Is my metaphor correct?

[Torkys]

To become enlightment means viewing the world without any extreme opposites. Thinking about that a metaphor was created in my mind: Life is like a spinning disk. You are on the disk and the Universe is around you. You move closer to the center when you are giving up extreme opposites. The more far away are you from the center, the more delusion filled and distorted your view on the Universe becomes. Only in the middle can you view reality as it is. (But how you know where is the center? )

Edited February 15, 2017 by Torkys

[C T]

the centre will reveal itself with the gradual cessation of craving and desire brought on by correct insight practices. 

[azucenaalev]

I see enlightenment as a bit more than that. It's the process of removing desires, like C T said, but it's still more. I suppose I view enlightenment as the refinement of the self to the point where you're no longer blocked by the obstacles that we all face. Things like ego, the congenital emotions, etc. Essentially, it's the point in which you can do anything but you chose to do only that which fits in with the "way" of things. I think your circle idea is interesting but not a complete representation. 

 

You could say that life is a rotating circle (I prefer sphere), and the center is the place of peace. But to get there isn't just to remove concepts of extreme duality, it's what I described above. Although I like the bit about the more distorted your view of the universe becomes. Anyway, when you're at the center, you're able to see everything rotating around you and you can go in and out as you please - you aren't stuck. And like you said, you can then take in reality (or the nonexistence of such). That's how I'd extend the metaphor. 

[Drifting_Through_Infinity]

I view enlightenment as being when you are 100% happy, and never in a state of delusion. Always spontaneous and never thinking of the future. Like a child

[AussieTrees]

Spinning on a disc,the further from the centre the faster you stream through life.

As you near the centre you speed is reduced to stillness at it's centre point.

 

Feel the stillness of life when centred,you have so much my time for life.

This is our path reaching one's centre.

Edited February 18, 2017 by AussieTrees

[Wu Ming Jen]

I view enlightenment as remembering where we came from and where we return, the unknown.

 

Knowing the unknown, seeing the unseen. hearing what has no sound. tasting that  has no taste.   

 

In this way when "things" come up in life we see the source and set the correct course of action or non action.

[dawei]

Thinking about that a metaphor was created in my mind: Life is like a spinning disk. You are on the disk and the Universe is around you. You move closer to the center when you are giving up extreme opposites. The more far away are you from the center, the more delusion filled and distorted your view on the Universe becomes. Only in the middle can you view reality as it is. (But how you know where is the center? )

 

Very interesting you came to that idea...  It has been argued by Sarah Allen that the oldest cosmology of Tai Yi Sheng Shui  is based on divination using the ancient cosmograph.

 

THE GREAT ONE, WATER, AND THE LAOZI: NEW LIGHT FROM GUODIAN

BY SARAH ALLAN

 

example graphic:

 

 

During the Warring States Period the cosmos began to be represented schematically in divination by a device known as a “cosmograph,” this being the term coined by Stephen Field to describe the divination device called shi 式 (shipan 式盤 in modern Chinese). On this device, a round heaven mounted on a square earth rotates around a central pole or point, represented, notionally at least, as the Pole Star.21 My hypothesis here is that when the cosmograph began to be used widely for divination—presumably

sometime in the Warring States Period—it influenced the manner in which the cosmos was visualized.

. . .

 

The use of textual evidence to date the introduction of the cosmograph inevitably leads to a circular argument because the early texts that make reference to the shi, including the Daodejing, are not firmly dated.

. . .

 

The term shi 式 occurs in three chapters of the Daodejing, none of which is found in the Guodian Laozi. In all of them, shi clearly refers to a cosmograph, even though the term is used figuratively. In chapter 28, we are advised to “know its white, hold to its black, and act as a cosmograph for the world. If you act as a cosmograph (shi) for the world, your virtue will be constant virtue without deviation, and you will go back again to where there is no ultimate (wu ji 無極).” The reference to “black” and “white” here suggests the schematic representation of a divination board. The term “ultimate” ( ji), as we shall see below, refers to the center of the sky, and the “Great Ultimate” corresponds to the Great One. In chapter 65, we are also told to “know constantly the array of the cosmograph ( ji shi 稽式): this is dark virtue.” 

In the third example, from chapter 22, the term shi is associated with another concept that is key to the present study, the “one”:  Thus, the sage embraces the one and acts as the cosmograph (shi) for the world. He does not reveal himself; therefore he is bright. He is not self-righteous;

 

 

In brief:   The center doesn't move and is static and eternal; The wheel spins and is life.   

