Anderz

Money has allowed for the development of individuals. That's a necessary development. But attachment to money is also a huge part of the ego tensions. If ego consciousness was intelligent enough there wouldn't be any need for greed, not even the need for money, but since the ego only sees a tiny part of reality in isolation, money is filled with conflict. The conflict and friction in money is actually a real physical phenomenon and much of that conflict is stored in us as ego tensions in mind and body. The good news is that it's possible to become free from the burden of money. And this can be achieved through letting go of attachment to money. Meditation is probably a useful tool for that, but I will experiment with mindfulness of money to let go of attachment to money.

@Artsu The overall Christian perspective I have figured out so far (without the Holy Spirit this time) is that the Father and the Son are one, and at the same time the Father is greater than the Son, and by Himself the Son can do nothing and only acts according to the will of the Father.

@Artsu I haven't looked into the difference between Jesus and Christ much. My main point is that the Word of God is the whole of our reality. And the Word of God is the same as Brahman in Hinduism. The Word is the timeless Absolute that gives rise to time and our manifested reality. And the Word is a point in Indra's net in Buddhism that I posted about earlier. But if the Word is just a point, then what is the whole Indra's net? The answer (well, my answer) is that Indra's net is Para Brahman: So I often look at it from as big perspective as possible. Only from such view have I managed to get the different spiritual traditions and religions compatible with each other. And interestingly, someone mentioned Indra's net in a comment about The Wolfram Physics Project which has a graph as the foundation for physical reality. Indra's net is what in graph theory is called a simple complete undirected graph. Religions, spirituality, science, logic and my own experience of reality, I want to have a consistent picture of all that, including what the nature of time is.

@Artsu It says in the Bible that Jesus is the Word made flesh. That to me means a physical human being. But Jesus also said that he and the Father are one, so Christ to me means all of manifested reality, while Jesus the man represents the whole Word as a person. And Christ consciousness is the same as self-realization or what it's called in nonduality. But something that puzzled me right now is that if the Father is the unmanifested and infinite Word, and the Son is the manifested Word, then what is the Holy Spirit?! It's a Holy Trinity and I have heard that the idea of a trinity exists in other religions too. Then I came up with the idea that the Holy Spirit means consciousness! Consciousness is an undivided whole, and holy as in Holy Spirit means whole. And Spirit means that it's not something material nor something unmanifested. And consciousness is truly timeless in the sense that consciousness is always the immovable witnessing/experiencing in the now.

@Artsu I interpret Christ as being the only begotten son since there is only one Word of God. I don't even know whether Jesus actually existed as a historical person or not. But what Jesus said seems like true knowledge to me, although in metaphors and parables, such as Jesus saying: In the beginning the Word and God are the same thing and all there is, but then the Word became manifest in the form of Christ and this it the beginning of creation so of course Christ is before Abraham was born. On the other hand, as it says in John 1, the Word has created everything, including us, so we and Christ are the same Word unfolding. I read that in Christianity the Body of Christ means the churchgoers. But that seems too limiting to me. The Body of Christ I think means all of humanity in Christ consciousness. The Bible is ultimately about nonduality it seems, just like all other major religions. And in nonduality all time is always now, even the beginning of time is now. So the Word made manifest happened now. It's a real mind twister but it makes logical sense to me.

What do religions and spiritual traditions say about time? I like how Brahman is described as changeless. And God is described as changeless in the Bible. Not only that, the idea of the Absolute as a changeless block of information is mentioned in the Bible! Check this out: To say that the Word of God means the Bible is way too limiting. Instead, the full meaning of the Word of God is the Absolute unchanging and infinite block of information that is Brahman, the foundation of reality. In the beginning was the Word. Meaning time has a beginning. And in the beginning the Word and God are the same thing. Then the Word was made manifest in the form of Christ, God's only begotten son. Christ simply means the manifested reality while God is the infinite unmanifested reality. That's why Jesus says in the Bible that the Father is greater than him: The phrase "going to the Father" refers to manifested reality being the Word unfolding. Christ will always "be going" to the Father, as the way and the truth and the life (generation of time) forever since the Word is infinite.

