The significance of "karmic vision" and its implications.

[goldisheavy]

People often wonder if they can find someone who will demonstrate psychic powers. An example would be having an idea that you'll go to some location and a wonderful, amazing, magnetic person at that secret location will start to do strange things. In this case you might think of yourself as a passive observer and the person you want to observe as the doer of psychic powers.

 

And people also wonder if others can observe and confirm certain manifestations. For example you're meditating and you viscerally feel that your body is lifting off the floor. You feel the sense of weight and pressure are lost and your body appears to hover 1 foot off the ground. Then you wonder if you weren't alone in the room, what would a stranger observe? Would they see you hovering? Or would they see your body sitting on the floor even as you subjectively experience yourself hovering?

 

And the answer to this can be anything depending on what's called "karmic vision." Briefly "karmic vision" is a type of experience you are most likely to experience based on your commitments, habits, expectations, hopes, fears and so on. Below I will talk about how this visionary process relates to the visionary processes of other beings.

 

First, I assume you already understand that the mind is a primordial capacity to know, to experience and to will. I assume you understand that the mind doesn't originate in the brain and is not started at the birth of the human body. If you don't get why that is so, you'll probably be confused by what I will say next. So this post is not for everyone.

 

Now, those who are still with me, you should realize that people are not things. This means that people are not concrete objects that exist definitively from their own side. People exist more as possible points of view. Because the possible points of view are infinite, we say that the sentient beings are infinite in number. This applies to others and to oneself as an individual being. But at the same time, everyone who sees this post is more than just a point of view. What is this "more"? It's a capacity. So you can think of yourself as a capacity which can potentially know, experience and will anything at all, but right now your experience is primarily occupied by this post and the associated thoughts, imagery, hopes and fears.

 

And because individual capacities are not things, and they do not have existence that can be concretely parametrized, the relationships between them are not established in any kind of objective sense.

 

I see my own human body and I know my inner being. Then I look around and I see bodies similar to mine. Then I assume those bodies which resemble mine have inner subjectivities similar to mine because I know I could, in principle, be experiencing from that other POV. So if I am in the "same" room as Sally, and we both look at the "same" table, I know that in principle I could be where Sally is, I could have had Sally's parents, Sally's thoughts, Sally's hopes and fears, I could be looking at the table from Sally's angle, and so on. In other words, in principle, my subjectivity could have been Sally's instead of my own. But currently it is my own as goldisheavy. Then Sally looks at goldisheavy and thinks the exact same thing but in reverse. At the same time goldisheavy and Sally can talk and they will understand each other, so while they are different, they're not so different that they can't even talk. So there is both an element of communion and an element of differentiation in that setup.

 

This is why the mind is ultimately uncountable. If we are unwilling to make assumptions, we cannot say definitively whether there is one mind or many. There are very good reasons for both positions, and there are reasons to maintain that the mind completely escapes counting and is open to experiencing in different modalities. Thus regarding the various individuals as having their own minds is only a convention. But if we maintained that only one individual had a mind, that too would be only a convention with exactly the same amount of substance as the first one: none. That's what it means for the mind to be "open." The mind is radically open and it can experience itself as a lone being, or as a being among beings, as everything, or as nothing, among a few possibilities. And without resorting to some sort of personal preference there's no way to affirm any of these modalities as the modality. But the sublime view is knowing that all these modalities are possible and that if it were not for bias they would all be impossible to compare in terms of which modality is more true.

 

So if you understand this abstract explanation, then a couple of practical implications should become evident.

 

1. Whether or not you meet people with amazing powers depends as much on you as it depends on the other people. Crude analogy: if I want to meet a mountaineer, then my chances increase if I move away from the planes and into the mountains. You know how a lot of people who hold physicalist commitments demand "show me some magic as proof"? This is like having a commitment to living on the planes while demanding that someone demonstrate some mountain climbing. Well, before you witness real mountain climbing, even if you can't scale the highest peaks yourself, you need to move into the mountains somewhere and then you can watch people climb. So typically mountain climbers are the people who are most likely to witness other people doing mountain climbing. This is a crude analogy that should not be taken literally, because I am using materialistic language to explain something that is profoundly immaterial.

