r0ckyreed

There are many problems with Plato. A better question is what is wrong with empiricism since Actualized.org claims that Direct Experience/Consciousness is King?

I still think I made some good points that haven’t received complete sufficient responses. No one has debunked my points yet for how an Amazon package appears on the doorstep. There is a process involved even if you don’t perceive that. You have an understanding and logic that it didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Even a bad detective finding a dead body would understand that there was a reason/cause behind how someone died. There is no package or death without a series of causes. It just seems foolish to state otherwise given how we understand how things work. We know that for every result, there has to have been a process regardless of if it was held in our consciousness or not. Our consciousness sees the results of the processes but it doesn’t also witness the processes. The same can be said vice versa.

You are absolutely right. I need to focus more on the structure and not so much of the content. I guess I am just not sure what is meant by consciousness then. There are a lot of things that I am not aware of but that seem to exist. Knowledge is an example of that. Maybe knowledge is nothing more than consciousness being raised to a greater awareness of itself.

I way overthought it with my examples. The only example needed to illustrate my point is when you lose your keys. You have an idea of keys and you assume they exist outside of your perception!!! How is that!!? What are you really looking for? Of course, your keys to your car are an idea, and you have an idea of them existing somewhere that you don't know. Where is it that your keys exist if not perceived? From your subjective experience, your car keys (prior to finding them and when you actually find them) are just an idea and visual, auditory, and tactile perceptions. Your keys don't just disappear into a void. They are out there somewhere out there waiting for your consciousness to be conscious of them. Sometimes, they are right in front of your nose. Also, a burglar could have stolen your keys and took your car away. From your perspective, you may not know this. How is it that stuff isn't happening behind the scenes? I feel like there is knowledge about the world that our current subjective experience does not have full access to. Even if you didn't witness your car being stolen, how do you explain it's disappearance? There is an objective answer of where your car vanished to. I am gonna keep contemplating this until I find an answer. It is not so clear to me whether there is or isn't an external world. I know my car keys and car are nothing but my ideas and perceptions, but if I find that if my perceptions of my car in the driveway cease to exist, I can infer using my ideas that my car was stolen and is somewhere out in the world of my consciousness. I can then explore the world of my consciousness to find my car. Am I missing something here? I hope this makes sense. Thanks for all of your helpful insights and feedback so far. I am really trying to crack this big fat nut. Edit: What does it even mean when you lose something? Doesn’t that imply that it is located outside of consciousness and can be find within your consciousness? Thanks, Rocky

Yeah that is a better example! If there is no external world, then what the hell is The War In Ukraine? That point always stumps me. Homelessness and child traffickers exist even though I have never directly experienced any of them. They are an idea in my head, and I believe that it is a real problem "in the world." But I get that the only world I ever truly experience is my own experience. Homelessness and racism are indirect ideas that I hold in my consciousness right now, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. I am not sure I fully understand the no external world argument anymore because I feel like I am strawmanning it.

That makes a lot more sense now. The reason why I believe in external world is because of all the amount of training and construction of it. Man, it is so convincing though that there is an external world, a world beyond my perceptions because after all, who am I writing to since all I perceive is my perceptions?

I have! I have also had a dream where I was lucid in the dream and then I woke up and told my mom about it. But then I "actually" woke up and realized that I dreamt waking up and telling my mom. Me waking up was a dream!! It makes me wonder if being lucid was also part of the dream of a story I was dreaming up! I have also had a dream where I posted a question on the Actualized.org Forum. So I know that I cannot know for certain whether or not I am dreaming right now. What I mean by an external world is a world or any phenomenon that exists outside of my perceptions, ideas, and consciousness. I know, it doesn't make any sense because anything I think that is beyond my consciousness is an idea held within consciousness. But I truly think that my girlfriend and her house still exist right now even though I am not perceiving it at this moment. I also believe that even when I am not seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, or thinking about something, it can still exist. I have bumped my head before on something behind me. So that item must have existed beyond my perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness. But right now, I am thinking of that incident, so it exists within my consciousness right now. I am going to have to think through this more because I get that I am imagining my Amazon package right now, but at the same time, I still think there are things that happen behind my consciousness of them. My mind is creating a story of the Amazon package right now and will create a story if/when I see the box tomorrow of a book being inside. It just seems irrational to think that a package arrived out of nowhere. The story I concoct is an illusion, but so is the story or lack of story that the package appeared out of nowhere. If that were the case, then what are detectives investigating? They are using their imagination to create a story of how a murder took place, but they can find the killer. How is that possible if there is no external world? I know I can imagine all of this inside of a dream, which is why I still have no position on the matter. I can literally see how both sides have a point. I cannot get past The Dream Doubt, but neither can I get past the doubt that it could be possible that there is more to reality than what I perceive and think about it.