 

Dao is the center; without motion.  Every movement relative to the center is the manifest world.

 

Many folks can talk to Form=Void but they can't explain Void=Form.

 

The former is: there is no self arising; it is interdependent on previous arising.   

 

How to explain the latter:  Void= Form ?

 

(no self) arising = no (self arising)      [credit another member with this]

 

which just means:

 

Dao-arising = 10,000 rising

[Brian]

You are the center of the universe. Not figuratively, not metaphorically -- literally and physically. The entire known universe is centered on you and is expanding around you at the speed of light.

 

Don't think you are special, though, because I am the center of the universe, too.

 

[Lost in Translation]

To lighten can mean removal of a burden. It can also mean illumination.

To be enlightened implies to carry no burden as well as to walk a well light path.

 

In a spinning disk, centrifugal force is strongest on the edge an weakest in the center. 

From the the center of a disk, all is the same. From the edge there is disk and no disk.

 

It seems like a good analogy to me. 

 

 

[Aletheia]

On 2/15/2017 at 11:15 PM, Torkys said:

To become enlightment means viewing the world without any extreme opposites. Thinking about that a metaphor was created in my mind: Life is like a spinning disk.

 

I think that's the path to enlightenment, where thinking submerges back into the all encompassing dream-like semiosphere. A place where opposites lose repulsive polarities and become united in coupled attraction, "going beyond Good and Evil."

 

But after that you have to get out of the slow lane and move on over to authentic alchemical training in order to get real energy so that you might become a real man. Real men astral travel then return back to earth to heal with the energy gathered from their travels, distant temporal zones beyond the realm of people's wildest dreams!

 

Quote

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

 

-- Nietzsche

 

LOL Nietzsche is so funny -- we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong) -- That's Kant's philosophy. He made up the synthetic a priori to save Platonism and then said what he'd "found" had been there all along LOL.

 

Quote

It seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt at present to divert attention from the actual influence which Kant exercised on German philosophy, and especially to ignore prudently the value which he set upon himself. Kant was first and foremost proud of his Table of Categories; with it in his hand he said: "This is the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics." Let us only understand this "could be"! He was proud of having

DISCOVERED a new faculty in man, the faculty of synthetic judgment a priori. Granting that he deceived himself in this matter; the development and rapid flourishing of German philosophy depended nevertheless on his pride, and on the eager rivalry of the younger generation to discover if possible something—at all events "new faculties"—of which to be still prouder!—But let us reflect for a moment—it is high time to do so. "How are synthetic judgments a priori POSSIBLE?" Kant asks himself—and what is really his answer? "BY MEANS OF A MEANS (faculty)"—but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether loses sight of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer. People were beside themselves with delight over this new faculty, and the jubilation reached its climax when Kant further discovered a moral faculty in man—for at that time Germans were still moral, not yet dabbling in the "Politics of hard fact." Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy. All the young theologians of the Tubingen institution went immediately into the groves—all seeking for "faculties."

 

-- Nietzsche

 

What's funny is "serious" academic philosophers read the above quotes and have no clue what he's talking about. I watched a lecture on Kant the other day and the guy was saying Kant is the greatest philosopher of all time.

 

 

I actually remember the timestamp which shows where Kant doesn't understand yoga -- 39:30 -- when he says we can not know an independent reality which is what Kant calls the thing-in-itself.

 

 

So in philosophy people wonder what the thing-in-itself really could be. eternity or what something really is like a cup! Of course they are the same thing in reality.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon

 

Heidegger has a book titled "what is a thing?" but I haven't read it.

 

https://www.amazon.com/What-Thing-Martin-Heidegger/dp/B001QDT0A6

 

Edited August 22, 2017 by Aletheia

[Aletheia]

So the noumena is the same as the Dao and the thing-in-itself is a "thing," like a cup, existing independently in "external" reality which leaves "sensory impressions" for the "understanding" to "conceive" with its "table of categories" that happen to be innately embedded inside the skull and "intuits" "things" in Kantian "spacetime," that can not be epistemologically "known" in-itself.

 

WOW Kant is an absolute madman-on-the-lose and people take him seriously? It really makes you wonder...

Edited August 22, 2017 by Aletheia