what we take as the predicates. Logic therefore only has the power to demonstrate what we already believe. Then we have truths like I have ten fingers. This type of truth may be false tomorrow after I tackle my woodpile with the chainsaw. It is therefore as shifty as provisional as the fashions that created the predicates in the logical argument. There comes a point where truth loses its meaning for us, and like you said we are left only with experience.

Here's something from blog that speaks to this post: All swans are white. If we think this is a falsehood then this depends on how we define the swan. Once, swans were defined as large, white birds with long, S-shaped necks. Their whiteness was a defining feature of the swan, and if the bird wasn’t white then it wasn’t a swan. Later, fashions for defining swans changed. We became more interested in their musculoskeletal characteristics then their plumage. If we encountered a bird with the S-shaped neck and the musculoskeletal characteristics then we started calling it a swan, even if the bird was black. In the future, when the genotype of the swan is mapped we might, for reasons of heredity, find ourselves calling a bird a swan, even if it doesn’t have the S-shaped neck and comes in all manner of colours. So, which is the better, truer definition of the swan? The plumage-based definition, the musculoskeletal definition, or the genetic definition? Or indeed any of the infinite ways in which we might define a swan? Call? Colour of eye or bill? Etc? This is important to know because unless we know the best way to define a swan our opening statement ‘all swans are white’ is in a terrible logical limbo: To the plumage-definer the statement is true; to the musculoskeletal-definer it is false. This means that the statement is both true and false, depending on your perspective of what a swan is. In other words, all swans seem to be both P and not-P. To resolve this intolerable contradiction it is necessary for us to explain what a swan really is – what is the definition of the true swan? How do you know? If you can manage this then you may, with justification, go on to resolve the contradiction. If you cannot manage this then we are not logically permitted to step beyond the contradiction: So, ‘swans are both P and not-P’ becomes the most illogical, and at the same time, logical viewpoint to hold. I wonder where this leaves logic?

Thoughts are never our thoughts. They pass before us like the landscape outside the window of the train. We cannot create them or control them. They are simply the features of an absolutely external realm. This landscape can be be busy or crowded, or it can be vast and serene. The busy, crowded realm is flittered by spiky weeds and vermin. They are the 'I do this, I think that' thoughts. They capture our eye and scatter the light of our awareness. As the train leaves this landscape the weeds and vermin gradually became scarce. Then for miles there is nothing to be seen. Suddenly a magnificent oak comes into view and we see it and know it and understand it with all the power of our awareness. These thoughts, these aboriginal oak like thoughts, full our existence with beauty and purpose. They are the reason we took the train. But never forget that we are simply the passengers watching it all go by. The weedy 'I thoughts' distract us so much that our weak attention becomes wholly absorbed in them. We lose ourselves in them. But they are not who we actually are. They are nothing to do with us. We do not even think them. Thinking is what the vermin thoughts do. Thinking is the abhorrent activity of an entirely alien breed. We, ourselves, do not think. We cannot think. All we can do is mistakenly believe that we can think. Allow the thoughts that pass to be their own reality. This allowing is to take the journey from the pestilential plain, to the Oak studded highlands.

Hey Yasjua - I won't be offended if you attack it. Show me what's wrong with it. Which bits did you particularly hate? I wrote this because it is the description of an ultra dualism. Like the chasm between God and man, this is the chasm between Self and all else. It's a view we don't often hear I think. I actually wrote this semi-ironically but at the same time I can see that the argument is as valid as anything else out there.

