Mason Riggle

Yes. It seems rather, that 'I' is something that occurs, rather than something that 'does things'. Similarly, there is no 'tree' inside a tree that has to 'try to be a tree'.. trees just 'are trees', effortlessly. I never have to 'try to be myself', I just am always 'being myself'. If I ever try not to be myself, then that is 'what I'm doing', which is just more 'me being me', and I do that effortlessly.

Trump isn't even playing the same game. If he were the head coach of a football team, his entire team would walk out onto the field, punch the referees in the face, beat up the other team, and declare victory, while his team's fans cheered from the stands, declaring, 'now that's how you play football'... and the minute anyone tried to point out that actual football has rules, they would complain that they are the ones being treated unfairly.

@X_X how do you know you are 100% responsible? Why would you try to affirm something, if you're not sure it's true? Perhaps what you really want to do, is know that it's true, then you will no longer need constant reassurance. The best way to remind myself that the sun exists, is to look at the sun. If I have to keep telling myself, 'the sun is real' in order to believe that it is.. I might start questioning why I need to do this.

These questions stem from your definition of 'God'. You might recognize, that even though Reality is seemingly made up of many different things, there is only 'one' Everything. This 'one everything' is God. The problem with being 'one everything', is that 'one everything' is infinite, which is to say, 'one everything' has no limits. No size. No shape. No color. No borders. It can't be described. It is the same as 'Nothing'. So then, the only way for 'God' to 'know itself', or 'be something, rather than nothing/everything'.. is to pretend that it isn't 'one everything', but rather, many things, by placing [imaginary?] limits on itself. In this way, God is hiding from God, by 'pretending' not to be.. by pretending to be 'us'.. by pretending to be 'not God' (everything).

Your mission is not to accept this mission, do you accept?

@Consilience yes.. or maybe you do everything.

Here are a couple paradoxes- You can't 'do nothing'. Even 'doing nothing' would be 'what you are doing'. How can you try to do anything, if 'trying' is something you do, meaning you would have to 'try to try' before you could try, unless trying is something you do without trying.

@Strangeloop interesting question from member who's name is 'strangeloop' and who's image is an Escher.

Counter-intuitively.. I set about recognizing that I'm 100% not to blame, because there is no 'me', other than what 'the entire Universe is doing'. Then I flip that on it's head. Am I doing all of this, or is all of this doing me? Is there any difference?

@PurpleTree I simply recognize that there is nothing that "I" do, other than 'be myself', which I'm always doing, effortlessly. I am happening. The same is true for others. They behave like themselves, through no effort of their own. Similarly, we might recognize that there's nothing a volcano is doing, other than 'existing how it does'. There is no 'volcano' inside of volcanos somewhere that we can hold responsible, or forgive, for spewing lava everywhere.

"The map is not the territory" is a useful concept to help people understand that a description of something is never the exact same thing as the thing it's describing, otherwise it's not a 'map of the thing'.. it's the thing. Leo clarified this for my be pointing out that any map that was the same as the thing as 'what it is mapping' it would have to include itself in the map. This is useful to realize that there is no 'description' of a thing that is the same as 'the thing', so when you are making sense of some description of reality, you can understand that no description of reality will perfectly represent 'reality', because the 'description' becomes part of the reality it's trying to describe.

Why not you?

I realize infinite love by recognizing that it's all me, and that I must love me (everything), because otherwise, I would be something else. It's easier for me (effortless?) to be kind and loving to others, and myself, and the universe, when it's realized there is no difference between the 3.

If I am here, death is not. If death is here, I am not. Why should I fear that which can not be while I am? (paraphrasing from Epicurus)

@Preety_India Your (not so bold) predictions and assessment may turn out to be accurate... perhaps not. The future is uncertain. He has been impeached tho. Can we agree on that?

@Preety_India Impeachment in the United States is the process by which a legislature (usually in the form of the lower house) brings charges against a civil officer of government for crimes alleged to have been committed, analogous to the bringing of an indictment by a grand jury. You don't get 'un-indicted' if you are found 'not guilty' at the trial. Once you're indicted.. you've been indicted. Once you've been impeached, which Trump has been.. he can't be 'un-impeached'. This just moves us to a trial. Might want to re-evaluate where you get your information from.

@Nak Khid the two are intertwined. How can you discuss whether prescribed morallity is a 'good' idea, especially on this particular forum, without discussing the deeper implications of 'prescribed morality' itself..

"Am I doing all of this, or is all of this doing me?"

Here's the thing.. thoughts arise. It seems what you are really after here is to quiet the neurotic conversation that persistently arises within our awareness. The seemingly constant internal dialogue. It should be recognized that even when this 'conversation' quiets down, thoughts are still arising, in the same way that the sound of a bell in the distance 'arises' into your awareness, and then fades into memory.. Part of the 'trick' is to learn a new perspective on thought itself.. to recognize that thoughts simply come and go, and there is no reason to 'hold on to them' or pretend that 'you are authoring them', and simply be aware that they are arising in awareness like waves on a beach, only to 'wash away' and be replaced by the next thought arising in awareness.

The Dream of Life - Alan Watts "If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. 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. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren't God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not God in a politically kingly sense, but god in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not."

@Mo Grand the people Crucified Jesus... "To people who hate the truth, the truth looks like hate."

We could present it like this. What if the title of this forum thread were not what it is, but rather, "Mark my words, Trump is made of Cheese".. and then I proceeded to elaborate to everyone who disagrees that they just don't see it from my equally valid perspective. I've seen his 'cheeseness', which you haven't.. I know you think he's a human, but you haven't experienced what I have, which is that his hands are Provolone, and the rest is a mixture of Swiss and Gouda.. How much time and effort will you spend contemplating the isness of my claims.. IS the president actually just cheese and I'm seeing it wrong? Probably not very much... I can understand having 2 unique perspectives of the same reality which are equally valid.. but this doesn't mean all perspectives are equally valid, does it?

@Serotoninluv I like what you have laid out here, but perhaps it's a bit 'meta'. How convinced are you that a rock is a rock? We could take this philosophical question all the way to it's ends and find out it's all imaginary, but it always comes full circle, and even though the rock IS imaginary, it's still a rock, and never a fish.