What is magic? How does magic work?

[goldisheavy]

What do you mean "where"?

 

How does the theory of yin and yang explain the appearance of red as a color.

[Todd]

In the interest of time, I'm gonna try the replying to quotes approach.

 

Kind of. Think about it. You see what you want to see. Agree? Yes, what you observe, be it this computer screen here, or some subtle and very abstract object of consciousness such as a belief, is intentional.

 

We weren't talking about what is seen, we were talking about what sees. Is intent what sees?

 

Moreover, many beliefs are best observed in action. In other words, when you observe yourself act in a certain way is when you can more truly observe what you actually believe as opposed to what you profess to believe.

 

I find that sometimes there is a difference between what I profess to believe or what I sort of wished I believed, and what I actually believe. That difference is a disturbing one, and in my opinion, not seeing my beliefs clearly has made my life more difficult than it needs to be in some sense. Of course in another sense, everything is just as it should be, so there is no problem.

 

In particular experimenting inside lucid dreams can demonstrate very clearly how beliefs exist and operate in a way that we weren't aware of at first. This has been an essential process for me.

 

I'm glad that it works for you.

 

Maybe you're confused. You think seeing clearly means filling your field of vision with objects that have sharp, crisp outlines.

 

This is where you are confused. I do not think seeing clearly means filling my field of vision with objects that have sharp, crisp outlines. What gave you that impression? I knew my description of it was impressionistic, but I am surprised that you got this from what I wrote.

 

That could very well be seeing unclearly. Maybe seeing clearly is seeing everything muddy and washed out. When you look for clarity, you're looking for some kind of preferential vision, are you not?

 

If not, then you'll recognize there is ultimately no such thing as seeing things clearly. Everything is already as clear as it will ever be, in a sense.

 

For the most part I agree. Except that clarity is clear, not preferential. Clarity can be of confusion, or sorrow, or anything. Looking for clarity is preferential, and I don't see anything wrong with preferences. The relative clarity is relative (really a relationship between consciousness and absolute clarity), and absolute clarity can take any form and so is diminished by nothing.

 

And yet, many of us are unhappy. Some of that unhappiness is necessary and we shouldn't get rid of it. But some of it, I think, is wasted or unnecessary unhappiness that we can do better without. To actually know what is what requires one to have a huge, very wide perspective.

 

This hugeness is of two kinds. One kind of hugeness is to get very very close to things and to see the details of operations. Another hugeness is to get very very far from things and to see the big picture. If you only see the big picture but not the minutia, or if you only see the minutia but not the big picture, then your vision is not yet mature. You have to see it all. Everything. From every level of magnification. From at least 2, or even 100 perspectives, simultaneously.

 

I agree, though it doesn't necessarily have to be simultaneous. Such simultaneity is one of those perspectives.

 

There is. All seeing is contextualized, and from the point of view of that context, it is indeed directional and intentional. But don't take my word for it. Just keep paying attention as you already have. Challenge yourself.

 

I don't agree that context necessitates direction or intention. If you could clarify this point, that might be helpful. My experience is that seeing can happen at a level that introduces no direction. It is as if the seeing happens as things return to nothingness. Relative clarity of seeing has a way of impacting the next arising, in that the clearer the seeing, the more freedom there is in the next arising, hence the tendency of things to change that before seemed stable.

 

I've had an profound visionary experience long time ago when I've experienced nothing less than the Omniscience itself. I've seen all things unmade and remade. I was God. I saw it all and knew it all and there was nothing left for me to see or to know. And yet a friend I had at the time challenged me and questioned the meaning of my experience. He didn't demean anything or denigrate it. He just questioned it in an honest way. This is the best thing that happened to me. Why so? Because I've become infinitely more omniscient since then. I've exposed many more prejudices and biases on my part. I've exposed emotional attachments I didn't think I had. And so on. In other words, contemplation really opened my eyes in ways that the experience of omniscience alone could not.

 

Peak experiences most often have a component of interpretation to them. It is the interpretation that makes them "peak", just as it is the interpretation that makes low experiences low. For example, Omniscience is a somewhat arbitrary word choice, though it does color one's experience of what it refers to. That is not to say that there are not many different non-ordinary experiences that one might have, but as you refer to somewhere else in here, wisdom itself is not a peak experience, and it doesn't lie in any of these interpretive colorings.

 

It is then I realized that nothing is wasted. Nothing is completely wrong. Omniscience is not completely right. Our relative experience is not completely wrong or completely mundane. They illumine one another. This illumines that. That illumines this. There is interplay. All is valuable in terms of vision. Muddy vision is essential to clear seeing. Confusion is perfect knowledge. Perfect knowledge is confusion. Confusion is confusion. Perfect knowledge is perfect knowledge. I got this understanding only on the back of experience and contemplation, combined.

 

I agree.

 

Now it's been some time, and I can honestly say that if I had to let go of my contemplation or of my experience, and I had to lose one, I'd choose to lose the experience of omniscience. Because contemplation over the long term is that much more powerful.

 

Seems like it would be a good choice.

 

The so-called peak experiences are powerful and precious. If I can, I want it all. I don't want to have to discard something. But at the same time, worship of the peak experience is false, because it sells short what can be learned from the ordinary experience. (And in my book lucid dreaming is an ordinary experience that anyone can easily experience, if so desired, unlike Omniscience, which is not whatsoever easily experienced.)

 

I don't really agree here. The particulars of your Omniscience experience may never be experienced by any given person, not would I suggest that it should be, but an intimate experience of the source of that experience is readily available to anyone who is interested.

 

 

Interesting that it is this conversation that prompts you to describe something you've never even tried to describe before. What do you think is the significance of that? Or perhaps you think it's all random?

 

I often do things that I have never done before, so in that sense its not particularly significant. On the other hand, there is a quality to this conversation that is not usual, though similar to (and obviously not identical to, thank god) experiences that I have had with other people.

 

Well, if we go with "my" theory of envisioning, then the answer is "a lot."

 

What exactly is your theory of envisioning again? I'm sorry if I am being dense.

 

I make a distinction between peak spiritual experiences and wisdom. It's possible to get started on the spiritual path thanks to a strong peak experience. It's not possible to get started on the spiritual path thanks to the perfection of wisdom.

 

This is a very useful distinction to make. The experience that I shared was not a peak spiritual experience, primarily because I was not seeking it and I had no context for it, so I didn't have much basis to interpret it, hence it was not "peak". Given that I did not do any of those things, then it slipped right in and went very deep and radically changed my life without my knowledge. It began a process, which is what I was referring to when I said "deeper movement" several times in my last post. This deeper movement is how wisdom interacts with my manifestation (though I'm pretty sure I can come up with a better description than that some other time, since that one feels pretty off). You might say that it kicked off an intensified process of contemplation.

 

If you are talking about perfection of relative wisdom, then I agree. If you are talking contact with perfected wisdom, I strongly disagree. I think this contact exists before there is any consciousness of it, and that we are all on a spiritual path, like it or not.

 

You probably got lucky that one time. I bet you can't repeat such experience at will. Am I right or wrong?

 

Yes I got lucky, though that is an arbitrary judgement. The actual experience.. no, can't repeat that at will. Access to what it revealed, yes, assuming I am interested and not too caught up in mind stuff. It is automatic in a lot of ways, though interest definitely can highlight it, or more importantly, allow it to function.

 

I can't return to my state of omniscience voluntarily because I am voluntarily bound up here right now. When I experienced omniscience back then, I was lucky and not lucky at the same time. I'll try to describe both elements.

 

I was lucky because I had a period in life when I didn't have to worry about much. I was lucky because no one was blocking my meditation and contemplation efforts. I was lucky because if I wanted some teaching, I got it (Internet, book store, etc.). I was lucky because I didn't have a Guru who brainwashed me with dogma and tradition. I was lucky because my parents did not brainwash me pro- or con- spirituality and they didn't brainwash me into any religion. I was also lucky because I had no idea how much impact that which I wanted would have on me. So I had the strength and the courage of the naive. It's like a man bravely walking into fire for the first time, because the man has no idea of what the fire is like. So I was lucky to be ignorant. Ignorance is different from a true lack of prejudice because an ignorant man is indifferent on the account of not knowing any better. A truly unprejudiced man knows what to expect, understands the process, and still is not prejudiced despite that knowledge. So I kind of had a naive lack of prejudice born of ignorance.

 

But in which way was my experience not due to luck?

 

It was not luck because I intended my experience to happen and when it was ongoing, I was a willing participant. It was not luck because I've prepared myself for the experience by putting my mind in a helpful perspective, by certain kinds of meditation and so on.

 

After the experience one could say I understood everything there was to ever understand. At the same time, I didn't fully own my understanding at that time. The understanding wasn't my bitch. It was still in awe of it. I was still bending my knee to my understanding. I was still not able to see every kind of connection between the extraordinary and the ordinary. I could see some connections, but not every kind. I was on my way to becoming the Lord, but not quite Lord yet. It was kind of like a prince who's been in the throne room.

 

So peak experience is not at all useless, but contemplation is key. Peak experience is optional. Contemplation isn't. Peak experiences come and go. They have a start, middle and end. The fruit of contemplation is a new way to live, a new direction in life... it doesn't come and go. It's stable. And it is more mystical than the mystical, because ordinary mystical states exist in contradistinction to the non-mystical states. Like black against white. But the contemplative mystery includes everything into it. It's not black or white. It's not non-mystical or mystical. It's not anything specific and yet it is. See? It's vastly superior. It represents the ultimate flexibility of mind and true power and not just some pretty vision of beautiful things in a consumerist fashion where you are the helpless consumer of a pretty vision.

 

The Lord stuff seems like added interpretation to me. But whatever floats your boat.

 

As "the fruit of contemplation" does not come and go, then it always is. This is what I point to.

 

Yes, true contemplation is not a technique. It is truly alive and it cannot be predicted. It's not dead or routine. If your thinking is completely directed by some kind of template, then it has less value because it's not your thinking. It's not sincere.

 

Contemplation is sincere, deep and calm meditative thinking.

 

I agree, but didn't you say that it can also be active?

 

Are they helping you now? If yes, good. If not, do you need help? If not, good. If yes, what kind of help are you looking for?

 

I don't relate to you in terms of your teachings. I enjoy you for the most part and find that interacting with you develops my understanding, though not in a categorically different way than interacting with any aspect of life accomplishes a similar task. I admit that I have some resistance to times that you misinterpret things that I say, though I don't know if you misinterpret more than others or if you are just more honest in sharing your judgements.

 

Being thrown back on what you always had... you mean like when I ask you to look at the beliefs you always had?

 

Well, since there was a time that I did not have this particular set of beliefs, however long ago, these beliefs are not what I have always had. I've found significant value in examining my beliefs, but it hasn't been the main thrust of my path, which has been becoming sensitive to, trusting and following the deeper movement.

 

Maybe you shouldn't try to be so perfect? What we say is not supposed to be used for the purpose of brainwashing. It's just food for thought. This is why I am not starting a religion now, when I really have everything I need to start one. I don't want to brainwash people. I think it's enough to share your thoughts and then let people use that expression however they find beneficial.

 

I agree.

 

So if you were writing for someone else, that would be unnatural? Maybe. Maybe not.

 

Doing what comes natural doesn't look a particular way in my book. See the description of the main thrust of my path immediately above.

 

From fear and laziness. Fear to disagree. Fear to take an untrodden path. Fear to be critical of commonly accepted ideas. And laziness in the sense that if something works in a crappy way, but it still works, why fix it? Why fix something today if you can fix it tomorrow? These I think are huge driving factors in dogma adoption. Dogma doesn't require thinking. Dogma just requires agreement and following.

 

Yes, it is important to recognize that we are all responsible in our interactions with any teaching, and in our expression to remain as true as possible to our experience and to be open to what that reveals.

 

Well, it's not often what I talk about gets labeled as "too balanced." My approach is subversive in its total meaning. Only superficially it may not look that way. To question something, anything, is a subversive act. In fact to even look at something, anything, is an act of subversion. You're supposed (who supposes this?) to be blind and ignorant and just do what you are told.

 

I wasn't referring to your current teaching when I said "too balanced", but to a hypothetical teaching that wasn't so unbalanced.

 

I don't know, who supposes? Seeing is beautiful, if challenging at times.

[goldisheavy]

In the interest of time, I'm gonna try the replying to quotes approach.

 

We weren't talking about what is seen, we were talking about what sees. Is intent what sees?

 

Short answer: yes. Seeing can never be unintentional. There is nothing that's divorced from intent. I explained this before.

 

This is where you are confused.

 

When I said "maybe" there, I actually meant it sincerely. I didn't know if you were confused or not, but considering how much emphasis you put on clear sight, I figured there is a chance you are confused. So I had to see how exactly you conceive of clarity.

 

For the most part I agree. Except that clarity is clear, not preferential.

 

Do you prefer to live your life without preferences? Can't you see that you're never divorced from a preference of some kind?

 

Clarity can be of confusion, or sorrow, or anything. Looking for clarity is preferential, and I don't see anything wrong with preferences. The relative clarity is relative (really a relationship between consciousness and absolute clarity), and absolute clarity can take any form and so is diminished by nothing.

 

So looking for clarity is preferential, but clarity is not preferential according to what you said earlier: "Except that clarity is clear, not preferential." See? You're using the word "clear" as a contradistinction from preferential. And yet just two sentences down you say something else entirely; you say clarity is a result of having a preference.

 

I don't agree that context necessitates direction or intention. If you could clarify this point, that might be helpful. My experience is that seeing can happen at a level that introduces no direction.

 

You don't want to understand that directionality is only something that can be changed. It can't be created or destroyed. It can't really vanish, or cease to be, and there is no such level where it does any such thing. Change is not creation/destruction. Directionality changes. It's not something that first "is" and then "isn't".

 

It is as if the seeing happens as things return to nothingness. Relative clarity of seeing has a way of impacting the next arising, in that the clearer the seeing, the more freedom there is in the next arising, hence the tendency of things to change that before seemed stable.

 

Peak experiences most often have a component of interpretation to them. It is the interpretation that makes them "peak", just as it is the interpretation that makes low experiences low. For example, Omniscience is a somewhat arbitrary word choice, though it does color one's experience of what it refers to.

 

It's all like this. Everything you described is like this too. I just used the words I like and you used the words you like. You said "everything returned to nothingness." And I can say, "everything returned to infinite potentiality" -- this is what I meant by Omniscience. In the state of infinite pregnancy I saw all things as seeds (not actual seeds, just a metaphor), as potential, instantly at once. So it was a mystical state. It wasn't nothingness, it was a pregnant everythingness brighter than a billion suns. But it was also nothingness in the sense that nothing ordinary was present at the time. I've also had an experience of absolute nothingness where even time and space stopped, and instead of infinite potentiality I experienced something like absolute absence of anything whatsoever. I refer to all such out of the ordinary experiences as "peak". So you described a peak experience that happened to you at 14. I described one or now two experiences that happened when I was 20 to 22.

 

That is not to say that there are not many different non-ordinary experiences that one might have, but as you refer to somewhere else in here, wisdom itself is not a peak experience, and it doesn't lie in any of these interpretive colorings.

 

Wisdom is not something completely alien to interpretation. Wisdom is dirty with interpretation. It's not clean. Likewise, interpretations are clean and impartial in a sense.

 

I am partial, right? But did I choose to be partial? Not really. So my partialities are impartial. It's all one and the same continuum. Being partial is a kind of impartiality. Being impartial is a kind of partiality. It's one and the same "thing."

 

Even if we say I choose X, did I choose to choose X? Probably not. Or if I say I chose to choose to choose X, then you can keep asking further and further. At some point you may start to understand that choice tastes like no-choice and no-choice tastes exactly like choice. It's all one thing! There is nothing dramatically better or dramatically worse when it comes to clarity, unless you want to be very specific and very relative.

 

Clarity is just a hallucination. It's an illusion. Lack of clarity is another hallucination. Which hallucination is better? You think you've transcended all hallucinations? Well, that's just another kind of hallucination again. You're still dreaming. You'll never transcend dreaming completely. You'll always be hallucinating. And you'll never know any kind of truth that's apart from this hallucinatory process.

 

The same is obviously true about me. At first I hallucinated that all objects were concretely existing and separate. Then I hallucinated a powerful state of being from which all that exists can emerge. Then I hallucinated a bunch of contemplations that lead me to hallucinate this current wisdom of mine. I don't see any problem with this process. I know which hallucinations are better. I enjoy ice cream more than I enjoy cheese, but I do like to eat cheese sometimes too. I am not confused. If something falls on my foot, I say "ouch."

 

I don't really agree here. The particulars of your Omniscience experience may never be experienced by any given person, not would I suggest that it should be, but an intimate experience of the source of that experience is readily available to anyone who is interested.

 

No, the source is not available. You don't get it. The source is not an experience! You can't experience it. Whatever you experience, know for sure, it's not the source. Each experience requires a certain cognitive context to be in the background of your mind. This is why you can never experience the source.

 

Alternatively, you never experience something other than the source. You're experiencing the source of all experience now, and you've been experiencing only the source all this time, whether your vision was clear or not, you were constantly at the source. That's another way to think of the same exact thing as what's described in the paragraph above.

 

In a sense you are the source, but you can't experience something that you can rightly call, "This is me, this is what I am!"

 

What exactly is your theory of envisioning again? I'm sorry if I am being dense.

 

Vision is an activity. It's participatory. It's not passive. When you're seeing things you're not a victim of those things impinging themselves onto your sense fields. When you are seeing things, you are never impartial, and the things you see are not impartial either.

 

This is a very useful distinction to make. The experience that I shared was not a peak spiritual experience,

 

It was. The way I use the word, it was. "Peak" just means out of the ordinary, or unusual in some sense. That's all it means. A peak experience can be an experience of profound silence for example. It doesn't have to be anything specific. A simple OBE can be one too. The word "peak" and what it refers to is rather arbitrary in how I mean it. Loosely it means any experience you can't (or don't want to) return to voluntarily, and usually that means it's a rare experience.