Not as I see it. The manifested information is always finite. Take for example the graph in The Wolfram Physics Project. That graph starts from an initial finite condition and expands from there with a deterministic rule. So the graph expands, step by step, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... and so on. When will the steps reach infinity? When will the graph reach infinite size? The answer is: never! Because there is no largest number. Infinity is not a number. And about diminishing information, that's similar I think to the Thomson's lamp paradox I posted about earlier. First the lamp is on for 1 minute, then off for 1/2 minutes then on for 1/4 minutes and so on until the total time is 2 minutes. That's supposedly an infinite number of steps within those two minutes, but there is a problem: when 2 minutes have passed, is the lamp on or off?

Physicist Leonard Susskind said that the deepest law of physics he knows of is that information is indestructible. He also said that entropy is hidden information. Just because we can't experience all the information doesn't mean that it's gone. So all the past information may always be preserved and permanent. Also in The Wolfram Physics Project all information is preserved I think. They have a finite graph as the fundamental model of physical reality. The graph starts from an initial condition and then expands from there in a deterministic way. They believe that the effects of quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity can be explained with the graph. (To me quantum mechanics seems valid but Einsteinian physics looks like some kind of deception to me.)

There is nothing new under the sun, but the future is always new. The idea that there are past moments away from the now is like the story about how Earth rests on a turtle, which in turn is supported by another turtle, and then yet another one beneath that and so on, turtles all the way down. Or that there is a first turtle resting on nothing that supports billions of turtles above it plus the Earth.

@Artsu I claim that the past is real but that all the past is information in the now. Otherwise as you pointed out there is the problem of the past stretching back an infinite number of years away from the now. And the past is expanding yet always finite information in the now. The entire history of our universe of billions of years is information in the now. This solves the false logic of infinite past and the false logic of time starting from no time somewhere in a past away from the now.

@Member Yes, mind and manifested reality being the same, that seems valid to me. But unfolding as imagination? I have a much cruder explanation which is that there is no choice, nor randomness and only the timeless block of information unfolding in a single timeline.

@Bogdan The Absolute sounds similar to what I mean by the unmanifested. To simplify it, the Absolute is a timeless block of infinite information, and the manifested reality is that block unfolding in the now. That's what I mean by the simple analogy of listing all natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... instantly in the now. The Absolute in this analogy is the infinite set of natural numbers N itself, and the manifested reality is the list of numbers which never will reach infinity (there is no largest natural number) and therefore the manifested reality is always finite and time thereby goes on forever. The Absolute contains intelligent design without the need for any designer! The Absolute is a platonic form that just is. That might seem like a bleak version of God, but the design has infinite intelligence probably considering the amazing structure of our universe.

I now found something even better than Zeno's paradoxes! It's called Thomson's lamp. It shows in my opinion that time cannot be continuous.

I don't think of time as an illusion, but Julian Barbour has a point in how we measure time is only a measure of relative motion. How to objectively quantify the motion of time?! Is time flowing one second per second? That makes the unit [second/second] = 1? Haha. Nor can there as I see it be a continuous flow of time. So there is a definite finite number of discrete steps from the beginning of time to the present moment. A hideously astronomically large number, but still finite.

@Leo Gura Julian Barbour has studied Einstein's papers and letters carefully and concluded: "It's quite a strange gap in his [Einstein's] thinking, and I don't think he really did have a particularly good idea of what a clock actually is." And Barbour's idea of a timeless universe is based on "Nows" which as I understand it contain sequences of time packed into single units. A 1.25x speed up of time is possible within such Now I guess depending on how it is experienced subjectively. Some people have experienced time slowing down when entering a zone state, which may be a similar experience in the opposite direction. Depending on how the Now is "sampled" subjectively it gives the experience of faster or slower time.

I discovered a Bhakti trap! Even when I put my devotion on consciousness, it's still me as an ego doing it. So it's still a special relationship. So the trick it seems to me is to have the knowledge of Bhakti devotion without actually doing the devotion. And instead let the new conditioning happen automatically. I will still take a look at this video about Bhakti yoga to see if there is more to it to know about:

To simplify it, one can say that special relationships are based on fear and the holy relationship is based on unconditional love. I hesitate to use the term unconditional love, and would like to just call it love as in ACIM, but it can be useful here to distinguish it from ego love. One idea I came to think of is to detach from all special relationships which will lead to liberation from fear. And the biggest special relationship I now realized is what Eckhart Tolle talked about, that in ego consciousness we have a relationship with ourselves. Our own conceptual relationship to oneself, that's the root special relationship! And I realized that this method is what Bhakti yoga is, as Sadhguru described it. And instead of devotion to God or to a guru, I will experiment with having devotion to consciousness, which is something that's always directly accessible, and also as I see it is connected to the infinite, whereas special relationships are always limited, isolated and ego-based.