Yes. I thought about the same thing with Skyrim, GTA, COD, and the most obvious, dreaming. Like I stated in my other post Awakening Is A Dream, we cannot fully unravel The Dream Doubt. Of course. Of course this whole scenario is something that is being imagined in my mind. Of course I am imagining that I have an Amazon Package coming tomorrow. Of course I am imagining someone else reading what I am writing right now. However, my point still stands that there are many things that I am unaware of that still seem to exist. I honestly don't know whether there is or is not an external world, but each of us live our lives as if the external world exists. Every time you send a text message or call your friends or chat with others online assumes that there are other people that exist somewhere beyond your current perceptions, somewhere in the "world." But I do get that the only "world" I have ever encountered has been my consciousness, perceptions, and ideas. The issue is that how do I know that my consciousness, perceptions, and ideas are all there is. You can imagine you are in a dream and that is fine. But you might as well apply the same logic and question the assumption that life is nothing but a dream. What if there is something beyond our perceptions? After all, our perceptions from the point of view of being on Earth tell us that the sun appears to go across the sky, and our perceptions from the point of view from outer space tell us that the Earth is round and we go around the sun. People knew of this before they ever had a direct experience of it. So what if, there is something more to consciousness that we cannot perceive? I honestly have no idea. I am literally trying to question everything I assume to be true. I don't want to believe that the external world exists or not, I want to know whether it does. I grant you that I have never known anything beyond my mind/consciousness. Everything I have ever experienced has been within my consciousness, but it makes me wonder how the hell my phone rings out of nowhere? I mean if all of a sudden, you had an unknown package arrive at your doorstep, your mind would suggest that it didn't just appear out of nowhere, it wasn't delivered by a deer nor an ant. Some human delivered it and maybe if you are a deductive detective, you could figure out who delivered the package through inference. Just because we can only infer the external world doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If there was no external world, how is detective work even possible? Detectives use their imagination to solve crimes, but their imagination points to a world that exists beyond it. If it was just my mind constructing reality and that is it, then how is it that murder still happens when I am not there to perceive it or imagine it? All of this has made me question such claims that there is no external world and reality is nothing but what you perceive because on the contrary, it appears otherwise. In addition, you would assume there is something inside of the package as well. Why wrap a package with nothing in it. You don't know what is inside the package, but you can imagine opening the package and there being a book inside of it. How is that book in there? Did it appear there because you opened the package and perceived it or was it because someone wrote the book, sent it to publisher, and then the book was shipped to Amazon facility where it was wrapped and packaged? The latter answer seems more logically the case. Even though logic is based off of our perceptions, I find it that just trusting our perceptions alone leaves out a huge chunk of reality undiscovered. Logic tells me that an external world exists and my perceptions tell me that only what I perceive exists. I am curious to what you have to say to my response here. Thanks for your time and thoughtful insight here.

Does Nothingness Exist?

Don't take what I wrote too personally. No words were put in your mouth. What I stated wasn't directed at you. It was a general statement to not give authority to others and to think for yourself. It is good to listen to people who are high quality so I give you that. Sometimes though, silence is good too. It is all relative. However, I think it is much wiser to spend your time contemplating as opposed to reading or listening to others. For every hour you spend reading or listening to others, you need to be contemplating 1.5 - 2 hours is my rule of mind. I have no idea what the hell awakening is anymore, so I have no idea if you are awake, but I highly doubt it. If you think you are awake, how do you really know? Nobody is immune to self-deception. See my post on Awakening is a Dream for more on that. In terms of open-mindedness, there reaches a point where open-mindedness and closed-mindedness come full circle. You don't want to open your mind up to nonsense. There comes a point where open-mindedness becomes toxic. You eventually have to close your mind off to all nonsense, falsehood, and fantasy and just focus on what is true, but to get to that stage requires high degrees of open-mindedness because distinguishing between truth and falsehood is filled with many tricks and traps. All the best, Rocky

The most important person you should be listening to is yourself. Be careful in giving your authority away to other people. If you do that, you become a slave. A master is one who keeps their own authority and thinks critically to derive their own answers about reality. No amount of listening to other people will awaken you. That also includes myself.