 

primarily because I was not seeking it and I had no context for it,

 

You certainly had a context for it. And you weren't consciously seeking it. When I go out to buy ice cream I am not exactly seeking it either. I just go and buy it. I know where it is. Ultimately we know where all is, so all our seeking ends when we decide to allow ourselves to know what it is we want to know.

 

so I didn't have much basis to interpret it, hence it was not "peak". Given that I did not do any of those things, then it slipped right in and went very deep and radically changed my life without my knowledge.

 

Without your knowledge?? Really now? So who am I talking to right now? Do you even know what you're talking about?

 

It began a process, which is what I was referring to when I said "deeper movement" several times in my last post. This deeper movement is how wisdom interacts with my manifestation (though I'm pretty sure I can come up with a better description than that some other time, since that one feels pretty off). You might say that it kicked off an intensified process of contemplation.

 

If you are talking about perfection of relative wisdom, then I agree. If you are talking contact with perfected wisdom, I strongly disagree. I think this contact exists before there is any consciousness of it, and that we are all on a spiritual path, like it or not.

 

In a sense. When I said perfection of wisdom earlier I mean to say conscious perfection of wisdom. Not subconscious one. If you consciously know your wisdom to be perfect, there is no path for you. Or we can say your only path is one of playing games and having fun.

 

Yes I got lucky, though that is an arbitrary judgement. The actual experience.. no, can't repeat that at will. Access to what it revealed, yes, assuming I am interested and not too caught up in mind stuff. It is automatic in a lot of ways, though interest definitely can highlight it, or more importantly, allow it to function.

 

The Lord stuff seems like added interpretation to me. But whatever floats your boat.

 

It's not added. To understand how I use that word, first forget religion. Think of the Lord as like a person from the Middle Ages. Like a King. The word means powerful, sovereign, mighty, infinitely wise, glorious, awesome, etc. That's all it means. As you can imagine, it's very very hard to describe in words.

 

Sometimes I also describe that experience as a great cosmic OK. What do I mean? I mean I felt that absolutely everything was OK. I was OK. The world was OK. Suffering was OK. Crime was OK. Immorality was OK. Ignorance was OK. Poverty was OK. Fame was OK. Strength was OK, but so was weakness. Health and disease were equally OK. Etc. I instantly realized that all those things I previously thought were very awesome or very terrible, they were all OK, all were peace. And it was utmost perfect peace beyond anything I would normally call "me." There was no me, and yet I am describing the experience and remembering it, so obviously saying there was no me is not completely honest, is it now? The experience was home, peace, OK.

 

Do you see how radically different this description is? And yet, it's the same freaking experience I am trying to describe.

 

As "the fruit of contemplation" does not come and go, then it always is. This is what I point to.

 

I agree, but didn't you say that it can also be active?

 

What do you mean by "also"? I don't think I've ever presented contemplation as something passive. Maybe you think the word "slow" opposes "active" in meaning?

 

I don't relate to you in terms of your teachings. I enjoy you for the most part and find that interacting with you develops my understanding, though not in a categorically different way than interacting with any aspect of life accomplishes a similar task. I admit that I have some resistance to times that you misinterpret things that I say, though I don't know if you misinterpret more than others or if you are just more honest in sharing your judgements.

 

You can bet your leg and your arm that I am more honest than most people you'll meet in this life. I am also more open and more willing to discuss the undiscussable. Honesty requires courage. It requires you to be, in some sense, immodest and vulgar. I have that. I don't try to be immodest on purpose, but to be honest means sometimes to say things you now others will interpret as outrageously immodest or offensive.

 

Of course I also misinterpret a lot of things. Some of it is definitely my fault. Some of it has to do with how you chose to present things. And some of it has to do with the fact that we haven't talked much yet, and so we haven't synchronized our vocabularies.

 

Well, since there was a time that I did not have this particular set of beliefs, however long ago, these beliefs are not what I have always had. I've found significant value in examining my beliefs, but it hasn't been the main thrust of my path, which has been becoming sensitive to, trusting and following the deeper movement.

 

It's never hopeless. Your old beliefs were sufficient for whatever you might have wanted to do. Beliefs are like a patch of the earth you currently stand on. Whatever patch of the earth you currently stand on, that patch is always sufficient to get you moving in the right direction, even if it's an ugly patch. Of course I am assuming you can stand on the patch comfortably. It looks like you were doing OK at 14, so the assumption is applicable, I believe.

 

At the same time, if your experience was so spontaneous and out of the ordinary, if you experienced it without any kind of conscious preparation on your part, and you can't repeat it at will, what makes you think other people can experience it?

 

You see, I can experience the fruits of contemplation at will, as well as I can contemplate at will. So this is why I advocate it. It's not so much luck-oriented. It works predictably, like say breathing. Deeper experiences are going to happen either in contemplation or later on as a result.

 

However, if you have an interesting experience at all times and you think you need to investigate it and familiarize yourself with it, then by all means that's exactly what you should be doing. Generally I think the more experiences and the more diverse, the better. But everyone should have something to play with. What about people who don't have any strange experiences? Instead of bashing them over the head urging them to have those experiences, it's more useful to discuss beliefs, imo.

 

What blocks spiritual experiences is a belief or a set of beliefs working together. So if someone were to be encouraged to examine such beliefs and to question them, then what do you think is the chance of having an interesting experience as a result? I think it's a good one.

 

Yes, it is important to recognize that we are all responsible in our interactions with any teaching, and in our expression to remain as true as possible to our experience and to be open to what that reveals.

 

This is excellent in my view.

 

I wasn't referring to your current teaching when I said "too balanced", but to a hypothetical teaching that wasn't so unbalanced.

 

I don't know, who supposes? Seeing is beautiful, if challenging at times.

 

I don't know. What makes convention the way it is?

Edited May 30, 2011 by goldisheavy

[Birch]

How does the theory of yin and yang explain the appearance of red as a color.

 

Hahaha, that was a fun one :-) Thank you!

 

What I ran into with it was an immediate tendency to want to stick yin/yang over the top of some other explanations of how 'red' might appear. That's a problem with theories IMO/IME because it's hard to keep them 'pure' unless one is very disciplined, which I'm not, but anyway :-)

 

As I attempted to go ahead and apply yin/yang anyway. It all started spinning. This reminds me that yin/yang is dynamic and moving, not a 'thing'. And as it moved - it grew as big as to encompass all systems everywhere and then shrank again as the system I was considering became bounded.

 

(Now I realise this is probably not satisfactory to you, but I was doing my best :-))

 

So the short answer is 'red' is the potential across the entire system and all parts of the system include the 'parts' that allow 'red' to appear. So no, it's not just 'in your mind' or in your own visual perception, it's also elsewhere.

 

I'd could give example of where else but I'd run into the same problem and then you'd accuse me of cherrypicking. So that's as far as I got.

 

However, what was really interesting IMO/IME with this is how the application of one theory (which is purported as universal) brings up theories I didn't even know I knew. That was strange. And the spinning thing too :-)

[Todd]

Short answer: yes. Seeing can never be unintentional. There is nothing that's divorced from intent. I explained this before.

 

Ok, seems like we are using different words. I will consider how your viewpoint might reflect in my experience.

 

Do you prefer to live your life without preferences? Can't you see that you're never divorced from a preference of some kind?

 

Ok, when I speak about a viewpoint that is not colored by preferences or partiality, I am using "preferences" and "partiality" in a specific sense, which is a desire for things to be other than they are. Partiality in its bare sense sure seems to be the means by which things manifest, but it is not the type of partiality that would have things be other than they are in any given instant.

 

There is a verse (22) in Red Pine's translation of the Tao Te Ching that I like a lot, "Partial means whole .... the ancients who said partial means whole / came close indeed / becoming whole depends upon this."

 

So looking for clarity is preferential, but clarity is not preferential according to what you said earlier: "Except that clarity is clear, not preferential." See? You're using the word "clear" as a contradistinction from preferential. And yet just two sentences down you say something else entirely; you say clarity is a result of having a preference.

 

I said "Looking for clarity is preferential". I did not say that clarity is the result of of looking for it. Looking for clarity both the result and the cause of non-clarity. As such, it precedes the recognition clarity, but we cannot really say that it causes clarity.

 

You don't want to understand that directionality is only something that can be changed. It can't be created or destroyed. It can't really vanish, or cease to be, and there is no such level where it does any such thing. Change is not creation/destruction. Directionality changes. It's not something that first "is" and then "isn't".

 

I am saying that there is a level where it isn't. This seems to be a matter of parsing, and I can't summon much energy for discussing it at the moment.

 

It's all like this. Everything you described is like this too. I just used the words I like and you used the words you like. You said "everything returned to nothingness." And I can say, "everything returned to infinite potentiality" -- this is what I meant by Omniscience. In the state of infinite pregnancy I saw all things as seeds (not actual seeds, just a metaphor), as potential, instantly at once. So it was a mystical state. It wasn't nothingness, it was a pregnant everythingness brighter than a billion suns. But it was also nothingness in the sense that nothing ordinary was present at the time. I've also had an experience of absolute nothingness where even time and space stopped, and instead of infinite potentiality I experienced something like absolute absence of anything whatsoever. I refer to all such out of the ordinary experiences as "peak". So you described a peak experience that happened to you at 14. I described one or now two experiences that happened when I was 20 to 22.

 

Wisdom is not something completely alien to interpretation. Wisdom is dirty with interpretation. It's not clean. Likewise, interpretations are clean and impartial in a sense.

 

I am partial, right? But did I choose to be partial? Not really. So my partialities are impartial. It's all one and the same continuum. Being partial is a kind of impartiality. Being impartial is a kind of partiality. It's one and the same "thing."

 

Even if we say I choose X, did I choose to choose X? Probably not. Or if I say I chose to choose to choose X, then you can keep asking further and further. At some point you may start to understand that choice tastes like no-choice and no-choice tastes exactly like choice. It's all one thing! There is nothing dramatically better or dramatically worse when it comes to clarity, unless you want to be very specific and very relative.

 

Clarity is just a hallucination. It's an illusion. Lack of clarity is another hallucination. Which hallucination is better? You think you've transcended all hallucinations? Well, that's just another kind of hallucination again. You're still dreaming. You'll never transcend dreaming completely. You'll always be hallucinating. And you'll never know any kind of truth that's apart from this hallucinatory process.

 

The same is obviously true about me. At first I hallucinated that all objects were concretely existing and separate. Then I hallucinated a powerful state of being from which all that exists can emerge. Then I hallucinated a bunch of contemplations that lead me to hallucinate this current wisdom of mine. I don't see any problem with this process. I know which hallucinations are better. I enjoy ice cream more than I enjoy cheese, but I do like to eat cheese sometimes too. I am not confused. If something falls on my foot, I say "ouch."

 

From a certain perspective what you say is entirely reasonable.

 

No, the source is not available. You don't get it. The source is not an experience! You can't experience it. Whatever you experience, know for sure, it's not the source. Each experience requires a certain cognitive context to be in the background of your mind. This is why you can never experience the source.

 

Ok, my word choice wasn't the best. I could have used "recognize the source" or "contact with the source", though they have their issues as well. However, when I said have an intimate experience of the source, I did not say that the source is an experience. When one rests as the source, this generates experiences. None of those experiences define the source, but it is reflected in experience.

 

Alternatively, you never experience something other than the source. You're experiencing the source of all experience now, and you've been experiencing only the source all this time, whether your vision was clear or not, you were constantly at the source. That's another way to think of the same exact thing as what's described in the paragraph above.

 

In a sense you are the source,

 

Thank you for making this point. This is why its recognition is so available, if we can just get past the often reinforced idea that it is unavailable to all but the very special.

 

but you can't experience something that you can rightly call, "This is me, this is what I am!"

 

I get what you are saying here, but why not? Be careful, you might contradict what you said above about intent!

 

Vision is an activity. It's participatory. It's not passive. When you're seeing things you're not a victim of those things impinging themselves onto your sense fields. When you are seeing things, you are never impartial, and the things you see are not impartial either.

 

Thanks for clarifying your meaning.

 

It was. The way I use the word, it was. "Peak" just means out of the ordinary, or unusual in some sense. That's all it means. A peak experience can be an experience of profound silence for example. It doesn't have to be anything specific. A simple OBE can be one too. The word "peak" and what it refers to is rather arbitrary in how I mean it. Loosely it means any experience you can't (or don't want to) return to voluntarily, and usually that means it's a rare experience.

 

By this definition, every experience is a peak experience! There is no experience that we can return to voluntarily. There is too much potential in potentiality for it to go around repeating itself. Even an incredibly similar experience has a different context, which is not separate from it.

 

You certainly had a context for it. And you weren't consciously seeking it. When I go out to buy ice cream I am not exactly seeking it either. I just go and buy it. I know where it is. Ultimately we know where all is, so all our seeking ends when we decide to allow ourselves to know what it is we want to know.

 

Yes, I considered adding the word "consciously" in there, but left it out in favor of relatively normal sounding language.

 

When I say that I had no context for it, I do not mean that there was no experiential context, but that I had no ready-made way of consciously contextualizing it. I had no conceptual reference for the experience, or for what it revealed. It was only in retrospect, as I noticed its effects, that I minimally contextualized it in terms of a natural developmental process. It actually wasn't something that I thought about a whole lot until much later, as I encountered conceptual contexts for it.

 

Without your knowledge?? Really now? So who am I talking to right now? Do you even know what you're talking about?

 

Yes, at the time, I was not conscious of the way that I had been changed. It only became obvious as I encountered situations in life that I responded differently to than those around me. Also, in communication, I discovered that things that seemed obvious to me were not readily understandable to others. I am still discovering the implications of what was revealed in that moment.

 

In a sense. When I said perfection of wisdom earlier I mean to say conscious perfection of wisdom. Not subconscious one. If you consciously know your wisdom to be perfect, there is no path for you. Or we can say your only path is one of playing games and having fun.

 

Ok, though I haven't met conscious perfection yet. Perfection in general is about as conceptual as one can get. See your points about hallucination and truth.

 

It's not added. To understand how I use that word, first forget religion. Think of the Lord as like a person from the Middle Ages. Like a King. The word means powerful, sovereign, mighty, infinitely wise, glorious, awesome, etc. That's all it means. As you can imagine, it's very very hard to describe in words.

 

Sometimes I also describe that experience as a great cosmic OK. What do I mean? I mean I felt that absolutely everything was OK. I was OK. The world was OK. Suffering was OK. Crime was OK. Immorality was OK. Ignorance was OK. Poverty was OK. Fame was OK. Strength was OK, but so was weakness. Health and disease were equally OK. Etc. I instantly realized that all those things I previously thought were very awesome or very terrible, they were all OK, all were peace. And it was utmost perfect peace beyond anything I would normally call "me." There was no me, and yet I am describing the experience and remembering it, so obviously saying there was no me is not completely honest, is it now? The experience was home, peace, OK.

 

Do you see how radically different this description is? And yet, it's the same freaking experience I am trying to describe.

 

Yes. This is what I mean by interpretation.

 

What do you mean by "also"? I don't think I've ever presented contemplation as something passive. Maybe you think the word "slow" opposes "active" in meaning?

 

Well what you said was: "Contemplation is sincere, deep and calm meditative thinking."

I was just adding the dimension of contemplation in action, which might not be immediately associated with thinking, though certainly fits into your definition of mind as the entirety of existence and that which perceives existence.

 

Personally, I feel that the thinking aspect of your description can be misleading, since one of the most important aspects of contemplation is silence and receptivity, often in combination with a question, but this question does not necessarily need to be voiced.

 

You can bet your leg and your arm that I am more honest than most people you'll meet in this life. I am also more open and more willing to discuss the undiscussable. Honesty requires courage. It requires you to be, in some sense, immodest and vulgar. I have that. I don't try to be immodest on purpose, but to be honest means sometimes to say things you now others will interpret as outrageously immodest or offensive.

 

Honesty does not require immodesty and vulgarity. It may be that for you, as you are currently hooked up (ie your beleifs) it does, but it is not a quality inherent to honesty. One can be honest and still communicate skillfully.

 

Of course I also misinterpret a lot of things. Some of it is definitely my fault. Some of it has to do with how you chose to present things. And some of it has to do with the fact that we haven't talked much yet, and so we haven't synchronized our vocabularies.

 

Yes.

 

It's never hopeless. Your old beliefs were sufficient for whatever you might have wanted to do. Beliefs are like a patch of the earth you currently stand on. Whatever patch of the earth you currently stand on, that patch is always sufficient to get you moving in the right direction, even if it's an ugly patch. Of course I am assuming you can stand on the patch comfortably. It looks like you were doing OK at 14, so the assumption is applicable, I believe.

 

What is the right direction and what makes it right?

 

At the same time, if your experience was so spontaneous and out of the ordinary, if you experienced it without any kind of conscious preparation on your part, and you can't repeat it at will, what makes you think other people can experience it?

 

You see, I can experience the fruits of contemplation at will, as well as I can contemplate at will. So this is why I advocate it. It's not so much luck-oriented. It works predictably, like say breathing. Deeper experiences are going to happen either in contemplation or later on as a result.

 

However, if you have an interesting experience at all times and you think you need to investigate it and familiarize yourself with it, then by all means that's exactly what you should be doing. Generally I think the more experiences and the more diverse, the better. But everyone should have something to play with. What about people who don't have any strange experiences? Instead of bashing them over the head urging them to have those experiences, it's more useful to discuss beliefs, imo.

 

I don't make the distinction between spiritual and non-spiritual experiences that you do. Every experience is spiritual to me and hence truth can be found in any experience. The main reason people do not find truth, besides the fact that they are looking for a thing, or a particular configuration of beliefs, or understanding or a feeling state, is that they believe that it is only accessible to special people, in special places, after special preparations, and that it will look, well, special, when it arrives (not to mention the assumption that it is something that arrives!). In my view, the main thing that people need, if they want to come to know truth, is their foot in their door. Their foot is already in the door, but they just need to notice that it is and then to use it to work their way into the room and to start exploring.

