LastThursday

Or neither. This illustrates my point well. The words 'Nyan' and 'Meow' don't actually capture a cat's call at all - despite them supposedly being onomatopoeic. If it did we'd be looking for the cat every time we heard the words. We are suckers for language,

Here's my thoughts: Language is nothing more than combinatorial symbolic manipulation. The symbols can be anything: letters, sounds, semaphore, binary. The symbols are completely arbritary, but have to be distinct enough to tell them apart from each other and there should be a finite set of them. By themselves the symbols are useless, but put them together in specific ways and they can be used to convey any sort of information. The juxtaposition of symbols then allows speakers to hang real world experiences onto those specific patterns. In effect the patterns of symbols point to a category of things in the real world. The things themselves can be any experience including thought. Communication between individuals boils down to constructing these special patterns that are pointers to experiences the speaker is having. The receiver of the communication then "runs the program" of the communication and "re-experiences" it for themselves. This is in effect a form of mind reading or thought transferrence. The system is not perfect because it is finite. To speak takes time, so the rate of transferrence of information is limited. Also the number of patterns (grammar, syntax, words etc), is huge but finite. This means that it is necessary to take only specific parts of the speaker's experience when communicating; the number and rate of experiences is much much greater (probably infinite) than the rate of information in speech. In other words the recipient of a communication can only receive a sketch of your experiences. But like a good artist, we will "fill out" the sketch to make a full picture which fits with our own experiences. Language is powerful, because it puts us into different states of consciousness, which can change our behaviours and actions - this leaves us open to manipulation by other speakers (positive or negative). It is also powerful, because when speaking we become habituated to only taking certain parts of our experiences to convey information and we ignore the rest. This habituation has a distorting effect on our perceptions, by placing greater importance on some experiences over others - over time we become blind to the non-important experiences, maybe to our detriment. But note that we experience things whether we are speaking or not - thought, memories and experiences carry on quite happily without language. It's easy to become too confident and make language the ground of our experiences, it is definitely not. It is a superficial layer above our experience of the world.

It is utterly incomprehensible, but you are staring into and experiencing the void right now. Any meaning you try to pin on the experience is coming from within the experience itself . In fact the observer or the awareness is also a product of this experience. Some say that it's possible to come out of the experience itself and awaken.

Indeed. Why all this separation business if not just to become aware of the connectedness of everything? Duality leads itself to non-duality.

Impatience is not a virtue. Anything that can happen, will happen; and you will be there to experience it.

Surely this is a tactic to make sure that we're not delusional? Mastery doesn't have an end. If you think or even "know" you've reached the end, then most probably you're wrong.

How long is the present moment? When does it stop being present? Did the present moment really just happen?

That would make a great opening line of a novel. The story of your childhood never went away. It's always "right here" for you to use.

Interpreting your dreams is like interpreting real life, very difficult, and you're probably wrong a lot of the time. Interpreting other people's dreams, and you may as well give up. But here's my advice and interpretation: Don't fixate on the girl. It seems to me that the source of the nightmare is that you'll lose your friends (it doesn't matter how). It doesn't seem to be a too unreasonable a fear to have. Why not instead work through the scenario (while you're awake), confront the fear so to speak. How would life be without any friends? Could your survive? Would it make you more resilient? Would you be lonely? And so on... Also. Don't fixate on the dreams. They'll pass.

I would say that in an everyday sense there is a difference between just thinking about things and taking action. I don't think that a pragmatic thinker is any more or less prone to taking action than an idealistic (or arty) thinker. However, the nature of their actions will be very different. A pragmatic thinker might be more logical and rely on common sense and as a consequence is better at planning and project management. But a pragmatic thinker may have a narrower range of choices because their thinking is more inflexible. An idealistic thinker will be wildly more flexible by having lots of constantly changing ideas - it could lead to paralysis in taking action - but may also lead to a more flexible approach to problem solving and taking action. If you're running a business having both types of people is great, and maybe a third person to mediate between them (the finance director)!

Sorry my bad, you've settled on the wrong "wrong". The wrong experience I was pointing to was that you "lost consciousness" whilst asleep. As soon as you start filling in experiences retrospectively (i.e. rely on memories, yours or other people's), you are in fantasy land - it is merely a construction or mental model of what may have happened - and I can't stress it enough: it is not actual. Except their accounts about what happened to you when you were asleep will again happen retrospectively. It's the same problem. You wake up someone says 'yeah, you were completely asleep, we measured your brainwaves and it looks like you were unconscious and by the way you didn't have tentacles'. You can never be 100% certain that you're not being told a lie, that their data is wrong and so on. There's always doubt. You can never confidently declare: "yes I was not aware when I was asleep." The solution to the doubt and to the contradiction is very simple. You are never not conscious. Consciousness is 'always on'.