 

2. Whether or not others can see you perform magic depends on whether or not you've involved (or allowed) other people into your mentality. This can be called "joint commitment."

 

3. Subjectivities converge and diverge all the time. When the person's body dies, that person's subjectivity diverges from our waking experience. When the person's body is born, that person's subjectivity converges with our waking experience. Dreaming subjectivity diverges from waking subjectivity during sleep (but converges with other subjectivities that are present in the dream as dream characters at the same time). Subjectivity can diverge in meditation during absorption. Subjectivities diverge when the human bodies disperse geographically. However living in close quarters is no guarantee of subjective convergence. It's possible to live in proximity with others and yet mentally be a loner who lives in one's own universe. Weirdly it's possible to be very far away from someone else, but remain in a convergent state with that someone else (most often this happens with the newly separated lovers). Subjective convergence can be arbitrarily weird, and so, for example, you can have dreams that you share with the people you know from the waking experience.

 

This converging and diverging is not an all or nothing proposition. It is gradual and it comes in degrees. With enough subjective convergence it's possible to read the thoughts of other people and sense their desires, because these people are so close to your own subjectivity. And another mind-blowing idea is that subjective convergence doesn't have to be completely reciprocal. So for example, if I am witnessing someone on Earth while in an astral body, that someone may not see me -- there is weak reciprocity in this case, assuming I identified some features of that person's waking experience in a way that the other person agrees with (otherwise there'd be no convergence at all).

 

So the most basic joint commitment we have here is that we share the planet Earth. This level of convergence by itself is not sufficient to guarantee anything other than we can bump into bodies that look like ours while walking around the planet. To experience a connection more meaningful than bodies bumping into each other in space, deeper levels of convergence are necessary. So in our case, besides all of us favoring Earth, we also all like Buddhism, for example, and thus we are here together.

 

So, if your mind is flexible enough to generate an extraordinary perception that subjectively feels real and visceral, and you have friends who believe such things are possible, and are joined with you in your commitments in a deep way, then these friends can observe you doing miraculous things.

 

So besides the joint commitment that results in a very close convergence of subjectivities, some mental flexibility is needed for both beings, the performer and the observer. The observer is not passive even while appearing passive, but is actually creating the experience from his or her side by maintaining an allowing and affirmatively expectant mind. And the performer should realize that while subjectively they do everything, if they want to think of the other person as a true and worthy individual, then they have to allow that the other individual is a participant and not a passive receptacle. If you think that beings are like things or objects, then what I said will appear paradoxical. But if you understand that a being is not actually a thing, there is no paradox.

[Tibetan_Ice]

So what did Nisargadatta mean when he said "there are no others"?

What did Buddha mean when he said that there is no self? If there is no self, then there aren't any "others" either...

Reality seems to be a movie that plays itself out and then you go onto the next reel...

[goldisheavy]

So what did Nisargadatta mean when he said "there are no others"?

What did Buddha mean when he said that there is no self? If there is no self, then there aren't any "others" either...

Reality seems to be a movie that plays itself out and then you go onto the next reel...

 

Reality doesn't play itself. You play it. You're a player. If you stop all your playing, reality will stop playing too because without your input it has nothing to do of itself and for itself.

 

Just to be clear, I'm talking about the phenomenal reality here and not secret reality.

Edited July 23, 2014 by goldisheavy

[Mandrake]

Goldisheavy:

 

 

Nice to see you back!

 

 

Mandrake

[goldisheavy]

Thanks Mandrake.

[Apech]

Brilliant post, always good to read you GiH, please continue.

[-_sometimes]

On 7/23/2014 at 4:54 AM, goldisheavy said:

So the most basic joint commitment we have here is that we share the planet Earth.

Super interesting post I really enjoyed reading it!