 

What often happens is that a person might notice their foot in the door, but then they quickly discount it. They have no confidence that their foot is in the door, even when they see it! When they discount it, which is due in part to its unexpected lack of qualities and in part to conditioned beliefs in its lack of availability, then they miss out on what is immediately available to them, as much as to anybody.

 

It is not foreign to anyone's experience. It just hasn't been given attention for the most part.

 

I have seen people give it attention. I give it attention. Giving it attention is repeatable and available.

 

What is revealed when it is given attention varies, but it always reveals something, even if that something is a distinct lack of something.

 

What blocks spiritual experiences is a belief or a set of beliefs working together. So if someone were to be encouraged to examine such beliefs and to question them, then what do you think is the chance of having an interesting experience as a result? I think it's a good one.

 

Interesting experiences can be helpful, but they aren't what this is really all about, as you have mentioned elsewehere.

 

I don't know. What makes convention the way it is?

 

I'm not sure that "convention" is anything more than an idea that we apply to the idea of people in society, especially when we want to emphasize ourselves in distinction from it.

 

Just taking the outside view on that one for now.

 

I think that next time I'll go back to writing a response in one or very few blocks. Feels better to me, and it goes faster. But feedback on how you experienced this different approach would be appreciated. This approach might have benefits in terms of conceptual clarity in communication.

Edited May 31, 2011 by Todd

[goldisheavy]

Ok, when I speak about a viewpoint that is not colored by preferences or partiality, I am using "preferences" and "partiality" in a specific sense, which is a desire for things to be other than they are.

 

The thing is, things don't have a true state. Things have a state in which they are stably manifest, but this state, like we talked about earlier, is kind of like a vortex, and it's moving around.

 

So for example, if I am looking at a tea cup in a room that's lit with a red light, I see it a certain way. If I am looking at the same tea cup outside, in the sunny weather conditions, I see a cup that looks rather differently again. If we bring the cup back indoors and look at it under the candlelight conditions, then again it looks differently. Which of these experience is the true cup as it really is? Well, I think the best realization is to realize that actually there is no true cup at all. Whatever you see is whatever stabilized given the circumstances of your psyche. So none of it is "what it is." Things don't have a true state that different from a false state, except conventionally. But even conventionally, it's a troublesome subject where you'll find plenty of disagreement.

 

So in other words, you seem to think that we are constantly mentally pulling and pushing on all the phenomena we observe, and thus we distort those phenomena. As soon as we relax a bit and let the phenomena be "themselves", we'll start seeing the true form of those phenomena. And here I am telling you, it's a false hope. Relaxing does not bring you closer to the truth than does straining. You have to exhaust the meaning of both straining and relaxation to really understand this. Now, relaxation tends to feel better than straining, so it's still a good idea to praise it, but I think one should be careful not to give relaxation a truth-giving character that it doesn't necessarily deserve.

 

Relaxed approach, effortless intent, I praise these not because they are more true, but because they are more powerful and more sustainable. They are as false as anything else though. Consider the fact that people relax all the time, but at the same time, people's delusions do not get cleared up by relaxing. It seems obvious to me. I mean, if relaxation by itself was some kind of truth serum, well, all the laid back people would be wizards and sages. We don't observe that, in my view.

 

It's obvious to me that not all relaxations are alike. Some relaxations are better than the others, just like some efforts are better than the others. Some people relax into wisdom, others relax into the status quo.

 

And believing that things have some kind of true state is delusional, in my view.

 

Partiality in its bare sense sure seems to be the means by which things manifest, but it is not the type of partiality that would have things be other than they are in any given instant.

 

Things are never anything other than what they are. Why not? Because things don't really have a true state. All things are dynamic, although the speed of change can sometimes be glacial.

 

There is a verse (22) in Red Pine's translation of the Tao Te Ching that I like a lot, "Partial means whole .... the ancients who said partial means whole / came close indeed / becoming whole depends upon this."

 

So looking for clarity is preferential, but clarity is not preferential according to what you said earlier: "Except that clarity is clear, not preferential." See? You're using the word "clear" as a contradistinction from preferential. And yet just two sentences down you say something else entirely; you say clarity is a result of having a preference.

 

I said "Looking for clarity is preferential". I did not say that clarity is the result of of looking for it. Looking for clarity both the result and the cause of non-clarity. As such, it precedes the recognition clarity, but we cannot really say that it causes clarity.

 

You don't want to understand that directionality is only something that can be changed. It can't be created or destroyed. It can't really vanish, or cease to be, and there is no such level where it does any such thing. Change is not creation/destruction. Directionality changes. It's not something that first "is" and then "isn't".

 

I am saying that there is a level where it isn't. This seems to be a matter of parsing, and I can't summon much energy for discussing it at the moment.

 

It's all like this. Everything you described is like this too. I just used the words I like and you used the words you like. You said "everything returned to nothingness." And I can say, "everything returned to infinite potentiality" -- this is what I meant by Omniscience. In the state of infinite pregnancy I saw all things as seeds (not actual seeds, just a metaphor), as potential, instantly at once. So it was a mystical state. It wasn't nothingness, it was a pregnant everythingness brighter than a billion suns. But it was also nothingness in the sense that nothing ordinary was present at the time. I've also had an experience of absolute nothingness where even time and space stopped, and instead of infinite potentiality I experienced something like absolute absence of anything whatsoever. I refer to all such out of the ordinary experiences as "peak". So you described a peak experience that happened to you at 14. I described one or now two experiences that happened when I was 20 to 22.

 

Wisdom is not something completely alien to interpretation. Wisdom is dirty with interpretation. It's not clean. Likewise, interpretations are clean and impartial in a sense.

 

I am partial, right? But did I choose to be partial? Not really. So my partialities are impartial. It's all one and the same continuum. Being partial is a kind of impartiality. Being impartial is a kind of partiality. It's one and the same "thing."

 

Even if we say I choose X, did I choose to choose X? Probably not. Or if I say I chose to choose to choose X, then you can keep asking further and further. At some point you may start to understand that choice tastes like no-choice and no-choice tastes exactly like choice. It's all one thing! There is nothing dramatically better or dramatically worse when it comes to clarity, unless you want to be very specific and very relative.

 

Clarity is just a hallucination. It's an illusion. Lack of clarity is another hallucination. Which hallucination is better? You think you've transcended all hallucinations? Well, that's just another kind of hallucination again. You're still dreaming. You'll never transcend dreaming completely. You'll always be hallucinating. And you'll never know any kind of truth that's apart from this hallucinatory process.

 

The same is obviously true about me. At first I hallucinated that all objects were concretely existing and separate. Then I hallucinated a powerful state of being from which all that exists can emerge. Then I hallucinated a bunch of contemplations that lead me to hallucinate this current wisdom of mine. I don't see any problem with this process. I know which hallucinations are better. I enjoy ice cream more than I enjoy cheese, but I do like to eat cheese sometimes too. I am not confused. If something falls on my foot, I say "ouch."

 

From a certain perspective what you say is entirely reasonable.

 

No, the source is not available. You don't get it. The source is not an experience! You can't experience it. Whatever you experience, know for sure, it's not the source. Each experience requires a certain cognitive context to be in the background of your mind. This is why you can never experience the source.

 

Ok, my word choice wasn't the best. I could have used "recognize the source" or "contact with the source", though they have their issues as well. However, when I said have an intimate experience of the source, I did not say that the source is an experience. When one rests as the source, this generates experiences. None of those experiences define the source, but it is reflected in experience.

 

Alternatively, you never experience something other than the source. You're experiencing the source of all experience now, and you've been experiencing only the source all this time, whether your vision was clear or not, you were constantly at the source. That's another way to think of the same exact thing as what's described in the paragraph above.

 

In a sense you are the source,

 

Thank you for making this point. This is why its recognition is so available, if we can just get past the often reinforced idea that it is unavailable to all but the very special.

 

It is indeed available. But you don't want to make people's own minds their own worst enemies to expose this availability. Being willfully ignorant doesn't make you into a sage and it doesn't enhance the availability of the mystical states. It's just the opposite.

 

but you can't experience something that you can rightly call, "This is me, this is what I am!"

 

I get what you are saying here, but why not? Be careful, you might contradict what you said above about intent!

 

Vision is an activity. It's participatory. It's not passive. When you're seeing things you're not a victim of those things impinging themselves onto your sense fields. When you are seeing things, you are never impartial, and the things you see are not impartial either.

 

Thanks for clarifying your meaning.

 

It was. The way I use the word, it was. "Peak" just means out of the ordinary, or unusual in some sense. That's all it means. A peak experience can be an experience of profound silence for example. It doesn't have to be anything specific. A simple OBE can be one too. The word "peak" and what it refers to is rather arbitrary in how I mean it. Loosely it means any experience you can't (or don't want to) return to voluntarily, and usually that means it's a rare experience.

 

By this definition, every experience is a peak experience! There is no experience that we can return to voluntarily. There is too much potential in potentiality for it to go around repeating itself. Even an incredibly similar experience has a different context, which is not separate from it.

 

I meant this in a conventional sense. For example, I am sitting in the chair typing this post. I can return to this experience many times at will. It doesn't mean it's exactly the same, but it's same enough to warrant me calling what happens here "a return to typing." So when I asked whether or not you can return to that experience that you felt at 14, I didn't mean the precise replica, but something that's largely similar.

 

Obviously some experiences are harder to return to than others. Specifically spiritual experiences that lie outside convention and outside the day to day normalcy are harder to return to.

 

You certainly had a context for it. And you weren't consciously seeking it. When I go out to buy ice cream I am not exactly seeking it either. I just go and buy it. I know where it is. Ultimately we know where all is, so all our seeking ends when we decide to allow ourselves to know what it is we want to know.

 

Yes, I considered adding the word "consciously" in there, but left it out in favor of relatively normal sounding language.

 

When I say that I had no context for it, I do not mean that there was no experiential context, but that I had no ready-made way of consciously contextualizing it. I had no conceptual reference for the experience, or for what it revealed. It was only in retrospect, as I noticed its effects, that I minimally contextualized it in terms of a natural developmental process. It actually wasn't something that I thought about a whole lot until much later, as I encountered conceptual contexts for it.

 

Without your knowledge?? Really now? So who am I talking to right now? Do you even know what you're talking about?

 

Yes, at the time, I was not conscious of the way that I had been changed. It only became obvious as I encountered situations in life that I responded differently to than those around me. Also, in communication, I discovered that things that seemed obvious to me were not readily understandable to others. I am still discovering the implications of what was revealed in that moment.

 

In a sense. When I said perfection of wisdom earlier I mean to say conscious perfection of wisdom. Not subconscious one. If you consciously know your wisdom to be perfect, there is no path for you. Or we can say your only path is one of playing games and having fun.

 

Ok, though I haven't met conscious perfection yet. Perfection in general is about as conceptual as one can get. See your points about hallucination and truth.

 

Concepts are about as non-conceptual as they get. What is conceptual in a concept? Nothing. Just check it out for yourself if you don't trust me.

 

It's not added. To understand how I use that word, first forget religion. Think of the Lord as like a person from the Middle Ages. Like a King. The word means powerful, sovereign, mighty, infinitely wise, glorious, awesome, etc. That's all it means. As you can imagine, it's very very hard to describe in words.

 

Sometimes I also describe that experience as a great cosmic OK. What do I mean? I mean I felt that absolutely everything was OK. I was OK. The world was OK. Suffering was OK. Crime was OK. Immorality was OK. Ignorance was OK. Poverty was OK. Fame was OK. Strength was OK, but so was weakness. Health and disease were equally OK. Etc. I instantly realized that all those things I previously thought were very awesome or very terrible, they were all OK, all were peace. And it was utmost perfect peace beyond anything I would normally call "me." There was no me, and yet I am describing the experience and remembering it, so obviously saying there was no me is not completely honest, is it now? The experience was home, peace, OK.

 

Do you see how radically different this description is? And yet, it's the same freaking experience I am trying to describe.

 

Yes. This is what I mean by interpretation.

 

OK, in that sense everything you are saying is also an interpretation, so there was no need to call my attention to that fact as if it was something only I was committing. (or something that was committed in only one specific instance, as opposed to constantly and by all parties)

 

What do you mean by "also"? I don't think I've ever presented contemplation as something passive. Maybe you think the word "slow" opposes "active" in meaning?

 

Well what you said was: "Contemplation is sincere, deep and calm meditative thinking."

I was just adding the dimension of contemplation in action, which might not be immediately associated with thinking, though certainly fits into your definition of mind as the entirety of existence and that which perceives existence.

 

Personally, I feel that the thinking aspect of your description can be misleading, since one of the most important aspects of contemplation is silence and receptivity, often in combination with a question, but this question does not necessarily need to be voiced.

 

Thinking is essential. It's misleading to say that contemplation can be done in the absence of thought. Not all thought sounds like words either. When people try to stop their thoughts, they really get lost. I learned how to stop my thoughts long time ago, and let me tell you, it did not make me even a tiny bit wiser or smarter. Having thoughts or not having them, I was the same genius or the same moron I always was. There was no real difference in my beliefs or in my state of being.

 

Why not take it further? Some people think that stopping breathing is even better than stopping thought. Why don't you stop your breathing in order to contemplate? When that's done, just keep taking it further and further. See if there is a stopping point somewhere down the line, or if it's chasing an ever receding horizon.

 

You can bet your leg and your arm that I am more honest than most people you'll meet in this life. I am also more open and more willing to discuss the undiscussable. Honesty requires courage. It requires you to be, in some sense, immodest and vulgar. I have that. I don't try to be immodest on purpose, but to be honest means sometimes to say things you now others will interpret as outrageously immodest or offensive.

 

Honesty does not require immodesty and vulgarity. It may be that for you, as you are currently hooked up (ie your beleifs) it does, but it is not a quality inherent to honesty. One can be honest and still communicate skillfully.

 

I disagree. Because all people are different, all people have opinions that are disagreeable to others. To the extent you cushion those opinions of yours during communication, is the extent to which you misrepresent the state of your heart.

 

Of course I also misinterpret a lot of things. Some of it is definitely my fault. Some of it has to do with how you chose to present things. And some of it has to do with the fact that we haven't talked much yet, and so we haven't synchronized our vocabularies.

 

Yes.

 

It's never hopeless. Your old beliefs were sufficient for whatever you might have wanted to do. Beliefs are like a patch of the earth you currently stand on. Whatever patch of the earth you currently stand on, that patch is always sufficient to get you moving in the right direction, even if it's an ugly patch. Of course I am assuming you can stand on the patch comfortably. It looks like you were doing OK at 14, so the assumption is applicable, I believe.

 

What is the right direction and what makes it right?

 

Ultimately whatever direction you choose is the right one and what makes it right is you.

 

Relatively the right direction is whichever one obtains maximum reason and consent, both. Too much consent and too little reason is as bad as too much reason and too little consent. Both reason and consent are important for the convention to remain healthy.

 

At the same time, if your experience was so spontaneous and out of the ordinary, if you experienced it without any kind of conscious preparation on your part, and you can't repeat it at will, what makes you think other people can experience it?

 

You see, I can experience the fruits of contemplation at will, as well as I can contemplate at will. So this is why I advocate it. It's not so much luck-oriented. It works predictably, like say breathing. Deeper experiences are going to happen either in contemplation or later on as a result.

 

However, if you have an interesting experience at all times and you think you need to investigate it and familiarize yourself with it, then by all means that's exactly what you should be doing. Generally I think the more experiences and the more diverse, the better. But everyone should have something to play with. What about people who don't have any strange experiences? Instead of bashing them over the head urging them to have those experiences, it's more useful to discuss beliefs, imo.

 

I don't make the distinction between spiritual and non-spiritual experiences that you do. Every experience is spiritual to me and hence truth can be found in any experience. The main reason people do not find truth, besides the fact that they are looking for a thing, or a particular configuration of beliefs, or understanding or a feeling state, is that they believe that it is only accessible to special people, in special places, after special preparations, and that it will look, well, special, when it arrives (not to mention the assumption that it is something that arrives!). In my view, the main thing that people need, if they want to come to know truth, is their foot in their door. Their foot is already in the door, but they just need to notice that it is and then to use it to work their way into the room and to start exploring.

 

What often happens is that a person might notice their foot in the door, but then they quickly discount it. They have no confidence that their foot is in the door, even when they see it! When they discount it, which is due in part to its unexpected lack of qualities and in part to conditioned beliefs in its lack of availability, then they miss out on what is immediately available to them, as much as to anybody.

 

It is not foreign to anyone's experience. It just hasn't been given attention for the most part.

 

I have seen people give it attention. I give it attention. Giving it attention is repeatable and available.

 

What is revealed when it is given attention varies, but it always reveals something, even if that something is a distinct lack of something.

 

What blocks spiritual experiences is a belief or a set of beliefs working together. So if someone were to be encouraged to examine such beliefs and to question them, then what do you think is the chance of having an interesting experience as a result? I think it's a good one.

 

Interesting experiences can be helpful, but they aren't what this is really all about, as you have mentioned elsewehere.

 

I don't know. What makes convention the way it is?

 

I'm not sure that "convention" is anything more than an idea that we apply to the idea of people in society, especially when we want to emphasize ourselves in distinction from it.

 

Just taking the outside view on that one for now.

 

I think that next time I'll go back to writing a response in one or very few blocks. Feels better to me, and it goes faster. But feedback on how you experienced this different approach would be appreciated. This approach might have benefits in terms of conceptual clarity in communication.

 

I'm fine either way as far as I am concerned.

Edited May 31, 2011 by goldisheavy

[Todd]

I lied. I want to respond to this with quotes.

 

The thing is, things don't have a true state. Things have a state in which they are stably manifest, but this state, like we talked about earlier, is kind of like a vortex, and it's moving around.

 

So for example, if I am looking at a tea cup in a room that's lit with a red light, I see it a certain way. If I am looking at the same tea cup outside, in the sunny weather conditions, I see a cup that looks rather differently again. If we bring the cup back indoors and look at it under the candlelight conditions, then again it looks differently. Which of these experience is the true cup as it really is? Well, I think the best realization is to realize that actually there is no true cup at all. Whatever you see is whatever stabilized given the circumstances of your psyche. So none of it is "what it is." Things don't have a true state that different from a false state, except conventionally. But even conventionally, it's a troublesome subject where you'll find plenty of disagreement.

