Mason Riggle

@r0ckyreed transcend it. Recognise that if there's no 'doer', and 'nothing to do', then it doesn't matter which it is. You always do exactly what you think you should. You're already doing it, efforltlessly.. or rather, it's happening, and you're not doing it.

'there is no difference between real and imaginary' is less confusing than 'I am dreaming you and you are dreaming me, only you don't know that but I do.' Why throw in all the confusing mes and yous?

How can anything be 'different' if everything is your dream? This is how Leo speaks in contradictions. It's a character in my dream, telling me I'm dreaming, and so are they, but the difference is they know it. What a silly dream that would be.

When you say, 'morality is relative', do you mean it objectively is relative, or relative to my subjective experience? The paradox is that all objective 'truths' only exist subjectively (relative to my experience). And my 'subjective experience' objectively exists... It's the only thing that does.

Any type of prescriptive Morality just makes one huge assumption.. that if there's anything worth caring about, it's the quality of experience. If we care about that, there are objectively better ways than others to go about improving the quality of our experience. It's like, should I go to the store? That's relative. What's your goal? Trying to sleep? Then, no, you shouldn't, but if you need milk then you should... But once you establish that getting milk is a worthwhile goal, there are objectively better ways to get to the store than others.

@r0ckyreed cool post. I enjoyed the distinctions you made between hedonism and Eudaemonia. I think this kind of dualist view on Morality, that you flawlessly play both sides of the fence on (This is perhaps called being spiritually grounded?) is transcended in light of 'lack of self' or 'lack of doership' realizations, or other realizations that illuminate the non dual nature of reality. It's very difficult for me to do anything right or wrong, if the only thing I'm ever doing is 'being myself' and I never have to try to do it. Being myself is effortless, because Im not doing it, you see? Trying to be myself, or trying not to be myself are the same thing. They are both 'what I am doing', whichever one I do. Either is always just more me 'effortlessly being myself'. I always do exactly what I want, because the only way to do anything else would be to want to do that other thing more, which would just be more doing exactly what I want.

I'd just accept my lack of acceptance. Problem solved.

My old karate teacher was not nearly as good as many of his students. He wasn't 'the greatest' at karate.. but he was very talented at teaching karate. Many of his students, myself included, were national champions. It might be easy to criticize him, from the outside looking in, and say, 'why isn't he better at karate if he's such a good karate teacher?' (Don't get me wrong.. you probably wouldn't wanna try to take his wallet on the street, but there were many areas that just weren't his strong suits, and yet many of his students surpassed his ability in these areas, under his instruction). But karate was never about him. His own karate skills had almost nothing to do with his ability to teach others karate.

My old boss was a total dick. I learned a ton from him.

perhaps finding yourself being a human with 0 free will is the 'anything' that you desire?? "I am not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be." And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today." - from, The Dream of Life, by Alan Watts.

It's always now. There are no false experiences. Everything is exactly as it seems, until it seems otherwise, in which case, everything is still exactly how it seems. If [reality] seems 'one way' and turns out to be 'another way'... then 'seeming one way that turns out to be another way' is exactly how it seems, when it seems that way.

@WelcometoReality "I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware." - Alan Watts Basically, "I" am 'my entire experience'.. and not 'the experiencer of experience'.

@Edvardas hmmmm. Anything can be verified through direct experience. By paying close attention to what your experience is like, you can know the answers to your questions. Run some thought experiments. Make some choices and notice what that is like. Recognize that you can't 'choose before you choose', and that 'choosing' is something that is occurring the same way 'hearing' is occurring. Everything in your 'awareness' or 'experience' is simply 'arising' in each new moment. Consider, can you choose that which does not occur to you to choose? Who decides what occurs to you? Consider, during your trip, why didn't you move your leg instead? Can you account for why you 'moved your finger' rather than 'moving your leg'? If not, then did you really 'choose' to move that finger?

