Petals

a short and beautiful video.

@Shaun I don't really understand what you mean, but I would answer: of course there is truth to this. I think it is the basis for compassion. Spirituality is not solipsism. do you know 'the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows' youtube channel?

@ActualizedDavid I've posted this a few hours ago on this sub-forum. I think it is appropriate here. you may like it. @ivankiss I think there is change, but that doesn't mean that the brain activity change is causal.

@Consilience thanks a lot for the detailed answer!!!

@Leo Gura what do you think of Bernardo Kastrup's theory of us being dissociated 'alters' (i.e. parts) of mind-at-large and the body / brain activity being the outside appearance of that dissociation? do your experiences corroborate it?

@Consilience would you mind writing a sentence or two about 'Do It Now' or 'Get Shit Done'? It sounds simple enough, but was there a specific insight that made them game changers for you? I'm just curious.

I think I haven't seen this TED talk already posted here on the forum. It is a great and moving talk. "I remember thinking there is no way I will ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body."

@Forrest Adkins if I understand you correctly you are trying to understand why it seems that there is an external world while at the same time it is said that there is no material universe. but maybe there is an external world, but it is just not made out of 'material stuff'. as Bernardo Kastrup sees it, there is an outside world, but that world is made out of the experiences of 'mind-at-large'. you yourself are a dissociated part of that mind-at-large. when you interact across the dissociative boundary with mind-at-large it presents itself in two ways - 1.) as the subjective experience of space and time you are having right now, and 2.) as an outside 2nd person view on that subjective experience, which looks like light bouncing off of objects hitting the eyes and signals being send to the brain. for clearer explanations you could read 'why materialism is baloney' or 'the idea of the world' by Bernardo Kastrup.

@remember thank you for writing this. what you wrote somehow really affected me although I haven't watched such content.

@Aaron p if I remember correctly, Ramana said that with each thought arising you should ask yourself 'to whom has this thought arisen?'. but I think first of all you should be clear about your expectations. what are you expecting to get from self-enquiry? be clear that there will NEVER be an answer to that question 'who am I?'. there will also never be an experience which will solve the question. "Recognition has nothing to do with anything that happens." -Franklin Merrell-Wolff

@Chives99 good point. if you think that you can win and as a consequence that you can lose, there will always be fear. all finite games are based in fear. paradoxically, true motivation can only come when you let go of the idea that you can win. I highly, highly recommend reading 'Finite and Infinite Games' by James P. Carse. It's my favourite book.

I can relate to what you are saying. when I experience a scotoma (you can google it), i.e. when a part of my visual field disappears, I often get the sense that the world is in fact a 2D screen from which my consciousness constructs a 3D world. this has nothing to do with enlightenment I guess but it at least makes you question the idea that there is a self-existent 3D space 'out there' independent of consciousness.

@fewrocker the 'Academy of Ideas' youtube channel has a few videos on Jung. + the biography 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections' is often recommended as an introduction.

I think this fits this thread. I've read it yesterday. It's by Aldous Huxley: "To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born ... the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things."

@Zigzag Idiot great! thank you!

I don't have much knowledge concerning the Magnitsky case and I am not taking any sides. I merely read Leo's blog post about it. I accidentally found this and wanted to let you know that this alternative view and a banned documentary exist. http://magnitskyact.com/telepolis maybe it is interesting for @Leo Gura and others... PS: @Leo Gura do you think about establishing an index for your blog posts? that would be great.

hope this is sth new. haven't gone through the whole thread.

@Cammy e.g. how do you know for sure that your parents are your biological parents?

@Pernani not explicitly I think. the other Krishnamurti - UG says: "If the idea of the 'meaningful' is dropped, then you will see meaning in whatever you are doing in daily life." I like that. maybe it helps you.

I read it quite a long time ago, but there is one sentence that I remember: "The ambitious man is the most frightened of man because he is afraid to be what he is." It's a great book. I would recommend it to those who want to read something 'spiritual' but at the same time something grounded and not 'far out'.

@Alex bliss I read it somewhere and I could also recognize in one of his answers that he was already highly advanced before he met his guru. So he was very advanced and he met a genuine guru who knew exactly what Nisargadatta had to hear. That's a great recipe for awakening. So try not to compare yourself with him and, as Nisargadatta would say, 'earnestness' will get you there too.

William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops especially 'dlp 1.1' it's 'impermanence' in a track. read about how he did it.

@Zigzag Idiot thank you very much for this link! did you get the collection for a reasonable price?

@Synchronicity thank you for making the video! I haven't read through the whole thread yet, but have you thought about somehow getting a brain scan or some interested psychologist to do an fMRI (which is probably hard to get). I am not saying that the brain is producing your experience. I think there can never be proof for us unless we ourselves have the direct experience. Until then the only hint can be a 2nd-person-perspective of your 1st-person-perspective, which is the brain. If there is some anomaly found, we would then at least have a basis for believing in what you are saying. I'm not saying that there has to be an anomaly, but maybe there is.

@Synchronicity thank you for sharing! a while back I read a book by Gardner Eeden called 'Lucid'. He explains that he lives simultaneously in the everyday world and the dream-world. So he is constantly dreaming while also being conscious of the regular world - 24/7. He calls it being 'bi-conscious'. This is probably different from what you are experiencing, but maybe you are interested in it.