 

So in other words, you seem to think that we are constantly mentally pulling and pushing on all the phenomena we observe, and thus we distort those phenomena. As soon as we relax a bit and let the phenomena be "themselves", we'll start seeing the true form of those phenomena. And here I am telling you, it's a false hope. Relaxing does not bring you closer to the truth than does straining. You have to exhaust the meaning of both straining and relaxation to really understand this. Now, relaxation tends to feel better than straining, so it's still a good idea to praise it, but I think one should be careful not to give relaxation a truth-giving character that it doesn't necessarily deserve.

 

Relaxed approach, effortless intent, I praise these not because they are more true, but because they are more powerful and more sustainable. They are as false as anything else though. Consider the fact that people relax all the time, but at the same time, people's delusions do not get cleared up by relaxing. It seems obvious to me. I mean, if relaxation by itself was some kind of truth serum, well, all the laid back people would be wizards and sages. We don't observe that, in my view.

 

It's obvious to me that not all relaxations are alike. Some relaxations are better than the others, just like some efforts are better than the others. Some people relax into wisdom, others relax into the status quo.

 

And believing that things have some kind of true state is delusional, in my view.

 

 

 

Things are never anything other than what they are. Why not? Because things don't really have a true state. All things are dynamic, although the speed of change can sometimes be glacial.

 

When I talk about the way things are, I am not referring to a stable, true state. I am talking about their manifestation in a given moment.

 

I haven't done a study on this or anything, but my experience is that when I am invested in the outcome of something, it often is more difficult to view things clearly. As I gain more perspective and add less biased energy, then I see things more clearly and decisions come more easily.

 

This doesn't have anything to do with true states really.

 

Now that I think of it, I remember a RSA youtube video that cited studies showing that people did better with some incentive, but beyond that basic level, more incentive actually harmed results, especially if the task was more complex.

 

Studies aside, does your experience suggest that biases and strong investment in outcome help you to see things more clearly?

 

It is indeed available. But you don't want to make people's own minds their own worst enemies to expose this availability. Being willfully ignorant doesn't make you into a sage and it doesn't enhance the availability of the mystical states. It's just the opposite.

 

Its seems like you're making a big leap here. How exactly does reacquainting people with their true nature make enemies of their minds? If it is because they start to see all the ways that they compulsively hide their true nature from themselves, there is nothing in that that requires the making of enemies. Its not different from contemplation, it just starts at a different place.

 

I meant this in a conventional sense. For example, I am sitting in the chair typing this post. I can return to this experience many times at will. It doesn't mean it's exactly the same, but it's same enough to warrant me calling what happens here "a return to typing." So when I asked whether or not you can return to that experience that you felt at 14, I didn't mean the precise replica, but something that's largely similar.

 

Obviously some experiences are harder to return to than others. Specifically spiritual experiences that lie outside convention and outside the day to day normalcy are harder to return to.

 

Well it depends on what level of similarity you require when you say the same experience. The higher the level of similarity, the rarer the experience. Within the level of similarity of accessing true nature, that is always available, though depth of recognition can vary. Also the reaction to it is very much different now. That part of the spectrum of feeling/experience does come from time to time, though, and isn't that rare. Those feelings/experiences are pretty conditional, so they aren't what I would call true nature.

 

 

Concepts are about as non-conceptual as they get. What is conceptual in a concept? Nothing. Just check it out for yourself if you don't trust me.

 

I meant conceptual in the conventional sense. By that I mean word based, and particularly word based without direct reference to apparent objects of the senses.

 

I'm guessing that when you say there is nothing conceptual in a concept that you are saying that concepts do not exist in the head, but are an aspect of existence, shaping experience in concrete ways. That doesn't change that perfection is an especially conceptual concept.

 

 

OK, in that sense everything you are saying is also an interpretation, so there was no need to call my attention to that fact as if it was something only I was committing. (or something that was committed in only one specific instance, as opposed to constantly and by all parties)

 

Thats true. Some interpretations are less skillful that others though. How does the interpretation affect your experience? How does it affect the experience of those you share it with? Where does it come from? Is it possible to interpret less?

 

 

Thinking is essential. It's misleading to say that contemplation can be done in the absence of thought. Not all thought sounds like words either. When people try to stop their thoughts, they really get lost. I learned how to stop my thoughts long time ago, and let me tell you, it did not make me even a tiny bit wiser or smarter. Having thoughts or not having them, I was the same genius or the same moron I always was. There was no real difference in my beliefs or in my state of being.

 

Why not take it further? Some people think that stopping breathing is even better than stopping thought. Why don't you stop your breathing in order to contemplate? When that's done, just keep taking it further and further. See if there is a stopping point somewhere down the line, or if it's chasing an ever receding horizon.

 

I agree here. When the discursive mind is silent, there still can be thought. This is the type of thought that is particularly useful in contemplation.

 

The discursive mind doesn't need to be quiet for this thought to go on, but it sure does make it more obvious. If we keep looking to the discursive mind and our judgments, without making the break that allows true contemplation, and think that that is some path to truth or clarity, then I think we will mostly be very disappointed.

 

This is not to suggest any forceful stopping of the discursive mind. As the attention moves elsewhere, it becomes less relevant.

 

I disagree. Because all people are different, all people have opinions that are disagreeable to others. To the extent you cushion those opinions of yours during communication, is the extent to which you misrepresent the state of your heart.

 

This is only true if you identify with your opinions.

 

If you don't identify with your opinions, then communication has nothing to do with some objectified subjective truth which is communicated or not. It is a creative response to the environment. In this case, honesty is not bound to particular opinions or ways of expressing those opinions.

 

It could be more honest for me to refrain from saying something that I have a strong sense will be hurtful than to say that thing because I think I should because its what the tough honest guys do. It can also be more honest to say the hurtful thing, if in my heart of hearts I have a strong sense that it is the best possible thing I can do right then.

 

In this view, honesty is an expression of a deeper movement, and not of the state of my discursive mind in any given moment.

 

Ultimately whatever direction you choose is the right one and what makes it right is you.

 

Relatively the right direction is whichever one obtains maximum reason and consent, both. Too much consent and too little reason is as bad as too much reason and too little consent. Both reason and consent are important for the convention to remain healthy.

 

This makes sense. I have tended to be weaker on the consent side, so this is one of the reasons that I have been emphasizing it recently.

 

Consent and reason are two sides of the same coin, and you can't really have one without the other. To what are you consenting, if you have not the reason to perceive it? And how can one have the use of reason to perceive clearly, if one cannot consent to things appearing as they do?

 

Edit: For quote color. Bright yellow was not my most inspired choice.

Edited June 1, 2011 by Todd

[goldisheavy]

Hahaha, that was a fun one :-) Thank you!

 

What I ran into with it was an immediate tendency to want to stick yin/yang over the top of some other explanations of how 'red' might appear. That's a problem with theories IMO/IME because it's hard to keep them 'pure' unless one is very disciplined, which I'm not, but anyway :-)

...

...

...

However, what was really interesting IMO/IME with this is how the application of one theory (which is purported as universal) brings up theories I didn't even know I knew. That was strange. And the spinning thing too :-)

 

Well, isn't that something?

 

Do you still think you understand what yin and yang are all about?

[JustARandomPanda]

Ganying sounds suspiciously to me like the Hermetic principle of "As Above, So Below" or maybe "As Within, so Without". Of course I don't know squat about Ganying and only read the first chapter of the Hermetica. I have the Hermetica but I would like a book on Ganying (and Wuxing too) that doesn't cost $55 or more on Amazon like the previous links provided do.

 

Also it kind of reminds me somewhat of David Bohm's Implicate Order which was admittedly very difficult for me to understand. Honestly I'm still not sure I really got what his whole Implicate Order was all about. But it did kind of sound like a modern, updated version of the Hermetic principle.

 

 

As to the subject of Thoughts here's some of what Bohm had to say:

 

...the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that it's not doing anything - that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally. This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it. And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call "sustained incoherence"

[goldisheavy]

I lied. I want to respond to this with quotes.

 

When I talk about the way things are, I am not referring to a stable, true state. I am talking about their manifestation in a given moment.

 

No you aren't. If you were, you'd be able to admit that things can't really get more or less clear. For a thing to be more clear it has to be perceived in a way that's closer to its true state. If there is no true state for anything, then there is no such thing as getting closer or moving away from it. Thus there is no such thing as clear or muddy perception.

 

I haven't done a study on this or anything,

 

I have studied this very issue extensively.

 

but my experience is that when I am invested in the outcome of something, it often is more difficult to view things clearly. As I gain more perspective and add less biased energy, then I see things more clearly and decisions come more easily.

 

This doesn't have anything to do with true states really.

 

Now that I think of it, I remember a RSA youtube video that cited studies showing that people did better with some incentive, but beyond that basic level, more incentive actually harmed results, especially if the task was more complex.

 

Studies aside, does your experience suggest that biases and strong investment in outcome help you to see things more clearly?

 

Ultimately I reject the idea of seeing things more or less clearly. When people talk about it, I know what they are trying to say, but they are all deluded. People generally think that things have true states, or true natures, and we can get closer and further away from those. Of course I don't think that. I know how to talk to people who have this baseless belief simply thanks to me having had that same belief in the past. At the same time I know it's nonsense.

 

Now then, things aren't muddy or clear except relatively. So this entire discussion is purely about aesthetics. It's like comparing different brands of beer and discussing which one has a more velvety texture and which one goes down smoother. We all have our preferences.

 

My personal preference is to rely on a good mix of active and passive observation. Sometimes I allow myself to get passive. Sometimes I become active and observe what happens then. I use every modality I am capable of to understand what I am capable of. I don't restrict myself in any kind of formulaic manner. I am not committed to action. I am not committed to non-action. I am not even committed to clarity. You can perhaps say that I am committed to wisdom, and then to power right after that. Wisdom first, power second. On the days I feel that convention deserves some respect (which happens often), I also put compassion into the number three spot, right after power. That's my personal order of priorities.

 

Its seems like you're making a big leap here. How exactly does reacquainting people with their true nature make enemies of their minds?

 

Because people's true nature is one of limitlessness. But you advise people to become silent and ignorant (to ignore something is to be ignorant, especially when that something is as life-shaping as core beliefs are). In other words, you advise people to embrace a limitation. You have a noble intent, but you're just unwise because you haven't connected all the dots yet. This is why you found a formula that works for you and you decided to stick with it.

 

Needless to say, me and you will never agree on this. I see your method as ranging between somewhat useful if the person doesn't become dogmatic about it, or very harmful if the person applies your method in a rigid and uncritical manner. Considering that most people around here lean toward dogma, it's kind of a harmful method actually. You're giving people what they superficially crave (mental laziness), which is the wrong thing to do right now.

 

A better way is to do what I do. Periods of relaxation followed by periods of effort. Mix and match. Adapt. Bend. Go with the circumstances and don't get stuck on any formula. Always put living wisdom ahead of any and all formulas, dogmas, and rituals.

 

If it is because they start to see all the ways that they compulsively hide their true nature from themselves

 

True nature cannot be hidden in the manner you imagine. Specifically discursive thought has no power at all to hide your true nature. What hides the true nature are beliefs. For example, if you believe that the true nature can be hidden by discursive thought, that kind of self-limiting belief will obscure the recognition of your true nature.

 

, there is nothing in that that requires the making of enemies. Its not different from contemplation, it just starts at a different place.

 

You use the term "discursive mind" in a pejorative sense. Your attitude toward it is to dismiss it, or to ignore it. This is a very much partial attitude that leads you toward a giant limitation and ignorance instead of toward limitlessness.

 

Well it depends on what level of similarity you require when you say the same experience. The higher the level of similarity, the rarer the experience. Within the level of similarity of accessing true nature, that is always available, though depth of recognition can vary. Also the reaction to it is very much different now. That part of the spectrum of feeling/experience does come from time to time, though, and isn't that rare. Those feelings/experiences are pretty conditional, so they aren't what I would call true nature.

 

I meant conceptual in the conventional sense. By that I mean word based, and particularly word based without direct reference to apparent objects of the senses.

 

I'm guessing that when you say there is nothing conceptual in a concept that you are saying that concepts do not exist in the head, but are an aspect of existence, shaping experience in concrete ways. That doesn't change that perfection is an especially conceptual concept.

 

I have no idea what is an especially conceptual concept. I'm not even going to try to understand this. It's like a supremely buttery butter. No idea what that is either.

 

Thats true. Some interpretations are less skillful that others though.

 

Right.

 

How does the interpretation affect your experience? How does it affect the experience of those you share it with? Where does it come from?

 

It's contextualized intent. In other words, whatever you intend is generally what happens, and this includes interpretations. And intent is not something that operates in the void (except at the highest level), but it operates within a certain context.

 

Is it possible to interpret less?

 

It's impossible. If you ever said to yourself, "Right now I am interpreting less" that would simply be your interpretation. You can't interpret more or less, only differently.

 

I agree here. When the discursive mind is silent, there still can be thought. This is the type of thought that is particularly useful in contemplation.

 

The discursive mind doesn't need to be quiet for this thought to go on, but it sure does make it more obvious. If we keep looking to the discursive mind and our judgments, without making the break that allows true contemplation,

 

True contemplation cannot be obscured by anything at all, ever. Alternatively, what obscures contemplation are beliefs. For example, if you believe that the discursive thoughts have the power to obscure true contemplation, your experience will confirm that for you.

 

You'll just find whatever limitation you believe in to be generally true in your experience. It just means you've created a self-fulfilling prophecy for yourself.

 

And frankly, as long as you're not hurting too many people too much, and as long as you're having a good time with it, there is nothing wrong living like that. That's what conventional living is all about. It's a kind of enjoyable limited ignorance. It comes replete with paths which pretend to take you beyond convention, but which in reality are just part of the convention and keep you enmeshed in it. Why? Because those paths don't challenge any of your core beliefs.

 

Are you going to die with largely the same worldview you were born with? Are you just tweaking it a bit here and a bit there? That's good enough for some people.

 

and think that that is some path to truth or clarity, then I think we will mostly be very disappointed.

 

This is not to suggest any forceful stopping of the discursive mind. As the attention moves elsewhere, it becomes less relevant.

 

This is only true if you identify with your opinions.

 

The opinions have their "own" energy whether or not I choose to aggregate them under my personal identity.

 

Simply observe other people from your point of view. Other people do not embody your identity, and yet they go around doing what is natural to them. So this proves that you don't need to slap your identity on everything in order to make things go boom. People will clash without your personal involvement as long as you believe in free will for all people, or as long as you have other beliefs that enable such manifestations.

 

Alternatively you can freeze all the people in their tracks, and/or make them peaceful by the force of your mind. You'd be chocking the living heck out of them and destroying the very meaning of what it means to be a person in the process. Ever read Dune? Think of Leto's peace, if yes. It's a stifling, brutal kind of peace. It's peaceful on the surface, but it's vicious and brutal at heart level.

 

In other words, I can create a universal peace by disempowering people within the space of my mind and by making them into my puppets, or otherwise, making them less meaningful and less free. If I did that, I'd be in peace, but also alone. I'd be one without equals. Certainly doable, but it's not to my taste.

 

In fact, I decided I will give people even more power than before and I will ratchet up the creative and beautiful chaos everywhere. When every person is Lord, there will be no such thing as leadership and followership. All the dogmas will fall and no one will command an army of dittoheads anymore because no one will be stupid enough to yield one's power to be used by others.

 

This time is coming because it is my intent. Fun times!

 

If you don't identify with your opinions, then communication has nothing to do with some objectified subjective truth which is communicated or not. It is a creative response to the environment. In this case, honesty is not bound to particular opinions or ways of expressing those opinions.

 

It could be more honest for me to refrain from saying something that I have a strong sense will be hurtful than to say that thing because I think I should because its what the tough honest guys do. It can also be more honest to say the hurtful thing, if in my heart of hearts I have a strong sense that it is the best possible thing I can do right then.

 

So you agree with me then. Grudgingly.

 

In this view, honesty is an expression of a deeper movement, and not of the state of my discursive mind in any given moment.

 

This makes sense. I have tended to be weaker on the consent side, so this is one of the reasons that I have been emphasizing it recently.

 

Consent and reason are two sides of the same coin, and you can't really have one without the other.

 

I think reason can exist without any kind of consent, but not the other way around.

 

To what are you consenting, if you have not the reason to perceive it? And how can one have the use of reason to perceive clearly, if one cannot consent to things appearing as they do?

 

Because you don't consent to things, but to other sentient beings opinion of those things.

 

Reason is consistency of beliefs and experiences and this can be completely self-referential.

 

Consent is an alignment of sentient beings' intentions and it has very little meaning outside the network of peers.

Edited June 1, 2011 by goldisheavy

[goldisheavy]

As to the subject of Thoughts here's some of what Bohm had to say:

...the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that it's not doing anything - that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally. This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it. And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call "sustained incoherence"

 

What a way to victimize oneself before one's own thoughts. One is master of one's thoughts and never the other way around.

 

As I see it, the power coupling looks roughly like this:

 

1. You
   
2. (optional) Thoughts
   
3. Beliefs
   
4. Experience
   

 

And the feedback loop is:

 

1. Experience
   
2. Interpretation born of belief
   
3. (optional) Thoughts
   
4. You
   

 

So beliefs affect things on the way out and in. Beliefs affect how the experience will manifest going outward, and they'll affect how we'll interpret the experience going inward. These out and in movements are one simultaneous movement, and the most powerful "thing" in there is You.

 

You are the one that can make important changes in beliefs by considering your beliefs. Considering one's beliefs requires at least some thinking. It could involve just weighing things, or it may involve a process of trial and error, pushing and pulling, to see what's worth what to you.

 

What happens though is that first, people forget about the true extent of the power they have, and second, people become unconscious of many important beliefs they have. Unconscious beliefs become implicit or tacit beliefs, and they are powerful. They often tend to be core beliefs about reality, life and beliefs (meta-beliefs).