Right. So you retrospectively "fill in" the fact that you had no awareness. It's like this. Fill in the missing word: "I was not aware of being _____ last night". Oh that's easy, "asleep". But there a lots of words which could go in there, "drunk" for example, or "robbed". My point is that you can't be aware of not being aware, it's a contradiction. You can only ever paint over the cracks retrospectively. For all you know whilst asleep you turn into a multi-dimensional being with tentacles, but you would never know. You wake up, but always fill-in the wrong experience: I was just a human who lost consciousness.

How do you know this, if you are not conscious at the time? How is it possible to be aware of not being aware?

@Stakres interesting. Do you just believe that biology has control, or is it an absolute certainty for you? How did you find this fact out - how do you know it's true? Is it at all possible that you have a belief in biology determining your life and that belief is just a subset of all your thinking?

@Stakres no doubt there's materialistic limits and rules. Do you think beliefs have more control of you than your biology?

Who or what determines it?

@Jahmaine then time travel would be possible, and fate would be a thing, the history of the universe would be set in stone. Given the right magic or technology, you would be able to re-live your childhood because it is always "there", or you could experience what happens after your death in the blink of an eye.

@dyslexicFcuk I appreciate your vigour. This forum is a bit like real life. You have a whole range of folks at many different levels and with different backgrounds and so on. It has its own flavour and way of speaking as any community does. You'll find it difficult to shift the centre gravity if that's your aim. The forum does have a collective ego! I also think you've slightly misunderstood the forum. I for one am not interested in converting the masses to mysticism and spirituality. More I'm just here for self discovery and advancement, I reckon a lot of others are the same. Anyway, do what anyone in real life does, either ignore the bullshit (I do) or call it out (as you've done) or better just acknowledge to yourself you don't understand it and move on. Humility goes a long a way as does rational discourse. Peace be upon you.

Apportioning blame for suffering to God is analogous to the characters in a film blaming the screen for their misfortunes. There is a difference between the content and the medium which conveys it. The medium in our cases is consciousness (a.k.a. God). Consciousness is resolutely neutral, in fact it is outside all suffering and it is meta to its content. In my opinion to be enlightened is to be at one with the meta-nature of consciousness and hence above all suffering, but also above all ecstasy. In this context to say that being enlightened is this or that experience is to miss the point or more accurately to be still caught up in the content of consciousness. The meta-nature of consciousness is without description or attributes, but it is directly knowable. The analogy with film characters is that the characters can get to understand their screen. Consciousness can know itself - that is its nature. But it is also powerful enough to indulge itself and to get caught up in its own content. How does the content then differ from the medium? This is like the difference between the knot and the string that makes it. Because consciousness is reflective or recursive (it knows itself) it can tie a knot in itself – like a string that is able to tie itself into a knot. Why is suffering in the content and not the medium? The first clue is the transitory nature of suffering. Suffering has a characteristic ebb and flow and so suffering is by nature impermanent. Any experience which is transitory must be unreal or imaginary because it happens on the knife-edge of the present moment. No sooner has it happened than it becomes “lost” to us again. In other words the entire content of consciousness is transitory and ephemeral – it is all “appearances” never again to be repeated in exactly the same way – yesterday’s suffering is not today’s suffering. Suffering is an appearance like a knot in consciousness. The meta-nature of consciousness is on the other hand not impermanent, because it has no attributes to change. Because it has no attributes it is indifferent to suffering and not the cause of it. The screen of the film does not care about the suffering of the characters playing out on it. God does not directly cause suffering or cause bliss.

@Jed Vassallo agreed. If there is no Time, then we are everything at once, all characters.

@Jed Vassallo we are all storytellers and Time makes for a good story.

How about @Schahin crystallised out of god/nothingness/infinity? The medium the crystal grows in is consciousness. The nature of consciousness is to get more twisty and knotty and self referential as it becomes more and more aware of itself - the crystal expands and gains more and more structure. But the power of consciousness is unlimited and it can disolve that crystal whenever it wants to and poof! You're gone. God carries on.

Being tucked into my pram (it felt warm) and looking up at my mother blue sky behind her. Definitely before I could walk I guess, so, less than two years old?

@Nash to get to the bottom of it, you have to understand what "exists" means. There's two kinds of "exists". One is the direct experience of hearing a tree fall, right now. The other is imagining hearing a tree fall in some forest somewhere. One is a certainty the other a possibility. Don't underestimate how confused people are between the two types of existence. Naturally, if you push it a lot further there is no difference between the two types of existence: they both occur in consciousness. In the end one is not more real than the other. Even a concrete direct experience is just imagination - albeit one that can kill you (when a tree falls on you).

Whether becoming someone takes ten years or five minutes doesn't matter - once you are there it's passed. Nothing is ever wasted in getting there, not even all the mistakes and wrong choices. The future unfolds at its own pace and in its own special way. Just do or be whatever you want to be right now. It's all you have. But do it with your eyes wide open and fully consciously - don't spoil it with whatifs. Well, that's my humble opinion anyway.