Look out for Trump and DeSantis!

Esse Est Percipi

Science with a small s is what is mainly being critiqued. Big S Science, or what I call Pure Science, is contemplating, meditating, and using psychedelics to investigate consciousness. I believe Pure Science can implicitly understand the nature of consciousness, whereas conventional science is a narrow, biased method that isn't holistic enough to understand. Conventional science cares about utility not truth, whereas Pure Science cares about pure understanding of reality. The people who are laughing and strawmannirg aren't doing Science (with capital S), they are doing pseudoscience.

The barrier for modern, conventional science that dismisses the spiritual and mystical elements of consciousness. Not all forms of science have the same hidden assumptions that modern, materialistic science has. Science with a capital S encompasses spirituality and questions all assumptions such that it seeks pure understanding, which means to be completely without bias. This is the kind of science we want modern, conventional science to evolve to; otherwise, humanity will never progress/develop beyond stage orange. If Consciousness cannot know itself, then complete awakening/omniscience must be an illusion assuming the base layer consciousness cannot know itself. But I guess that is the issue that reality is faced with -- Existence/Consciousness is prior to knowing. This means that knowledge of anything is an illusion because existence precedes knowledge. I think I get you now.

I see a common issue then with Actualized.org and its followers of not being specific in their critique and generalizing their critiques. If you want to criticize how humans today do science, then state that your critique is that conventional, modern, materialistic science cannot do _____ or fails at ______. If we state that science cannot do or fails at _____, then we are stunting what science can do and evolve to. We want modern science to evolve to become as holistic as possible. It seems that critiques about science assume that there is only a certain way science can be done. But that is exactly what we don’t want if we truly want to understand all of reality. We must view things holistically and make it clear about what we are really critiquing. That is just my thoughts anyways.

Then what is Spirituality? Isn’t Spirituality after all, the science of consciousness/awakening? Science means “to know and understand” and there are many forms and ways of doing science. The Scientific Method is only one narrow way to investigate reality and yes, the method is limited. But that method is only one narrow domain within science and does not encompass the whole of science. That is like saying that there is only one way of doing spirituality, using The Spiritual Method of astrology. Anything that isn’t in the paradigm of astrology is bs. But that doesn’t mean spirituality is bs or flawed, but rather it is the method itself and the way it is practiced by the individual or group. Start to see that the duality between spirituality and science doesn’t exist. Doing meditation and psychedelics is a science of consciousness because there is no difference between science and spirituality/philosophy. Science = spirituality! Also consider: If it is impossible for consciousness to understand itself, since there is nothing outside of consciousness to grasp it with, then what is awakening really? Wouldn’t that mean awakening is but a dream within consciousness? If there is nothing but the Dream/Consciousness, then what are you really awakening from and into? Another dream. I talk about this more in my other post called Awakening is a Dream.

The question we overlooked is what it really means to say _______ exists. Everything that you say exists is something that is perceived or imagined within consciousness. A book exists as perceptions. If you couldn’t perceive a book or color, how would that be any different than them not existing?

Thanks for your time. I respect your answers even though I may not entirely see the same way. Wishing you the best!

Contemplation = Observation + Analysis You can have observation without analysis, but you cannot have analysis without observation. Can you have true analysis without thought?

It adds another layer to The Dream Doubt. How can we trust our own thoughts and memories if The Dream Demon swapped them with someone else? What does that say about any awakenings you think you may have?

How so? I'd like to see what he has composed for us. Give it here please! Sounds right to me.

Anyone else gonna answer? Contemplation is more important than psychedelics and meditation!

You are Me. I am The Self. Total knowledge of The Self is impossible. Truth-realization cannot be given. Who is in possession? Who would it be given to? You are not awake! You can't fool me.

Nobody on here (myself included) knows what they are talking about. No one on here (myself included) is awake or Truth-realized. Buddhism is NOT Awakening. Cessation is NOT Awakening. Meditation is NOT Awakening Psychedelics are NOT Awakening. Mystical Experiences are NOT Awakening. Hallucination is NOT Awakening. Reading a spiritual book is NOT Awakening Nothingness is NOT Awakening. Any blissful feeling you have is NOT Awakening Spiritual Enlightenment is NOT Awakening. And finally, Leo or Actualized.org is NOT Awakening. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Awakening IS Truth-Realization Truth-Realization = Complete Understanding of Reality