 

For example a person can believe that beliefs have no power over anything, and ironically this kind of belief has a very perversely powerful effect on what happens in the psyche.

[Birch]

Ganying sounds suspiciously to me like the Hermetic principle of "As Above, So Below" or maybe "As Within, so Without". Of course I don't know squat about Ganying and only read the first chapter of the Hermetica. I have the Hermetica but I would like a book on Ganying (and Wuxing too) that doesn't cost $55 or more on Amazon like the previous links provided do.

 

Also it kind of reminds me somewhat of David Bohm's Implicate Order which was admittedly very difficult for me to understand. Honestly I'm still not sure I really got what his whole Implicate Order was all about. But it did kind of sound like a modern, updated version of the Hermetic principle.

 

 

As to the subject of Thoughts here's some of what Bohm had to say:

 

I'm studying ganying in a haphazard way (seems to be my way :-))

Anyway, I'd akin my current understanding of it more to 'triangulation' so perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree. The way I tell it to myself (so far) is that if 'something' is the case (never forgetting the other aspects of it - which are dynamic and networked, as usual :-)) then signs of it will be all over the place, and not necessarily in places that one might have thought to look at off the top of it.

 

It's a more complicated model of causality, I figure :-) And following on from my other rambling post about yin/yang and red. It occurred to me that the problem is not so often what we think, but how we think. And that 'non-conventional' ways of thinking are ways of understanding things you can't understand any other way (if you've been properly 'educated' that is )

 

I'm not suggesting any way of thinking is more 'real' than another (well, actually, I am ) Rather that certain types of thinking have better relationships with reality than others. What's a "better" relationship with reality? One that does not destroy you or it in the process

Edited June 2, 2011 by -K-

[goldisheavy]

I was looking to find something about ganying, as it's first I hear of the term. I found this article.

[Birch]

I was looking to find something about ganying, as it's first I hear of the term. I found this article.

 

 

Thanks for that Mr GIH. I dunno, but it looks like there's something going on with the definition of jing.

[Todd]

No you aren't. If you were, you'd be able to admit that things can't really get more or less clear. For a thing to be more clear it has to be perceived in a way that's closer to its true state. If there is no true state for anything, then there is no such thing as getting closer or moving away from it. Thus there is no such thing as clear or muddy perception.

 

I have studied this very issue extensively.

 

Ultimately I reject the idea of seeing things more or less clearly. When people talk about it, I know what they are trying to say, but they are all deluded. People generally think that things have true states, or true natures, and we can get closer and further away from those. Of course I don't think that. I know how to talk to people who have this baseless belief simply thanks to me having had that same belief in the past. At the same time I know it's nonsense.

 

Now then, things aren't muddy or clear except relatively. So this entire discussion is purely about aesthetics. It's like comparing different brands of beer and discussing which one has a more velvety texture and which one goes down smoother. We all have our preferences.

 

Your argument that things don't have a true state consisted of a description of how a teacup appears differently in different contexts, and so no pure, true teacup can be found. I stated that nothing that I was saying depended upon the presence of a true state of a teacup as you defined true state. I do not depend on knowing the teacup in some pure form, divorced from context. In any given context (and take context to mean whatever level you like, out to the most profoundly altered core beliefs) the teacup has a way of appearing, which one can perceive more or less clearly.

 

I get that in terms of the ultimate there really is no clarity or lack of clarity. All just is, and is equally a revelation of the same reality. This is a part of the basis for my argument that truth is available no matter the state of one's beliefs.

 

But we were talking about relative clarity. You can dismiss it as aesthetics, and I get that point of view, but its not the aesthetics of which brand of beer is more velvety. Is the aesthetics of stepping into the road and getting run over or not. It is the aesthetics of alienating your child or not. It is the aesthetics of financial ruin or success. It is the aesthetics of being run by one's beliefs unconsciously, or encountering one's beliefs and their changing to something more harmonious (or whatever word you're using to mean preferable at the moment).

 

If you have trouble seeing how this plays out, I can flesh it out. For now I'll just explain the first example. As we step into the street a car either is or isn't just about to pass through the space that we move into. If it is, then we will be hit. If it isn't, then we won't. If we don't perceive the situation clearly, then we might walk into the street when we will be hit.

 

It may be that it is possible to have some super clarity, where one sees how thoughts are creating the street and the cars and one's body, and so through this super clarity, one is able to step into the street, while at the same time neglecting to create the thought of being hit, or creating some other thought, which would be preferable to being hit, and thereby circumvent what would be the reality of the situation for most people, but that doesn't change that it is relative clarity that brings about this result.

 

You can argue that all of this is still just aesthetics, and thats your right, but holding onto such an attitude has its own outcomes.

 

My personal preference is to rely on a good mix of active and passive observation. Sometimes I allow myself to get passive. Sometimes I become active and observe what happens then. I use every modality I am capable of to understand what I am capable of. I don't restrict myself in any kind of formulaic manner. I am not committed to action. I am not committed to non-action. I am not even committed to clarity.

 

Good for you! Really!

 

You can perhaps say that I am committed to wisdom, and then to power right after that. Wisdom first, power second. On the days I feel that convention deserves some respect (which happens often), I also put compassion into the number three spot, right after power. That's my personal order of priorities.

 

More on power later.

Because people's true nature is one of limitlessness. But you advise people to become silent and ignorant (to ignore something is to be ignorant, especially when that something is as life-shaping as core beliefs are). In other words, you advise people to embrace a limitation. You have a noble intent, but you're just unwise because you haven't connected all the dots yet. This is why you found a formula that works for you and you decided to stick with it.

 

Needless to say, me and you will never agree on this. I see your method as ranging between somewhat useful if the person doesn't become dogmatic about it, or very harmful if the person applies your method in a rigid and uncritical manner. Considering that most people around here lean toward dogma, it's kind of a harmful method actually. You're giving people what they superficially crave (mental laziness), which is the wrong thing to do right now.

 

A better way is to do what I do. Periods of relaxation followed by periods of effort. Mix and match. Adapt. Bend. Go with the circumstances and don't get stuck on any formula. Always put living wisdom ahead of any and all formulas, dogmas, and rituals.

 

Your last two paragraphs could just as easily be me talking about your method, though I wouldn't have added the "never agree on this" part. The first paragraph is a reflection of your misunderstanding of what I have been saying.

 

I have never advocated for some wholesale ignoring of core beliefs. I advocate for paying attention to the source, coming to know it intimately, and then seeing where that leads. It can form a powerful basis from which to become aware of one's core beliefs, and let go of them in favor of what is revealed in their absence (or perhaps more accurately, what is revealed as the death grip on them relaxes). Core beliefs can be strongly highlighted when we contact that which never bought into one of them, even for a second. I have said that it is possible to access this, without first making one's core beliefs especially coherent.

 

Any approach will be toxic if it is engaged in dogmatically. Surely you can see how a dogmatic understanding of your approach can lead to a lot of ineffective mind referring to mind, staying at a very surface level of verbal thoughts, or even if it goes deeper, to a lot of fiddling with beliefs in order get just the right set of beliefs, to make some more preferable experience, without ever really discovering what one really is. For your approach to lead somewhere, a person must engage in it with deep integrity, or just make a mistake somewhere on the way. The same is true with my approach.

 

True nature cannot be hidden in the manner you imagine. Specifically discursive thought has no power at all to hide your true nature. What hides the true nature are beliefs. For example, if you believe that the true nature can be hidden by discursive thought, that kind of self-limiting belief will obscure the recognition of your true nature.

 

I wasn't referring to discursive thought when I was speaking of hiding true nature (despite the fact that it can't be hidden). I was referring beliefs. Discursive thoughts reflect beliefs in some sense, and can distract us from beliefs, so I can see how that might seem to hide true nature as well (even though it doesn't), now that you bring it up.

 

You use the term "discursive mind" in a pejorative sense. Your attitude toward it is to dismiss it, or to ignore it. This is a very much partial attitude that leads you toward a giant limitation and ignorance instead of toward limitlessness.

 

How exactly does suggesting that someone move their attention from the discursive mind, which previously was the place that they constantly looked to tell them what they and everything else is, to what they actually are (or even to anything else at all, for that matter!) is introducing some new limitation? If it is interpreted as ignore the discursive mind in all situations, then yes, this is a new limitation, even though it might be freeing on some level, but if it is, "Hey, there is something other than your discursive mind going on. You might want to check it out, really!", then please, tell me how this is introducing a new limitation.

 

I have no idea what is an especially conceptual concept. I'm not even going to try to understand this. It's like a supremely buttery butter. No idea what that is either.

 

An especially conceptual concept is a concept that is further removed from sense experience than another concept. An example of a relatively less conceptual concept is "water". I can point to water. A more conceptual concept is "wetness", since it requires separating out a single quality from at least one thing. And in the sense that "wetness" is often used, it refers to quality that is conceptually separated out of many different things, or applied to many different things, depending on your point of view, and can be further separated into many different degrees of "wetness". An even more conceptual concept is "perfection", since it is a concept that refers to the state of satisfying various arbitrarily defined parameters of said perfection, which are all other concepts. I can point to something that I think is perfect and a lot fewer people will agree that I am pointing to perfection than would agree that I was pointing to water if I were pointing to it, or to an example of wetness. This is because perfection is more reliant on concepts for its perception, and they have different concepts making up their concept of perfection as it relates to whatever object I am pointing at.

 

This is all relative, but if I have to keep saying that, then maybe we're not understanding each other very well.

 

It's contextualized intent. In other words, whatever you intend is generally what happens, and this includes interpretations. And intent is not something that operates in the void (except at the highest level), but it operates within a certain context.

 

This answer applies to interpretation in general. The questions were directed specifically to the "Lord" interpretation.

 

It's impossible. If you ever said to yourself, "Right now I am interpreting less" that would simply be your interpretation. You can't interpret more or less, only differently.

 

Really? So lets say I see someone open a mailbox. I perceive that event without naming any of those objects. I have no idea how to describe such a perception, but I think that you have access to such a way of perceiving, so perhaps you know what I mean. I could also not only name all of those objects, but I could start telling a story about it, with many far-flung assumptions and perceived connections, such that I decide that I need to move house within the hour, or else the world will end. Are you saying that there is not less interpretation in one of these examples?

 

If so, then I'll have to define interpretation as conceptual addition to bare experience, where concepts are defined as mental chatter that one can communicate to another person using words.

 

Still no difference?

True contemplation cannot be obscured by anything at all, ever. Alternatively, what obscures contemplation are beliefs. For example, if you believe that the discursive thoughts have the power to obscure true contemplation, your experience will confirm that for you.

 

You'll just find whatever limitation you believe in to be generally true in your experience. It just means you've created a self-fulfilling prophecy for yourself.

 

I agree, including the belief that people cannot readily access true nature except through investigating beliefs, and then only after a very long time and a lot of effort.

 

And frankly, as long as you're not hurting too many people too much, and as long as you're having a good time with it, there is nothing wrong living like that. That's what conventional living is all about. It's a kind of enjoyable limited ignorance. It comes replete with paths which pretend to take you beyond convention, but which in reality are just part of the convention and keep you enmeshed in it. Why? Because those paths don't challenge any of your core beliefs.

 

Are you going to die with largely the same worldview you were born with? Are you just tweaking it a bit here and a bit there? That's good enough for some people.

 

It is true-- at some point it is important to challenge core beliefs, though, as you suggest, not necessarily as a project.

 

The opinions have their "own" energy whether or not I choose to aggregate them under my personal identity.

 

Simply observe other people from your point of view. Other people do not embody your identity, and yet they go around doing what is natural to them. So this proves that you don't need to slap your identity on everything in order to make things go boom. People will clash without your personal involvement as long as you believe in free will for all people, or as long as you have other beliefs that enable such manifestations.

 

Alternatively you can freeze all the people in their tracks, and/or make them peaceful by the force of your mind. You'd be chocking the living heck out of them and destroying the very meaning of what it means to be a person in the process. Ever read Dune? Think of Leto's peace, if yes. It's a stifling, brutal kind of peace. It's peaceful on the surface, but it's vicious and brutal at heart level.

 

In other words, I can create a universal peace by disempowering people within the space of my mind and by making them into my puppets, or otherwise, making them less meaningful and less free. If I did that, I'd be in peace, but also alone. I'd be one without equals. Certainly doable, but it's not to my taste.

 

In fact, I decided I will give people even more power than before and I will ratchet up the creative and beautiful chaos everywhere. When every person is Lord, there will be no such thing as leadership and followership. All the dogmas will fall and no one will command an army of dittoheads anymore because no one will be stupid enough to yield one's power to be used by others.

 

This time is coming because it is my intent. Fun times!

 

Its not so impressive when you consider that you are all those other people, and giving them their freedom is only really giving yourself freedom.

 

Given that you are everything, how does the question of power come into play? Power of what, over what? In my view, the obsessive movement, either toward or away from power is a symptom of a rather limited view.

 

So you agree with me then. Grudgingly.

 

Well, I'm glad that you agree with me. I had gotten the impression from what you wrote that you felt that it would necessarily be dishonest to not voice an opinion in deference to a deeper movement, but now that I reread what you wrote when the subject first came up, I see that I misinterpreted you.

I think reason can exist without any kind of consent, but not the other way around.

 

Because you don't consent to things, but to other sentient beings opinion of those things.

 

Reason is consistency of beliefs and experiences and this can be completely self-referential.

 

Consent is an alignment of sentient beings' intentions and it has very little meaning outside the network of peers.

 

I misinterpreted you again here. Thanks for the clarification.

 

As defined here, reason and consent do not seem like a good basis to guide my direction in life.

[goldisheavy]

No you aren't. If you were, you'd be able to admit that things can't really get more or less clear. For a thing to be more clear it has to be perceived in a way that's closer to its true state. If there is no true state for anything, then there is no such thing as getting closer or moving away from it. Thus there is no such thing as clear or muddy perception.

 

I have studied this very issue extensively.

 

Ultimately I reject the idea of seeing things more or less clearly. When people talk about it, I know what they are trying to say, but they are all deluded. People generally think that things have true states, or true natures, and we can get closer and further away from those. Of course I don't think that. I know how to talk to people who have this baseless belief simply thanks to me having had that same belief in the past. At the same time I know it's nonsense.

 

Now then, things aren't muddy or clear except relatively. So this entire discussion is purely about aesthetics. It's like comparing different brands of beer and discussing which one has a more velvety texture and which one goes down smoother. We all have our preferences.

 

Your argument that things don't have a true state consisted of a description of how a teacup appears differently in different contexts, and so no pure, true teacup can be found. I stated that nothing that I was saying depended upon the presence of a true state of a teacup as you defined true state. I do not depend on knowing the teacup in some pure form, divorced from context. In any given context (and take context to mean whatever level you like, out to the most profoundly altered core beliefs) the teacup has a way of appearing, which one can perceive more or less clearly.

 

I get that in terms of the ultimate there really is no clarity or lack of clarity. All just is, and is equally a revelation of the same reality. This is a part of the basis for my argument that truth is available no matter the state of one's beliefs.

 

But we were talking about relative clarity. You can dismiss it as aesthetics, and I get that point of view, but its not the aesthetics of which brand of beer is more velvety. Is the aesthetics of stepping into the road and getting run over or not. It is the aesthetics of alienating your child or not. It is the aesthetics of financial ruin or success. It is the aesthetics of being run by one's beliefs unconsciously, or encountering one's beliefs and their changing to something more harmonious (or whatever word you're using to mean preferable at the moment).

 

Examining one's beliefs is very important for this very reason. It's precisely because you can get hurt that sitting on a mat and summarily ignoring your thinking and beliefs in order to bliss out is not a good long term approach.

 

Beliefs have a direct relationship to aesthetics. When you know your beliefs, you know the aesthetics of your life as well.

 

If you have trouble seeing how this plays out, I can flesh it out. For now I'll just explain the first example. As we step into the street a car either is or isn't just about to pass through the space that we move into. If it is, then we will be hit. If it isn't, then we won't. If we don't perceive the situation clearly, then we might walk into the street when we will be hit.

 

It may be that it is possible to have some super clarity, where one sees how thoughts are creating the street and the cars and one's body, and so through this super clarity, one is able to step into the street, while at the same time neglecting to create the thought of being hit, or creating some other thought, which would be preferable to being hit, and thereby circumvent what would be the reality of the situation for most people, but that doesn't change that it is relative clarity that brings about this result.

 

It's not clarity, it's intent. What you're describing is a way for the intent to flow such that it will look to an ignorant observer as if you should have been hit, but you aren't hit.

 

It's possible to have what you refer to as clarity and simply to allow yourself to be hit, as if it's not a very big deal.

 

The reason I criticize clarity is because I see it as counter-productive. By trying to see things clearly you're actually becoming more crazy over time. Eventually you might actually convince yourself that you got it, you can finally see things as they really are. If that happened, it would be the beginning of the horizons collapsing.

 

You can argue that all of this is still just aesthetics, and thats your right, but holding onto such an attitude has its own outcomes.

 

Yes it does.

 

My personal preference is to rely on a good mix of active and passive observation. Sometimes I allow myself to get passive. Sometimes I become active and observe what happens then. I use every modality I am capable of to understand what I am capable of. I don't restrict myself in any kind of formulaic manner. I am not committed to action. I am not committed to non-action. I am not even committed to clarity.

 

Good for you! Really!

 

You can perhaps say that I am committed to wisdom, and then to power right after that. Wisdom first, power second. On the days I feel that convention deserves some respect (which happens often), I also put compassion into the number three spot, right after power. That's my personal order of priorities.

 

More on power later.

Because people's true nature is one of limitlessness. But you advise people to become silent and ignorant (to ignore something is to be ignorant, especially when that something is as life-shaping as core beliefs are). In other words, you advise people to embrace a limitation. You have a noble intent, but you're just unwise because you haven't connected all the dots yet. This is why you found a formula that works for you and you decided to stick with it.