@WokeBloke this all depends on how "I" is defined. When people (human organisms) talk about, or think about, 'themselves', there is this tendency to imagine a 'separate self' which exists somewhere inside the body, typically inside the head, behind the eyes somewhere, who is not only witness to what the organism is experiencing, but also controller of what the organism is doing. But this is a mistake. We may consider, for example, what we mean when we say something like, 'I am growing hair on my head.' It's very apparent here that the "I" who is 'growing hair' is 'the entire organism'... 'the organism Mason Riggle is growing hair on his head.' We may recognize that there's nothing that the organism Mason Riggle has to do in order to 'grow hair', and that 'growing hair' is something organisms do (or don't do) automatically. It's effortless. And, it's fairly easy to notice that there is no separate 'grower' of hair somewhere inside organisms.. (we may also note the arbitrary nature of what is considered to be 'the grower of hair'.. is the head growing hair? or is it the skin? or maybe the brain? The whole organism? Maybe it's Earth that's 'growing hair'? After all.. who grows the apples? Is it the branches of the apple trees? The whole tree? The orchard? The farmer? Is the Universe busy growing apples? It seems so.. apples are growing, after all.) Now, the same is true for 'thinking', except here is where the 'mistake' occurs. When we say or think, "I am thinking about going to the store.", there is this tendency to imagine a separate 'locus of attention' or 'self' which is 'inside our organism' somewhere who is 'aware of the thoughts' and who is also 'author of the thoughts'. But this isn't accurate. Organisms are 'thinking' the same way organisms are 'growing hair'.. that is to say, thinking happens automatically. You can't 'think a thought before you think it'.. thought merely 'arises', the same way 'hair grows'.. The same way there really is no 'grower of hair' inside me somewhere, there is also no 'thinker of thoughts' inside me.. there is just my organism, doing what it does... making red blood cells, digesting food, regulating temperature, breathing, thinking, hearing, feeling.. and it does these things 'all by itself'. It's doing these things right now, effortlessly. It takes no effort from 'me' to 'be me'. Rather, I (however "I" is defined, doesn't matter.. some imaginary locus of attention, or the entire Universe, or anywhere in between) am 'being myself', all the time, effortlessly. There's literally nothing to do. It's already happening, and 'you' aren't 'doing it'.. 'you' are occurring now, as a thought, right along with everything else that's occurring. "What we mistake to be the thinker of thoughts, is just more thought, occurring now." - Sam Harris

@WokeBloke it's ALL there is for me. There 'seems to be' other people who have experiences, but I can't be sure... I can be sure, however, that 'there seems to be'... The 'seeming' I'm sure of.. but 'what seems to be', I can always be mistaken about. It seems like I'm here writing to you.. but I could be dreaming, or hallucinating, or in some sort of simulation.. but 'the experience of me writing to you' is undeniable.

why is 'seeing' what you equate with 'the only way to experience'? Is this conversation not a way for me to experience you? My logic states that 'whatever I experience' is 'what there IS', and I can't know if there's anything more.. and the only way for me to 'know', would be to experience it some way.

@WokeBloke try thinking more about it this way---> If you can not experience something, does that something exist [for you]? Can you think of anything that you know 'exists' but you have never experienced in some way, directly or otherwise?

I think for him, this just strengthens the notion of an 'experiencer' and an 'experience' which are separate from each other, rather than having the opposite effect, of showing that 'subject/object' are not two things, but one. This can be a tricky notion to dispel, because it's not always apparent how connected 'experience' and 'experiencer' really are. @WokeBloke insists that my coffee cup has an inside, and an outside.. and we are telling him, well.. there's really just 'the whole cup', and the difference between 'inside' and 'outside' is arbitrary, imaginary, and relative. Inside/Outside exist together, or not at all.. you can't have 'just the outside' of a cup.. same with 'seer' and 'seeing'. They are, in reality, one thing, 'appearing' as two. It's like trying to separate 'a tree' from 'what a tree is doing'... but these are the same thing. 'what a tree does' is 'what a tree is'. There is no 'tree' that 'grows leaves'.. because 'growing leaves' IS what a tree is.

Truly a magical moment!

@WokeBloke I'm saying 'what is happening' is the 1 thing there IS.

?

Maybe let me put it this way... Seeing is happening the same way trees are happening.. I could ask.. who is happening the trees? This is actually a reframing of the classic philosophical 'tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it' question. What is really being asked is, without a subject 'for whom' existence exists, does anything objectively exist? Without a 'seer' is anything seen? This duality of subject/object is transcended by recognizing the duality as a duality.. two sides of the same coin. It's direct. No 'experiencer' in addition to experience.

Are trees 'treeing'? Is there a difference between 'a tree' and 'treeing'? Are clouds 'clouding'? Is there a difference between 'clouds' and 'clouding'? There is no 'seer' in addition to 'seeing'. No 'tree' in addition to 'treeing'.. no 'cloud' in addition to 'clouding'. Who or what is 'clouding the clouds'? Who or what is 'treeing the trees'?

Can't it be both? I take my fun very seriously.