Just a few more thoughts to contribute... The worldview of the average person is fundamentally dualistic. Reality is split up into that which we can control by individual will, and that which occurs of it's own accord. Events in nature occur according to their own inviolable law. We can learn to understand them and participate in this laws, but their fundamental nature is fixed and external to us. We must accommodate ourselves to them. Standing against this is our individual will, which can purposefully interact with nature according to our own desires. We can use our understanding of the laws of nature to our own advantage and, within their constraints, carve a creative individual path. Laws of nature are either secular or divine, it makes no difference. Whether God's inviolable decree, or just the way he universe exploded, either way things are as they are and the rules can't be changed by us. Individuality is the freedom to choose and create according to our own vision. It is also not knowing what will come next, and considering tour human brothers and sisters more unpredictable and inscrutable than the cosmos. The normal view is to hold both of these side by side and to not feel the logical conflict. It is to switch between freedom and necessity as the situation requires. Once we have felt the conflict there is a tendency to subsume one view into the other. The determinist considers freedom of the will an illusion, along with creativity. The novel occurrence is simply the part of the pattern not previously noticed. The existentialist, on the other hand, points out that the future can never be discerned from the past and so we must always live our life at the frontier, never knowing where our behaviours will take us. This radical unknowing is experienced as a dizzying freedom. These two viewpoints can be elaborated even further and made transcendental. In terms of experience this flight into transcendence is to rise above the duality of self and other. But at the intellectual level this transcendence is still susceptible to two types of explanation. The transcendental determinist recognises that the world continues as it does according to its own mysterious ways, but that the Self does not and can not participate in the world. Any illusion of participation must be radically surrendered. Any given experience of the world is a transient irrelevance. Nathan Gill, Tony Parsons both take this view. The transcendental existentialist recognises that the world itself, even the laws of nature, are part of our own creation. We have the power to shape and mould events on a cosmic scale. We must radically renounce any dependence on God or the universe and take absolute responsibility. In doing this we can learn to love and enjoy our experience and take proud ownership of it. This is reminiscent of much of he channeled stuff eg the Seth Material. I think any awakened being is likely to carry their former tendencies into their awakened state and their new worldview will fall into one or other category. And this will shape the kind of sage that they are. What do we all think?

Hi Thislife, Thank you for all this great material you are posting. I have no doubt that all these non-dualists have had truly liberating breakthroughs and I admire the purity of their message. But at the same time I can't help but think that there is a difference in degree between their awakening and that of, say, Ramana Maharshi or Buddha or Jesus. And the difference between them has something to do with the way they understand their experience. Although they deny that there is anyone to understand anything, still, their manifestation of the truth has a shallowness. And this shallowness is due to their insistence that their phenomenal existence has nothing to do with their actual identity. I'd be interested to know what you think? Is there a difference between Ramana Maharshi and Tony Parsons? (and of course everyone else please contribute!)

As we distance ourselves from the thoughts and let them flow past, the thoughts themselves change in nature. They become much more vivid, and also much more authentic. In fact they start to approach a level of authenticity that we associate with actual objects. Thoughts, you could say, evolve into objects which have a much higher level of reality and are therefore much more rewarding to observe. This is why I disparage the everyday level of thought and call it vermin. Although in its nature it is identical to higher thought, it is unrewarding and often downright painful. I liked the material you posted a lot, but the speaker didn't point out the change that occurs in actual experience once we start to dissociate from thought and disown its activity. Thanks for posting

Here in Finland,at nearly eleven it he morning,it's turning dark and the birds are returning to roost. But what does it mean?

A really good article on this subject. In fact this writer is pretty awesome in general. http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/loy3.htm

The ability to see illness as something that will pass IS knowing your true self! The moment we get lost in an illness we are no longer our true selves but locked in a local vision.

You WILL recover! You definitely will.

One point I've heard him make many times is that belief in the myth as literal truth strips it of its force - a force that resides in it being a metaphor for a spiritual reality. So he sees half the people taking the idea of God as literal truth, and the other half seeing it as a falsehood. And neither really understanding the ineffable reality to which the myth of God points. But of course human history is the story of people failing to see myth as myth but as truth, and then fighting thosevwho see it otherwise. It is almost inevitable that he viewed modern science as the myth of our times. It is the one thing that nearly everyone is incapable of viewing as myth, and is therefore an extremely potent myth. But...Campbell did not make this point explicitly at all. I think the point can literally not be made. It is too radical and incomprehensible to nearly everyone.

Thanks a lot, but I can't find any such book.

I agree, attachment to scripture is an individual spiritual trait. Most of the highest teachings warn against it, but there are many people incapable of truly hearing it. In fact they turn the vey advice into more scripture.

You can be honest but commit all kinds of villainy because you are foolish. And you can be very honest but very self-centred. Surely there's more to virtue than honesty?