 

Needless to say, me and you will never agree on this. I see your method as ranging between somewhat useful if the person doesn't become dogmatic about it, or very harmful if the person applies your method in a rigid and uncritical manner. Considering that most people around here lean toward dogma, it's kind of a harmful method actually. You're giving people what they superficially crave (mental laziness), which is the wrong thing to do right now.

 

A better way is to do what I do. Periods of relaxation followed by periods of effort. Mix and match. Adapt. Bend. Go with the circumstances and don't get stuck on any formula. Always put living wisdom ahead of any and all formulas, dogmas, and rituals.

 

Your last two paragraphs could just as easily be me talking about your method, though I wouldn't have added the "never agree on this" part. The first paragraph is a reflection of your misunderstanding of what I have been saying.

 

I have never advocated for some wholesale ignoring of core beliefs. I advocate for paying attention to the source, coming to know it intimately, and then seeing where that leads.

 

First, there is no source in the way you describe. Secondly, if someone pays attention to this strange source, they'll be ignoring everything else. That's how attention works. Attention is selective.

 

It can form a powerful basis from which to become aware of one's core beliefs,

 

Only if you intend to use such state this way, but the state you describe as "following the source" doesn't automagically force this outcome.

 

and let go of them in favor of what is revealed in their absence (or perhaps more accurately, what is revealed as the death grip on them relaxes).

 

There is no such thing as absence of beliefs. Didn't we discuss this already? You can change what you believe, but you can't nullify them. Your beliefs can become very flexible, but they can't vanish altogether.

 

Core beliefs can be strongly highlighted when we contact that which never bought into one of them, even for a second.

 

Really? What is "that" which never bought into one of them? Sounds like nonsense and it sounds like you're contradicting what we've talked about earlier as well.

 

Remember that we agreed that silent, tacit beliefs, core beliefs, all those are intentionally invigorated by your mind, by the totality of your being. It's this totality of commitment that gives those beliefs such force that you don't even have to be conscious of them in order for them to operate.

 

No beliefs operate despite yourself. They all operate because at some level you've invigorated them (and then forgot this fact). So what this means is that there is no "that" which never bought into them.

 

Consider this. This "that which never bought into core beliefs" is more powerful than the conscious layer of the mind. If this deep and powerful layer of the mind doesn't do anything to be pro- or con- anything, then it falls to relatively powerless conscious mind to be the one creating this whole world. If that's the case, then manifesting magic in the world should be joke easy, since there is nothing to counteract the conscious intent in this deluded view.

 

"That which never bought into core beliefs" has indeed bought into them, and is maintaining this entire show. And the reason you can't willy nilly screw around with this show is because you've cut yourself off, fragmented yourself off from that which runs the show. If you then just settle into intentionally inactive observation you'll get what you intend to happen -- status quo.

 

I have said that it is possible to access this, without first making one's core beliefs especially coherent.

 

Any approach will be toxic if it is engaged in dogmatically. Surely you can see how a dogmatic understanding of your approach can lead to a lot of ineffective mind referring to mind, staying at a very surface level of verbal thoughts, or even if it goes deeper, to a lot of fiddling with beliefs in order get just the right set of beliefs, to make some more preferable experience, without ever really discovering what one really is. For your approach to lead somewhere, a person must engage in it with deep integrity, or just make a mistake somewhere on the way. The same is true with my approach.

 

True nature cannot be hidden in the manner you imagine. Specifically discursive thought has no power at all to hide your true nature. What hides the true nature are beliefs. For example, if you believe that the true nature can be hidden by discursive thought, that kind of self-limiting belief will obscure the recognition of your true nature.

 

I wasn't referring to discursive thought when I was speaking of hiding true nature (despite the fact that it can't be hidden). I was referring beliefs. Discursive thoughts reflect beliefs in some sense, and can distract us from beliefs, so I can see how that might seem to hide true nature as well (even though it doesn't), now that you bring it up.

 

You use the term "discursive mind" in a pejorative sense. Your attitude toward it is to dismiss it, or to ignore it. This is a very much partial attitude that leads you toward a giant limitation and ignorance instead of toward limitlessness.

 

How exactly does suggesting that someone move their attention from the discursive mind, which previously was the place that they constantly looked to tell them what they and everything else is, to what they actually are (or even to anything else at all, for that matter!) is introducing some new limitation?

 

Because first of all, discursive mind is volitional. It's not something other than yourself. It's you talking to yourself. It's not an "it". Don't refer to it in 3rd person.

 

Second, when you turn away from the discursive mind you're not actually facing that which you really are!

 

If it is interpreted as ignore the discursive mind in all situations, then yes, this is a new limitation, even though it might be freeing on some level, but if it is, "Hey, there is something other than your discursive mind going on. You might want to check it out, really!", then please, tell me how this is introducing a new limitation.

 

I have no idea what is an especially conceptual concept. I'm not even going to try to understand this. It's like a supremely buttery butter. No idea what that is either.

 

An especially conceptual concept is a concept that is further removed from sense experience than another concept. An example of a relatively less conceptual concept is "water". I can point to water. A more conceptual concept is "wetness", since it requires separating out a single quality from at least one thing. And in the sense that "wetness" is often used, it refers to quality that is conceptually separated out of many different things, or applied to many different things, depending on your point of view, and can be further separated into many different degrees of "wetness". An even more conceptual concept is "perfection", since it is a concept that refers to the state of satisfying various arbitrarily defined parameters of said perfection, which are all other concepts. I can point to something that I think is perfect and a lot fewer people will agree that I am pointing to perfection than would agree that I was pointing to water if I were pointing to it, or to an example of wetness. This is because perfection is more reliant on concepts for its perception, and they have different concepts making up their concept of perfection as it relates to whatever object I am pointing at.

 

This is all relative, but if I have to keep saying that, then maybe we're not understanding each other very well.

 

It's contextualized intent. In other words, whatever you intend is generally what happens, and this includes interpretations. And intent is not something that operates in the void (except at the highest level), but it operates within a certain context.

 

This answer applies to interpretation in general. The questions were directed specifically to the "Lord" interpretation.

 

It's impossible. If you ever said to yourself, "Right now I am interpreting less" that would simply be your interpretation. You can't interpret more or less, only differently.

 

Really? So lets say I see someone open a mailbox. I perceive that event without naming any of those objects. I have no idea how to describe such a perception, but I think that you have access to such a way of perceiving, so perhaps you know what I mean. I could also not only name all of those objects, but I could start telling a story about it, with many far-flung assumptions and perceived connections, such that I decide that I need to move house within the hour, or else the world will end. Are you saying that there is not less interpretation in one of these examples?

 

Precisely. Not less! Only different.

 

If so, then I'll have to define interpretation as conceptual addition to bare experience, where concepts are defined as mental chatter that one can communicate to another person using words.

 

Still no difference?

True contemplation cannot be obscured by anything at all, ever. Alternatively, what obscures contemplation are beliefs. For example, if you believe that the discursive thoughts have the power to obscure true contemplation, your experience will confirm that for you.

 

You'll just find whatever limitation you believe in to be generally true in your experience. It just means you've created a self-fulfilling prophecy for yourself.

 

I agree, including the belief that people cannot readily access true nature except through investigating beliefs, and then only after a very long time and a lot of effort.

 

And frankly, as long as you're not hurting too many people too much, and as long as you're having a good time with it, there is nothing wrong living like that. That's what conventional living is all about. It's a kind of enjoyable limited ignorance. It comes replete with paths which pretend to take you beyond convention, but which in reality are just part of the convention and keep you enmeshed in it. Why? Because those paths don't challenge any of your core beliefs.

 

Are you going to die with largely the same worldview you were born with? Are you just tweaking it a bit here and a bit there? That's good enough for some people.

 

It is true-- at some point it is important to challenge core beliefs, though, as you suggest, not necessarily as a project.

 

The opinions have their "own" energy whether or not I choose to aggregate them under my personal identity.

 

Simply observe other people from your point of view. Other people do not embody your identity, and yet they go around doing what is natural to them. So this proves that you don't need to slap your identity on everything in order to make things go boom. People will clash without your personal involvement as long as you believe in free will for all people, or as long as you have other beliefs that enable such manifestations.

 

Alternatively you can freeze all the people in their tracks, and/or make them peaceful by the force of your mind. You'd be chocking the living heck out of them and destroying the very meaning of what it means to be a person in the process. Ever read Dune? Think of Leto's peace, if yes. It's a stifling, brutal kind of peace. It's peaceful on the surface, but it's vicious and brutal at heart level.

 

In other words, I can create a universal peace by disempowering people within the space of my mind and by making them into my puppets, or otherwise, making them less meaningful and less free. If I did that, I'd be in peace, but also alone. I'd be one without equals. Certainly doable, but it's not to my taste.

 

In fact, I decided I will give people even more power than before and I will ratchet up the creative and beautiful chaos everywhere. When every person is Lord, there will be no such thing as leadership and followership. All the dogmas will fall and no one will command an army of dittoheads anymore because no one will be stupid enough to yield one's power to be used by others.

 

This time is coming because it is my intent. Fun times!

 

Its not so impressive when you consider that you are all those other people, and giving them their freedom is only really giving yourself freedom.

 

Given that you are everything, how does the question of power come into play? Power of what, over what? In my view, the obsessive movement, either toward or away from power is a symptom of a rather limited view.

 

Power over one's own limitations.

Edited June 2, 2011 by goldisheavy

[Todd]

Examining one's beliefs is very important for this very reason. It's precisely because you can get hurt that sitting on a mat and summarily ignoring your thinking and beliefs in order to bliss out is not a good long term approach.

 

Have I ever suggested sitting on a mat and summarily ignoring your thinking and beliefs in order to bliss out as a long term approach? Or even a short-term approach?

 

Directing one's attention to something other than thinking and beliefs for periods of time can be very useful, but I have never emphasized bliss as the purpose. I think I have mostly emphasized truth, utility, and broader perspective.

 

Beliefs have a direct relationship to aesthetics. When you know your beliefs, you know the aesthetics of your life as well.

 

 

It's not clarity, it's intent. What you're describing is a way for the intent to flow such that it will look to an ignorant observer as if you should have been hit, but you aren't hit.

 

It's possible to have what you refer to as clarity and simply to allow yourself to be hit, as if it's not a very big deal.

 

The reason I criticize clarity is because I see it as counter-productive. By trying to see things clearly you're actually becoming more crazy over time. Eventually you might actually convince yourself that you got it, you can finally see things as they really are. If that happened, it would be the beginning of the horizons collapsing.

 

I am starting to see that what you call coherence I am calling clarity. Your criticism of clarity is my criticism of coherence-- specifically a crystallization of view based upon false assumptions/limiting motives, and that the only true clarity/coherence is already present and whole and does not increase or decrease, even in the presence of relative lack of clarity/coherence.

 

Its kinda funny, in a way.

 

Perhaps you will notice that your argument for increasing coherence depends upon a less coherent state, which then becomes more coherent. The method that you propose is becoming aware of one's beliefs (which we created but then somehow forgot, even though we still continue to invigorate them) and then reconciling them, as a function of our awareness (or intent, which you have manifesting awareness (please correct me if I am wrong)). This is essentially the same process by which relative clarity increases, using different words.

 

First, there is no source in the way you describe.

 

Strictly speaking, this is right. Everything just is. But the idea of a source or a prime mover is useful in some contexts. You used it yourself in your diagram of power coupling (I had to look up the definition of coupling to be sure I understood you. Are you using that term in the computer science sense of degree of dependency of one module on another, or as just as a link, transferring power?):

 

"As I see it, the power coupling looks roughly like this:

 

1. You

2. (optional) Thoughts

3. Beliefs

4. Experience"

 

What I am calling the source is what you list as You.

 

Secondly, if someone pays attention to this strange source, they'll be ignoring everything else. That's how attention works. Attention is selective.

 

You keep forgetting that I suggest connecting with or recognizing this source, seeing what it reveals, trusting it, and then seeing what unfolds from there. What unfolds is not a trivial thing. It quite literally can be anything, since this source or You, is the only thing that ultimately has power. It is the intent, as you use the term. If it wants to, it can turn attention to core beliefs. Or in your language, if you want to, you can make your core beliefs more coherent, whether automagically, or via a process of deep, slow, mixed active and passive contemplation. It/You is not limited to this, which is why I value it so much.

 

Just to make sure that this point is clear, I do not advocate fixed attention on any one thing. If I were to interpret you as you have interpreted me, then I would accuse you of advocating blindness, because placing attention of beliefs means one is ignoring sensations, true nature, day to day life, surface thoughts, etc.... You could say its all beliefs, and I could slightly more accurately say its all You/source.

 

Oh wait, maybe I did imply that. Sorry.

 

 

Only if you intend to use such state this way, but the state you describe as "following the source" doesn't automagically force this outcome.

 

Thank god! If there was only one way that the infinite potential explores itself, then that would be kinda boring, don't you think?

 

 

There is no such thing as absence of beliefs. Didn't we discuss this already? You can change what you believe, but you can't nullify them. Your beliefs can become very flexible, but they can't vanish altogether.

 

Well, thats why I said "(or perhaps more accurately, what is revealed as the death grip on them relaxes)".

 

Lets look at this idea that beliefs cannot disappear, though. Are you postulating some fixed quantity of beliefs that never changes, a kind of law of conservation of beliefs? How many is it? Or is it not fixed, but ever increasing (actually, that seems more likely than the fixed number hypothesis)?

 

I would suggest that although beliefs sure seem to be a necessary component of manifestation, that their number is not fixed, and that individual beliefs do disappear, and do not necessarily need to be replaced by other beliefs. Or since infinite potential does not decrease, one might also say that beliefs can cease to be invigorated, without invigorating an equal number of other beliefs, or perhaps any beliefs at all.

 

I am not even willing to say that beliefs are 100% definitely necessary for manifestation. A bending of intent perhaps, but this doesn't need to form beliefs as we currently experience them. I maintain it as an open question, not ready to collapse my horizons on this issue just yet.

 

 

Really? What is "that" which never bought into one of them? Sounds like nonsense and it sounds like you're contradicting what we've talked about earlier as well.

 

Remember that we agreed that silent, tacit beliefs, core beliefs, all those are intentionally invigorated by your mind, by the totality of your being. It's this totality of commitment that gives those beliefs such force that you don't even have to be conscious of them in order for them to operate.

 

No beliefs operate despite yourself. They all operate because at some level you've invigorated them (and then forgot this fact). So what this means is that there is no "that" which never bought into them.

 

Consider this. This "that which never bought into core beliefs" is more powerful than the conscious layer of the mind. If this deep and powerful layer of the mind doesn't do anything to be pro- or con- anything, then it falls to relatively powerless conscious mind to be the one creating this whole world. If that's the case, then manifesting magic in the world should be joke easy, since there is nothing to counteract the conscious intent in this deluded view.

 

"That which never bought into core beliefs" has indeed bought into them, and is maintaining this entire show. And the reason you can't willy nilly screw around with this show is because you've cut yourself off, fragmented yourself off from that which runs the show. If you then just settle into intentionally inactive observation you'll get what you intend to happen -- status quo.

 

Well, from the point of view that it creates and invigorates them, then obviously it has bought into them. But this buying in isn't as a consumer of someone else's product, or line of reasoning. It is never truly caught, since it can change them at will. They are its intent, as you say.

 

Giving attention to true nature is a means to bridge the apparent fragmentation "off from that which runs the show." It is always available, since this fragmentation is a function of beliefs and not actual, as per your own definition of mind.

 

There is nothing inactive about the sort of observation that occurs from/as source. Remember, this is the sort of observation that automagically transforms beliefs. It is precisely the assumption that nothing will happen when I stop adding intent upon intent that keeps people from ever coming to recognize their true nature, and that their intent is really what's running the show, and if they just their get heads out their asses, then it really has a way of revealing what needs to be revealed and generally working things out.

 

Because first of all, discursive mind is volitional. It's not something other than yourself. It's you talking to yourself. It's not an "it". Don't refer to it in 3rd person.

 

Discursive mind is a part of, but not the whole of, the self. You use "it" three times and then say not to use "it". The discursive mind is not any more or less me than my toe.

 

Second, when you turn away from the discursive mind you're not actually facing that which you really are!

 

That depends on what you turn toward. In an ultimate sense, the discursive mind is included, but if one has all of oneself tied up in it, it is very useful to untie those knots.

 

 

Precisely. Not less! Only different.

 

"If so, then I'll have to define interpretation as conceptual addition to bare experience, where concepts are defined as mental chatter that one can communicate to another person using words.

 

Still no difference?" I'll just tack on, "in amount" here, to be clear.

 

 

Power over one's own limitations.

 

The same limitations that are one's intent?

 

Be careful, you might start arguing for clarity again!

[goldisheavy]

Have I ever suggested sitting on a mat and summarily ignoring your thinking and beliefs in order to bliss out as a long term approach? Or even a short-term approach?

 

Directing one's attention to something other than thinking and beliefs for periods of time can be very useful, but I have never emphasized bliss as the purpose. I think I have mostly emphasized truth, utility, and broader perspective.

 

I almost agree, but I had to check to see which way you are going, so I offered a direction called "bliss" which you didn't take.

 

Nonetheless, it still sounds like the idea is to just sort of sit there and watch all your beliefs, thoughts, and experiential symbols resolve themselves, so it's a kind of a purposeful non-involvement.

 

I am saying that some amount of that has value no matter what and I find myself spending brief periods of time that way pretty often. I am also saying that because non-involvement is intentional, and because our intent is complex and almost always conditioned by beliefs of ours we aren't aware of, it's possible to get a neutered version of what you're advocating. And the neutered version would simply be just relaxing. It would have some medical benefits if the person was stressed out.

 

You seem to believe that just relaxing in the manner you describe is automagically effective. I don't believe that at all. I don't see it as a guarantee at all.

 

I remember when I first began meditating, I was a hard materialist. I thought the mind was nothing but the brain. I knew how to stop my inner verbalization and to just be quiet and I spent lots of time that way. But nothing was changing. I found I was just sitting there, or just walking silently. There were no verbal thoughts in my mind. I felt nothing different really. Just ordinary body experience of either sitting or walking around. Nothing became obvious. I had no a-ha moment. Zip. Just a total waste of time.