In this new video, Sadhguru explains how Bhakti yoga means devotion to something beyond the ego's relationships. Beyond what ACIM calls special relationships! So it's a devotion to the holy relationship.

Oh! What Shunyamurti meant by trans-conceptual awareness can be reached through recognizing that the ego is a conceptual construct. As Paul Hedderman said, the ego experiences itself as a noun. The ego is like a noun chasing other nouns in a conceptual experience of reality. And as Anna says in her latest video, we run around thinking we are going to find who we are on a journey:

Paul Hedderman said that the ego experiences itself as a noun. And a noun is f*cking empty, he said. Good point! The ego is a conceptual experience, and a concept is a label. And if we take ourselves to be a label that's an empty kind of experience.

I don't think physical reality is infinite, but consciousness is connected to the infinite. So consciousness is essentially the Holy Spirit. And the pleasant state of experience Sadhguru talked about will become activated through consciousness. And I found that ACIM says something similar, except it says that consciousness can receive either from the ego or from the Holy Spirit:

I don't think of or experience time as a dimension. And the fundamental information of reality is not made of separate bits. Fundamental reality is a no-thing, a platonic form that just is. The fundamental information is an interconnected whole, like Indra's net:

@LastThursday In the Integrated information theory (IIT) there is a value Phi that determines the level of consciousness of a system. My experience is that consciousness can be more or less clear but also that there is a certain threshold where my consciousness is active and when it enters an off state. And I have occasionally experienced my consciousness waking up suddenly so it's a discontinuous on/off state. In IIT any system with integrated information is conscious but I believe they consider human consciousness to be dependent on the brain and the nervous system. My explanation of OBEs is that the vacuum energy in space can become structured in such way that localized consciousness is activated outside the brain. Information is primary and consciousness a result of the information reaching a high enough level of complexity and integration (high enough Phi value). The neural activity in the brain is correlated with the information but it's the fundamental information that determines consciousness. So for example in a real OBE the person can actually see the world without physical eyes, which like the brain are correlated with the conscious experience of the world, but physical eyes are not the only possible way to have sight. In IIT even a video camera can be conscious if it has integrated information. I don't think a video camera has enough information integration to be conscious. The experience of sight depends on consciousness being active. Otherwise there is no experience. A video camera doesn't have experiences. And consciousness is a state, not some substance of field or anything like that. Like IIT says, consciousness is a whole undivided state, so I cannot determine from my own individual consciousness whether other people or animals are conscious or not, but from a nondual perspective all things are one, and I expect that humanity may soon enter a collective consciousness where true intersubjective experiences become possible.

Ah, now I got an insight about money. The love of money is the root of all evil. And love of money means attachment to money. It's what in A Course in Miracles are called special relationships, which as I see it is not only between people but also about material possessions. The attachment to money results in a heavy burden. And since money is the ego's primary belief in security, the burden becomes heavy indeed, so much so that it becomes an anchor for the "devil" and thereby the root of all evil. Up-anchor that devilish attachment to money and set sail to the shores of a new heaven and a new earth. That doesn't mean stop using money. It means stop paying attention to money. Dealing with money will be taken care of automatically.

@Member Time and mind are one, and also all minds are one! So when I am in deep dreamless sleep, it's only my localized consciousness that is in an off state. By mind I actually mean all manifested information, and that information exists on its own, and consciousness is activated where the complexity level gets high enough. So all 7 billion people on the planet share the same mind and each individualized consciousness can be on or off. And let's say as an example that a person is having a real OBE, then his or her consciousness is active not in the brain, but in the vacuum energy of the location of space where the OBE is experienced. And I read somewhere that real OBEs have actually been proven, with people reporting seeing things not visible from the position of the body, such as reading the text on a light armature label from a position at the ceiling (in a hospital during an operation if I remember correctly).