I think all this virtues link together like a chain. You can't be kind unless you're wise, and you can't be wise unless your selfless, an you can't be selfless unless your happy and so on...

Hi 9th I tried to choose my words carefully to get the subtlety and thanks to Stosh for pointing out the many ways regret can be interpreted. I think the persecuted gay person has to confront the fact that they are a source of disgust. This needs to be faced quite squarely and with the spirit of responsibility. Trying to pass the blame onto the persecutor by deriding what Aaron called 'spiteful childlike behaviour' is not the solution. This is the same kind of quasi-solution we see in homophobics who wish only that gay people stop being gay and behave normally. Both appeal to a standard of moral conduct that is spurious. So I wish the gay person to take responsibility and atone for the disgust they bring into the world. This is done by bravely accepting both their sexuality and the disgust it brings. When both of these are fully accepted then love is free to come in. Love for any kind of bigoted perpetrator can only come in when we recognise that they suffer because of us. We are the poison that afflicts them. The spirit of contrition for our own selves enables love to flow. Expectation that the other be contrite and not us stems the flow of love. As I'm sure you've realised, I would offer the exact same advice to any homophobic person. All of us need to follow the same advice Moral judgement is never rational. There is no correct or incorrect mode of behaviour. At the behavioural level, morality is always a relativistic concept. But in terms of our own individual attitude, there is an infallible moral truth and it is called Love.

I think what 4bsolute is describing is actually one of those big breakthroughs in insight, and to dwell on the perspective of the unmoving centre is powerful practice. To think we just move around in a fixed landscape is just the normal view. When we see that it is also the case that the landscape moves within us we are given a sharp jolt. Who exactly are we? We are neither in the world, nor is the world in us. Both are just interpretations of reality and can't both be the final answer of who we in fact are. This realisation drives us deeper and makes us see that our identity is prior to any reality - whether moving or fixed.

And sadly homosexuality staggers people, it is one of the few taboos that are truly global, and arouses deep and genuine disgust in many, if not most people. The moral task for the persecuted homosexual is to ensure that love, understanding and empathy are extended to those that persecute them. It may help if you focus on the negative feelings towards your persecutors, sit with them, and then remember that you cause these same negative emotions in others. By taking responsibility for the disgust you bring to others you are then in a position to truly and creatively find love for them. Your abhorrence of your own hurt will make you want to atone for the hurt you cause to others. Love for your prosecutors is the only solution. But most of all do not change who you are or what you are. You must be simultaneously proud of being gay, and regretful of the hurt it causes. A most difficult tightrope to walk, but hugely hugely beneficial for your practice.

Hi forest - I think you should bear in mind the distinction between technology and the discourse that is used to describe and explain said technology. Technology can make rapid gains, even within a theological society with a theological worldview. Islam in the middle ages is the obvious example. The problem Sheldrake correctly identifies is when dogmatic attachment to discourse inhibits technological advance hat is inspired by other discourses.

I feel very sympathetic to what everyone is saying here but especially Hundun. I've long realised that there is a certain quality, that is undoubtedly some kind of cognitive excellence, that is necessary for realisation. But at the same time, it has nothing to do with intelligenc as conventionally defined. I find myself calling it wisdom, but it is a wisdom that a child can already possess at 10 and which some adults die without ever attaining. Such people can be very high functioning but at the same time seem incapable of learning from their mistakes and commit the same negative patterns of behaviour over and over until they die. A child at 14 may make the same kind of blunder at 14 and resolve never to make it again, and they don't. What could cause such a disparity in the human mind is a complete mystery. For some people this wisdom develops slowly over the lifespan, but others it eludes entirely. Unsatisfactory though it is, many people develop a concept of soul age to account for this mysterious cognitive capacity. In other words, some people are born with a wisdom that has been acquired in former lifetimes. As this thread is on self enquiry, we can quote Ramana Maharshi who himself said " A competent person who has already, perhaps in a previous incarnation, qualified himself realises the truth and abides in peace as soon as he hears it told to him just once, whereas one who is not so qualified has to pass through the various stages before attaining samadhi." What Hundun has called existential depression is a characteristic of what new age circles define as mature and old souls.

Dreambliss clearly asked a good question because it has led to a lot of high quality replies!