 

I then realized what I was doing wrong. I realized that my beliefs about who I was, what my mind was, all that created a condition whereby my relaxation would stably manifest into something mundanely physical, boring, ordinary and entirely unenlightening.

 

As soon as I realized this, I started having the most amazing experiences in meditation. And that's when my learning process took off like a rocket. I started to get a-ha after a-ha.

 

So having been firmly caught in the trap of my beliefs, and having experienced following your method while under influence of the physicalist beliefs, you can understand why I am giving a strong warning against it.

 

My method is guaranteed to work because once you start to look at your own beliefs critically there is no way to remain as you were in the past. It's just impossible. Critical eye melts everything it looks at. That is its nature. That's why people don't want to be criticized. Criticism is like a solvent. It just dissolves everything without exception.

 

And beliefs dissolved by criticism don't vanish into nothingness, but they return into a state of potential. They become possibilities. So there is really no permanent loss. There is only opening up.

 

Now what I call criticism can be a critical post, but it's not really that. Criticism is looking at something, anything, but usually a belief, with an investigative and analytical mind, a questioning mind. This questioning state is deeper than just talking or verbal thinking. At the same time, talking and verbal thinking does not whatsoever interfere or harm the process, so there is no need to curtail say verbal thinking except for aesthetic reasons, for the reasons of pleasure.

 

There is no point in labeling some part of our mentality as bad, and another part good. No point in trying to turn away from the discursive mind in order to attain something else. Instead it's best to master it all, master all modalities and to ultimately be at home in every kind of mentality. Aesthetics do matter though, so if you simply enjoy silence more, then it makes sense to verbalize less. But if you enjoy verbalizing, that's perfectly legitimate, harmless, and it doesn't interfere with anything. Such things are peanuts.

 

It's beliefs that are the icebergs. Beliefs are not peanuts. Beliefs don't come and go. They stay. Often people die believing roughly the same things they were born believing. This should tell you something. Consider what this means.

 

I am starting to see that what you call coherence I am calling clarity. Your criticism of clarity is my criticism of coherence-- specifically a crystallization of view based upon false assumptions/limiting motives, and that the only true clarity/coherence is already present and whole and does not increase or decrease, even in the presence of relative lack of clarity/coherence.

 

Its kinda funny, in a way.

 

Perhaps you will notice that your argument for increasing coherence depends upon a less coherent state, which then becomes more coherent.

 

It ultimately depends on mystery, but mystery is the resolution of everything, so mystery is the ultimately coherent state of mind. It's the only state of mind where nothing contradicts anything else. It's not an incoherent state of mind at all. This is why mystery is closely associated with intelligence, rather than with stupidity and with anti-intellectual tendencies some people advocate. And real intelligence has nothing to do with how much you think. It has to do with the quality of your mindstream. You can be someone who utters countless words and be very intelligent. Or you can utter few and also be very intelligent. Conversely, you can talk a lot and not be very intelligent and you can talk very little and still be a complete fool. Talking in terms of the amount is orthogonal to the intelligence of a person. What matters is the quality and the impact.

 

This coherency I speak of is not something artificial or rigid. It's alive. It's moving. It's playing. We see it in the way trees grow and in the way rivers flow. It's creative and imaginary but it's the kind of imagination that has power, rather than imagination bubbles. It's imagination that is thoroughly integrated into and inseparable from non-imagination. It's not something steady or clear in any ordinary way. But this is its mystical aspect.

 

The less mystical aspect of coherence is that some beliefs work well with each other. Others don't. Some beliefs support each other. Other beliefs contradict each other. When you have a pair of contradicting beliefs that you are very strongly vested into, there is a huge amount of pain you can cause to yourself and to others. But healing this situation doesn't involve micromanaging your beliefs, it just involves examining them critically. Once the offending beliefs get thoroughly examined, they begin to resolve themselves in more healthy ways. So it's almost like what you are describing at this point but with one difference: in my description you have to intend to get involved, you have to intend to look at your beliefs. You don't sit around waiting for it to happen on its own. You get your hands dirty.

 

The method that you propose is becoming aware of one's beliefs (which we created but then somehow forgot, even though we still continue to invigorate them) and then reconciling them, as a function of our awareness (or intent, which you have manifesting awareness (please correct me if I am wrong)). This is essentially the same process by which relative clarity increases, using different words.

 

Yes. But as I describe it, this process benefits from active involvement as much as it benefits from periods of rest and relaxation and from periods of unfocused broad attention, as well as other ways of abiding. And no matter what you choose, be it a mysterious silence or contemplative involvement, it's always intent that does the magic. So if you intend to just be the way you are, you will be the way you are... meaning, you won't change. So if you want change, you have to intend to change. If you want change, but try to attain it by intending to remain the same, that's not going to work!

 

Of course if you're completely content the way you are, then intending to change makes no sense at all. In that case one can just enjoy whatever one is, in whatever modality of being. Whether one intends to change or not, one is going to change anyway. If one lives aimlessly, then the manner in which one changes is chaotic. This is not necessarily bad. Sometimes that's exactly what is enjoyable. Sometimes that's what the person or maybe even society needs or wants. But sometimes you want to experience yourself being the captain of the ship. The captain doesn't control the winds, but you can control the rudder and the sails. With skill you can arrive wherever you want to go, on purpose, without drifting about chaotically.

 

I think a person must master every mode of being. Undirected chaos. Directed change. Everything. Relaxation. Tension. Peace. Struggle. The whole thing. Everything. There should be nothing excluded whatsoever. That is my vision for a mighty and capable person. A person who can surprise you, who can challenge you, who can kill you, and who can save you as well.

 

At this point in time, I would like people to be more harmonious. This won't be possible in our current state because some of us hold beliefs which are tearing us apart. I want those beliefs to be relaxed away for the time being. I'm specifically talking about certain types of religious dogmas. But see, even if I don't mention dogma, the path I describe is so antithetic to dogma, that whoever engages in it will ruin and abolish all dogmas without necessarily even trying to. Of course I do this consciously. I am putting kibosh on certain ways of thinking. It's my mystical command. I am tired of waiting now. I decided to decisively crush certain things in the psyche and because it's my psyche I am operating on, my aim is true, and there will be no resisting it or dodging.

 

This is why even if I tell people exactly what I am doing, it's as if they can't hear it. The secret is safe. Always. That's why there is no need to keep secrets. If you fear to lose your secret, then guess what? Then it's not safe.

 

Strictly speaking, this is right. Everything just is. But the idea of a source or a prime mover is useful in some contexts.

 

I agree, and just as you say, I always use it myself. At the same time I don't associate a primer mover with any experiences. This allows me not to saddle my prime mover with some experiential identity. I find this to be powerful and useful.

 

So I exist and my intention is real, but at the same time, I am not anything I experience. I am alive. If I became something specific, I would be dead. At the same time I am conventionally distinguished from other people as a point of view. So besides me being a sentient being, you can say I am also a point of view. I am not what is conventionally understood as "I". I am as much not-I as I am an I. My stream of consciousness traverses I states and non-I states, but ultimately this intentionality is a stream that's unbroken, and it's distinct from other intents, such as say yours, so in this sense I am myself and you are you. At the same time, you are not outside of myself. And I am not outside of you. So in this other sense, I am integral feature of your mindstream and you are an integral feature of my mindstream. And here I mean mindstream as a stream of experiences, a series of experiences that shimmer right now like a stream of life.

 

You used it yourself in your diagram of power coupling (I had to look up the definition of coupling to be sure I understood you. Are you using that term in the computer science sense of degree of dependency of one module on another, or as just as a link, transferring power?):

 

It's a power transfer but it's also a process of shaping the power. So it's not just a dumb transfer, but a progressive and also simultaneous shaping. It's progressive in the sense that we can find structures in the psyche that are more significant and more responsible for the way things are than other structures, but it's simultaneous in the sense that all this operates all at once rather than step by step one thing at a time in a sequential manner.

 

So some beliefs of ours are very critical and others are like footnotes. And the criticality of a belief is not necessarily static, but it's always with respect to some aim or activity. So for some aims and for some activities, some beliefs are critical. But for other aims or other activities, those same beliefs may be non-critical. Still, the kinds of beliefs I call "core beliefs" tend to be critical to almost every activity.

 

So for example, let's say we have a common belief that all objects maintain internal consistency. This means that if I put a cup on the table, it doesn't fall through, but the table bears the cup up. We believe this is the case, and we believe our experience should validate this belief and it does for the most part (unless we're having a strange experience). This belief is critical in walking around, in handling objects, it going to the store to buy things and so on. At the same time, if you want to compose a novel, and you're sitting there twiddling your pen, the belief in objects' internal consistency is not critical because neither sitting on the chair without falling through it, nor pen twiddling is essential for novel composition. You can compose novels perfectly fine as a disembodied consciousness.

 

And maybe a better word than "consistency" is "integrity", so maybe I should have been talking about internal object integrity.

 

At the same time, let's say you have a belief that you're a person and I am a person, and you live among people. So you believe in individuals and in communities. This belief will be critical to the novel composition if your novel is intended to be understandable to others. If you didn't believe in any sort of individual or community, then guess what? Your novel could be very strange indeed, since it wouldn't necessarily be grounded in any kind of convention.

 

"As I see it, the power coupling looks roughly like this:

 

1. You

2. (optional) Thoughts

3. Beliefs

4. Experience"

 

What I am calling the source is what you list as You.

 

You keep forgetting that I suggest connecting with or recognizing this source, seeing what it reveals, trusting it, and then seeing what unfolds from there. What unfolds is not a trivial thing. It quite literally can be anything, since this source or You, is the only thing that ultimately has power. It is the intent, as you use the term. If it wants to, it can turn attention to core beliefs. Or in your language, if you want to, you can make your core beliefs more coherent, whether automagically, or via a process of deep, slow, mixed active and passive contemplation. It/You is not limited to this, which is why I value it so much.

 

I agree. Ultimately you aren't limited. However, we do have some transient conditioning. Since I am talking to you now, it is likely your conditioning is not too dramatically different from mine. So what I am telling you has some partial purpose and some partial relevancy to you.

 

What I am saying is this. Living beyond limitations in a way that's practical is not necessarily instant. You seem to want to skip a couple of steps. And I am saying, don't skip anything. There is no shortcut. The fastest way is to face everything directly. This means over-reliance on formulas is a way to slow oneself down, but short-cuts are invariably presented to us in a formulaic way. Right? When people want a short-cut, what do they want to see or hear? They want a formula. They want a step-by-step. They want something simple, like sit down, stop focusing on your thoughts and just observe. That's simple! That's what people want. But it's not necessarily effective. And I go into a great detail why not. Simple things can be effective when the person is properly prepared. This is why no shortcut exists and one should avoid spiritual greed, which is to say, trying to achieve more in faster time. It's like being whipped up by hope and fear into formulas.

 

Just to make sure that this point is clear, I do not advocate fixed attention on any one thing. If I were to interpret you as you have interpreted me, then I would accuse you of advocating blindness, because placing attention of beliefs means one is ignoring sensations, true nature, day to day life, surface thoughts, etc....

 

That's actually true. When you observe your beliefs you temporarily become blind to other things. We are always blind in some way. Seeing means being blind. Blindness and seeing are two sides of the same coin.

 

But the way to get around this is to not make this into a fixed practice, and I don't tell you specifically which beliefs to look at, or how often. I am not telling you to make this into some regular practice. Etc. I leave so many things open to interpretation and to variation that it's not so easy to make a dogma out of what I am saying. I am saying something very abstract and not very specific. On purpose this time.

 

Just think about it. If you follow what I am saying, you may then examine, "I believe that examining beliefs is a beneficial process." This belief may dissolve then. So my process has a full capacity to be self-dissolving. Can you say the same about your process? If you think your process can be self-dissolving, can you tell me how that would happen?

 

You could say its all beliefs, and I could slightly more accurately say its all You/source.

 

Oh wait, maybe I did imply that. Sorry.

 

Thank god! If there was only one way that the infinite potential explores itself, then that would be kinda boring, don't you think?

 

Well, thats why I said "(or perhaps more accurately, what is revealed as the death grip on them relaxes)".

 

Lets look at this idea that beliefs cannot disappear, though. Are you postulating some fixed quantity of beliefs that never changes, a kind of law of conservation of beliefs? How many is it? Or is it not fixed, but ever increasing (actually, that seems more likely than the fixed number hypothesis)?

 

Beliefs are something very abstract. They are a structure of the psyche. This structure is alive, but it is relatively stable. While we conventionally talk of many beliefs, or of network of beliefs, it's not really correct to say that you have 1 belief or 30. Beliefs cannot be counted and counting them is mostly a waste of time, in my opinion. Because what you end up counting are various statements of beliefs, various ways to profess our beliefs and not the underlying beliefs themselves, right? Beliefs are not purely what we profess, remember?

 

So in a sense I believe in a conservation of belief, but in a very abstract way. It's very unhelpful to represent that conservation as some kind of number. I think actually if you try to come up with a number, you might become crazy. I don't advise it at all.

 

I would suggest that although beliefs sure seem to be a necessary component of manifestation, that their number is not fixed,

 

I agree. But the number doesn't go to 0. Once you understand that you always have some belief(s), then the number doesn't matter. What matters is what specifically you believe, the quality of your beliefs, the sincerity, and the relatedness, how your beliefs play off each other, that sort of thing. Counting them is a fool's game, in my opinion. It's like counting the hairs on your head. It's useless unless in some strange way you just enjoy it. It wouldn't be enjoyable for me, and so I say it's useless.

 

Just try to imagine what it would be like to be without any beliefs. Would you recognize such state? As soon as you recognize such state you have a belief. You believe you have no beliefs. That's it! See, beliefs are not what we profess, that's the key here. Recognition is belief in action.

 

and that individual beliefs do disappear, and do not necessarily need to be replaced by other beliefs.

 

Yes, the fewer the better. But fewer is very different from zero.

 

OK, think of it this way. There are many ways to think about beliefs. One way is to think that believing in something means you accept that something. So for example, if I believe in computers, then when I experience typing on one, I accept that experience as real and I don't think, "Gee this is so weird, I am probably hallucinating all this stuff, it can't really be happening to me." So the acceptance of this experience as something real is a belief. Now, if you think about beliefs in this way, then you can see how you'll always have some kind of acceptance. From this POV, the more acceptance you have, the better, the more power and flexibility you enjoy. So from this POV you see, the more beliefs, the better.

 

So you see how I was able to come up with the more beliefs the better and I can also see the fewer the better? Why is that? It's because my mind is very flexible by now. And I got to be this way through being involved, by being meddlesome in some ways, by punching and biting things. I learn the way babies learn. If I want to know what's a pen, I taste it. I don't just meditate on it. I mix myself into that which I want to know.

 

OK, so in what sense the fewer the better? Well, if we think of the belief as a limitation, as something that posits some kind of condition, then the fewer you have the more flexible you are. So for example, if I believe I am present in one place at a time, that's a limitation on my mobility. If I didn't believe that, I could be much more limber in my experience of my presence.

 

Right?

 

So fewer is better.

And more is also better.

 

This is why I use every modality whatsoever. I even use insanity to gain sanity and I use sanity to gain insanity. I use everything. I use sleep and waking, normal and abnormal, everything! This is why when I finally intend to do something, it can be so powerful because it's not easy to stop me. Why not? Well, ever tried to stop space? How does that work? Right... So this is why non-dogmatic attitude is one of personal power. And dogmatic attitude is one of social constraint, subjugation, submission and exploitation.

 

Or since infinite potential does not decrease, one might also say that beliefs can cease to be invigorated, without invigorating an equal number of other beliefs, or perhaps any beliefs at all.

 

I am not even willing to say that beliefs are 100% definitely necessary for manifestation. A bending of intent perhaps, but this doesn't need to form beliefs as we currently experience them. I maintain it as an open question, not ready to collapse my horizons on this issue just yet.

 

Well, from the point of view that it creates and invigorates them, then obviously it has bought into them. But this buying in isn't as a consumer of someone else's product, or line of reasoning. It is never truly caught, since it can change them at will. They are its intent, as you say.

 

Giving attention to true nature is a means to bridge the apparent fragmentation "off from that which runs the show." It is always available, since this fragmentation is a function of beliefs and not actual, as per your own definition of mind.

 

There is nothing inactive about the sort of observation that occurs from/as source. Remember, this is the sort of observation that automagically transforms beliefs. It is precisely the assumption that nothing will happen when I stop adding intent upon intent that keeps people from ever coming to recognize their true nature, and that their intent is really what's running the show, and if they just their get heads out their asses, then it really has a way of revealing what needs to be revealed and generally working things out.

 

Discursive mind is a part of, but not the whole of, the self. You use "it" three times and then say not to use "it". The discursive mind is not any more or less me than my toe.

 

That depends on what you turn toward. In an ultimate sense, the discursive mind is included, but if one has all of oneself tied up in it, it is very useful to untie those knots.

 

"If so, then I'll have to define interpretation as conceptual addition to bare experience, where concepts are defined as mental chatter that one can communicate to another person using words.

 

Still no difference?" I'll just tack on, "in amount" here, to be clear.

 

The same limitations that are one's intent?

 

Be careful, you might start arguing for clarity again!

 

It's hard to answer the whole post. I might answer the second half later on.

Edited June 3, 2011 by goldisheavy

[Todd]

Oh, my. I'm not going to be able to respond to this whole post, using quotes. On the whole, I'd say that your view makes sense. I can see this view and I share similar views often.

 

There are a few things that are asking to be expressed though.

 

First, there is no guarantee that any method will work. If anything, there is only a guarantee that any method will fail.

 

To understand this, we need to understand what it is to succeed and to fail. I think it is not uncommon for people to be able to see the viewpoint that success and failure are relative, depending on intent (e.g. If one's intent is to eat ice cream, then one has succeeded when one eats ice cream). But the intent that most people are aware of often changes, so it isn't really reliable as a guide to lasting success or failure. The reason that it changes is that it isn't really coherent. It is actually important for a healthy human intent to have contradictory tendencies, which vary according to the situation so that one is capable to varied responses appropriate to conditions (as we discussed earlier).

 

The only truly coherent intent is the mystery. As such, one can't really call it truly coherent intent, since its the mystery. As you stated, it is its mysteriousness which makes it alive.

 

In order to succeed, we must satisfy the mystery's intent. And yet, it is the mystery. It won't be defined, can't really be pinned down. As such, any rigidly defined method will obviously fail at some point, since it is not alive. Even very subtly defined methods eventually fail. Ultimately, the only method that succeeds is the method of the moment, generated by the mystery.

 

From a certain point of view, every method is the method of the moment. This information is either not useful at all, or extremely useful, depending on your point of view.

 

One can reject this information outright.

 

One can take this information, adopt it as a method to justify any old thing and go to sleep.

 

One can also take this information and stop seeking for methods, but this end to seeking does not change the fact of intent, and it can and does continue to manifest methods in all shapes, sizes and forms, much as you describe your method manifesting. From the outside, it might not be obvious, who is consciously living as a manifestation of this intent and who is still unconscious. The "methods" and even the superficial intents could be the same, but one is fixated on a partial view, whereas the other is exploring a partial view without fixation. The lack of fixation comes from the recognition that another method could be manifesting and it would be equally the mystery's intent, or more simply, that this method is the mystery's intent. The "this" doesn't change, as the method changes (if that makes any sense!).

 

In terms of your stance that your method is guaranteed to work, I would say that that is only true if it is engaged in with integrity. By integrity I mean openness to a deeper intent which supercedes methods, since it is their source. Ultimately all methods boil down to this openness to a deeper intent.

 

If your method is engaged in without this integrity, it can easily become non-helpful self-criticism (which is basically just the assertion of new negative beliefs without really encountering or examining one's underlying beliefs), cataloging of ideas about one's psyche without transformation, managing beliefs to generate relatively stable states that still lack wisdom, or even worse, deciding that one has gotten one's beliefs really coherent and so one is now way more enlightened than everyone else.

 

You might say that such people wouldn't really be applying your method, and I agree, but what exactly is your method? It seems much more flexible than something that can be simply said.

 

I think we both aim at introducing people to this flexibility.

 

My method has the ordering a little different from yours. I agree that there really are no short cuts, and that the idea of short cuts can really get in the way, but even though there is no faster way between two points (remember, we're talking relatively here) than a straight line, it is certainly possible to spend a lot of time walking in circles.

 

---

 

I also find that it is powerful and useful to not associate the prime mover with any particular experiences. That has been a huge stumbling block for me, no matter how clear I may have been conceptually on this issue.

 

I guess I'll leave the rest to come up again, or else I might look back at your post and see what else comes up.

Edited June 4, 2011 by Todd

[goldisheavy]

Oh, my. I'm not going to be able to respond to this whole post, using quotes. On the whole, I'd say that your view makes sense. I can see this view and I share similar views often.

 

There are a few things that are asking to be expressed though.

 

First, there is no guarantee that any method will work. If anything, there is only a guarantee that any method will fail.

 

To understand this, we need to understand what it is to succeed and to fail. I think it is not uncommon for people to be able to see the viewpoint that success and failure are relative, depending on intent (e.g. If one's intent is to eat ice cream, then one has succeeded when one eats ice cream). But the intent that most people are aware of often changes, so it isn't really reliable as a guide to lasting success or failure.

 

This is one of the reasons why lasting success makes no sense at all. Nor is there such a thing as lasting failure.

 

The reason that it changes is that it isn't really coherent.

 

You seem to equate a coherent state of mind with inflexibility. That's a deadly mistake on your part. Someone is coherent when all parts of one's being want the same thing, are integrated and well connected, brightly inform one another, work well with each other (play for the same team, so to speak), etc...

 

It is actually important for a healthy human intent to have contradictory tendencies, which vary according to the situation so that one is capable to varied responses appropriate to conditions (as we discussed earlier).

 

Varying according to situation doesn't necessarily mean working with conflicting visions of reality or working with conflicting visions of what's good for oneself. If anything, a coherent person is better able to adapt to the environmental changes because it's always obvious what adaptation would be best, and it comes naturally and effortlessly. The reason this is so, is because you don't have an inner fight with yourself every time you need to react. You are ready to go every time because all of you is playing for the same team.

 

In order to succeed, we must satisfy the mystery's intent.

 

This is deadly wrong. Mystery doesn't have an intent that's separate from our own relatively more conscious intent. So talking about satisfying mystery is simply nonsense. It just means you don't fully understand what it is you're trying to discuss here.

[Todd]

You seem to equate a coherent state of mind with inflexibility. That's a deadly mistake on your part. Someone is coherent when all parts of one's being want the same thing, are integrated and well connected, brightly inform one another, work well with each other (play for the same team, so to speak), etc...

 

Varying according to situation doesn't necessarily mean working with conflicting visions of reality or working with conflicting visions of what's good for oneself. If anything, a coherent person is better able to adapt to the environmental changes because it's always obvious what adaptation would be best, and it comes naturally and effortlessly. The reason this is so, is because you don't have an inner fight with yourself every time you need to react. You are ready to go every time because all of you is playing for the same team.

 

This depends on your point of view. If your viewpoint is from mystery, then nothing contradicts. If your viewpoint is conventional understanding, then many seeming contradictions exist, especially in a very healthy person. In fact, the more contradictions that can be consciously held, the better. An example might be my sense of self: I can find all of these within me, that I am nothing, that I am somebody in particular, that I am everything, that I am all potential, that I am a man, that I have many roles, that I am none of my roles, that I have a name, that I am indescribable, that I have a state, that no state is me, that there is no self, that self is actual. I could go on, but my point is that in conventional understanding, many of these are contradictory. So from the conventional viewpoint, if I were to eliminate contradiction, then I would have to settle on some of these and throw out the others. This would be violence and limiting.

 

I get that this is not what you are advocating, but at times your words suggest something like this. Perhaps there is an artifact in you that wants things to only be one way?

 

I will say that in my experience none of the things that I listed is actually contradictory. They are all playing on the same team, as it were. It may be that at different times in my life, different experiences of self predominate, and some may become very quiet, but that doesn't change that they all play a part in the whole of my life manifestation.

 

So I get what you are saying about coherence and non-contradiction. If a part of the self seems to be in conflict with another part, then there is a breakdown happening. I just worry that it can be easily misinterpreted in very unskillful ways. Harmonious seems like a less tricky word. Coherence also works-- its just the association with non-contradiction that is opaque.

 

Also, I think that elements that are very different on the surface can create a very healthy tension. This is the experience of life.

 

It is good if there is a knowing of non-contradiction, or inherent coherence in the midst of this tension though.

 

This is deadly wrong. Mystery doesn't have an intent that's separate from our own relatively more conscious intent. So talking about satisfying mystery is simply nonsense. It just means you don't fully understand what it is you're trying to discuss here.

 

Are you saying that there is not a deeper intent? Then what maintains unconscious beliefs? What keeps our hearts beating? What breathes us when we sleep? What heals a cut?

 

No, its not separate in an actual way, as in two discrete objects, separated by other objects or space, but to equate the conscious intent with this deeper intent is very misleading.

 

I will admit that satisfying mystery's intent is ridiculous, since there is no separation between its intent and what happens, so how can there be an intent, which is then satisfied?

 

It then becomes just what is happening. I actually would not have been using the word intent if I were not speaking with you, since in my experience it is removed from where things are really happening. It is based in separation. It is a very useful concept in some situations, but not particularly useful for describing reality, and not actually the most powerful thing that I have encountered, which is silence.

 

This is not the silence of stopping thoughts.

Edited June 5, 2011 by Todd

[goldisheavy]

This depends on your point of view. If your viewpoint is from mystery, then nothing contradicts. If your viewpoint is conventional understanding, then many seeming contradictions exist, especially in a very healthy person.

 

I strongly disagree with this estimation. I think while some small amount of contradiction falls within a healthy range, generally the more internal contradiction, the more mentally sick the person is.

 

In fact, the more contradictions that can be consciously held, the better.

 

You don't understand the difference between being able to consider contradictions for the purpose of examination, and actually committing to contradictions. There is a huge difference. For example, I can read the Bible without committing to it. I can then read Daodejing without committing to it. In the similar way I can observe countless contradictions without committing to any of them.

 

My commitment is strong to the extent it is passionate and to the extent the beliefs that condition my commitment are themselves coherent. I am definitely committed to something.

 

If you are not passionate about anything specific, then having a fragmented mindset is not going to be all that painful. The more passionate someone is, the more it is essential to have a coherent mind.

 

A coherent mindset is always safe: it is safe in a dispassionate person and it is safe in a passionate one as well. The same cannot be said about fractured and self-contradicting mindset.

 

An example might be my sense of self: I can find all of these within me, that I am nothing, that I am somebody in particular, that I am everything, that I am all potential, that I am a man, that I have many roles, that I am none of my roles, that I have a name, that I am indescribable, that I have a state, that no state is me, that there is no self, that self is actual.

 

It's very possible that you're a person who is ill-at-ease to some extent. For example, when you talk about your many roles, are they mutually contradictory roles? If yes, you definitely suffer from a disease. If those roles are orthogonal or mutually supporting, then why mention that as an example of something contradictory? Either way you're either sick or confused.

 

I could go on, but my point is that in conventional understanding, many of these are contradictory.

 

You offered something that I take as either an inaccurate example, or shallow. I can't accept your example as valid or useful. For example, when you say you see yourself as nothing, I don't accept that at all, except in a shallow poetic literary sense (like emo or goth kind of stuff). I don't want to waste time on such empty rhetoric.

 

So from the conventional viewpoint, if I were to eliminate contradiction, then I would have to settle on some of these and throw out the others. This would be violence and limiting.

 

It would only be violence if it was imposed on you somehow. Violence is what happens when one half of your being fights the other half. I call that inner violence.

 

I am calling you to abandon inner violence of your own free will.

 

You are fiercely protecting your right to fight yourself on an inner level, as if I am dangerously close to stripping that ability from you.

 

I get that this is not what you are advocating, but at times your words suggest something like this. Perhaps there is an artifact in you that wants things to only be one way?

 

If by "one way" you mean I want everyone to be wise, healthy and powerful, then yes, I want it all one way.

 

I will say that in my experience none of the things that I listed is actually contradictory. They are all playing on the same team, as it were.

 

So you gave a hollow and dishonest example on purpose? Why don't you give an example that has true meaning to you personally? How about exposing a contradiction that's actually real for you?

 

It may be that at different times in my life, different experiences of self predominate, and some may become very quiet, but that doesn't change that they all play a part in the whole of my life manifestation.

 

So I get what you are saying about coherence and non-contradiction. If a part of the self seems to be in conflict with another part, then there is a breakdown happening. I just worry that it can be easily misinterpreted in very unskillful ways.

 

So far you failed to materialize your worry in this debate.

 

Harmonious seems like a less tricky word. Coherence also works-- its just the association with non-contradiction that is opaque.

 

Also, I think that elements that are very different on the surface can create a very healthy tension. This is the experience of life.

 

It is good if there is a knowing of non-contradiction, or inherent coherence in the midst of this tension though.

 

 

 

Are you saying that there is not a deeper intent? Then what maintains unconscious beliefs? What keeps our hearts beating? What breathes us when we sleep? What heals a cut?

 

No, its not separate in an actual way, as in two discrete objects, separated by other objects or space, but to equate the conscious intent with this deeper intent is very misleading.

 

It's not at all misleading. It's correct to equate the two. It's wrong to imply that mystery can somehow be satisfied or unsatisfied. That shows woeful misunderstanding.

 

I will admit that satisfying mystery's intent is ridiculous, since there is no separation between its intent and what happens, so how can there be an intent, which is then satisfied?

 

Thank you! So let's not talk like that again.

Edited June 5, 2011 by goldisheavy

[Todd]

You don't understand the difference between being able to consider contradictions for the purpose of examination, and actually committing to contradictions. There is a huge difference. For example, I can read the Bible without committing to it. I can then read Daodejing without committing to it. In the similar way I can observe countless contradictions without committing to any of them.

 

My commitment is strong to the extent it is passionate and to the extent the beliefs that condition my commitment are themselves coherent. I am definitely committed to something.

 

If you are not passionate about anything specific, then having a fragmented mindset is not going to be all that painful. The more passionate someone is, the more it is essential to have a coherent mind.

 

I would say that commitment to any verbal understanding is eventually painful. This is because any verbal understanding is contradictory to experience on some level. If one is stronger, then one can argue for this understanding and can kind've muscle one's experience to fit in with this understanding and try to influence the world so that it better matches this understanding, but this is a false strength, because it is based on violence. It is a strength that postpones failure, while at the same time guaranteeing failure, because the first step was wrong and persevering in it only generates more pain.

 

Instead of contradictory verbal understandings being the issue, it is commitment to verbal understandings that is violence.

 

You offered something that I take as either an inaccurate example, or shallow. I can't accept your example as valid or useful. For example, when you say you see yourself as nothing, I don't accept that at all, except in a shallow poetic literary sense (like emo or goth kind of stuff). I don't want to waste time on such empty rhetoric.

 

This is a very clear experience to me. Is it deep or shallow? I don't know, but it is clear. "No thing". No particular thing. Thats totally clear to me.

 

Perhaps you have trouble getting it because you aren't able to reconcile nothing and something. They are not contradictory to me.

 

The problem with all this talk of eliminating contradictions is that people get confused, because they meet something that seems contradictory on the surface and they decide that this is not good, or not appropriate, so they choose one over the other. This is violence, because oftentimes both are true, and not actually contradictory. It is internal violence, so it does not need to be imposed from the outside. It is alienating oneself from oneself.

 

A better language would be reconciling contradictions, or realizing underlying unity of seeming contradictions. Your language encourages violence, when the actual experience is more one of recognition and then harmonization.

 

So far you failed to materialize your worry in this debate.

 

If by this you mean that I have understood your meaning, then you are right. Not everyone will understand you. I think a lot of people will/do misunderstand you and use it to do violence to themselves and others.

 

It's not at all misleading. It's correct to equate the two.

 

That is like equating my toe and my body. They are not equal, because you can cut off my toe, and my body will still be my body, just minus one of its parts. If you have all of your identity wrapped up in your toe, then it will be a hell'v'a lot more traumatic experience to lose that toe than otherwise (even though it'd probably still be pretty damn traumatic and not recommended). You might choose to sacrifice your whole body to protect that toe, instead of letting it go and saving the rest of the body. This is the kind've mistake that equating two unequal things can lead to.

Edited June 5, 2011 by Todd

[goldisheavy]

I would say that commitment to any verbal understanding is eventually painful. This is because any verbal understanding is contradictory to experience on some level. If one is stronger, then one can argue for this understanding and can kind've muscle one's experience to fit in with this understanding and try to influence the world so that it better matches this understanding, but this is a false strength, because it is based on violence. It is a strength that postpones failure, while at the same time guaranteeing failure, because the first step was wrong and persevering in it only generates more pain.

 

Alas, there is no such thing as verbal understanding. When we verbalize something, it comes from a deeper place than verbal. This is precisely why stopping verbalizations is ineffective.

 

Think of it this way. Imagine you have a wooden block with a carved text. Verbalization is like pressing that block against the paper when the block is covered in ink. So you can get an imprint on the paper. That imprint is a verbalization. However the wooden block is a psychic structure that gives rise to the verbalization. The verbalizations come and go. The wooden block remains and you can make more and more prints from it.

 

So, it's not the printed text that's in conflict! You can have two different wooden blocks that contradict each other. Now then. If you are committed to both of these meanings carried in both of the wooden blocks, you'll suffer greatly.

 

If you simply stop talking it is equivalent to simply ceasing to make imprints on paper. The papers stop coming, but the blocks and the meanings they embody remain active in the psyche.

 

Do you understand now?

 

So when you distinguish understanding into verbal and non-verbal, actually you are making a huge mistake. You're making a gross mistake. You misrepresent the psyche and how it's setup. And the reason you do that is because you never actually examined your psyche on your own. You're simply parroting some texts and what others have said.

 

Put down your formula, and look at reality!

 

Test the meaning of what I am saying and see for yourself.

[Birch]

Alas, there is no such thing as verbal understanding. When we verbalize something, it comes from a deeper place than verbal. This is precisely why stopping verbalizations is ineffective.

 

Think of it this way. Imagine you have a wooden block with a carved text. Verbalization is like pressing that block against the paper when the block is covered in ink. So you can get an imprint on the paper. That imprint is a verbalization. However the wooden block is a psychic structure that gives rise to the verbalization. The verbalizations come and go. The wooden block remains and you can make more and more prints from it.

 

So, it's not the printed text that's in conflict! You can have two different wooden blocks that contradict each other. Now then. If you are committed to both of these meanings carried in both of the wooden blocks, you'll suffer greatly.

 

If you simply stop talking it is equivalent to simply ceasing to make imprints on paper. The papers stop coming, but the blocks and the meanings they embody remain active in the psyche.

 

Do you understand now?

 

So when you distinguish understanding into verbal and non-verbal, actually you are making a huge mistake. You're making a gross mistake. You misrepresent the psyche and how it's setup. And the reason you do that is because you never actually examined your psyche on your own. You're simply parroting some texts and what others have said.

 

Put down your formula, and look at reality!

 

Test the meaning of what I am saying and see for yourself.

 

He has a point with this one. I have a pretty silent mind but that hasn't seemed to resolve a huge amount of anything much for me. Although when I speak to people they seem to take it seriously enough.

 

Shutting yourself up verbally is IME only part of it (whatever it is). Which is why (again IME) one has to go through the emotions as well if you're going to get anywhere. Just as qi-gong layers it on internally (I have gained some pretty weird muscle awareness and control from doing it) I guess other 'techniques' shift the emotional aspects of belief. And by 'emotional' I am referring to physical sensation and not the accompanying verbal (or non-verbal, such as images) thoughts. The chakra stuff gets close to it IMO/IME but what happens if you're completely disassociated to begin with? In that case, I wouldn't reckon turning your discursive off would be a smart move...