r0ckyreed

But we live life as if that isn’t just a story because there are real survival costs at stake if you just leave your drink at a bar. We act as if the external world exists. I mean if what you are saying is true, then there is no thief. But how do you explain that I can find the thief and the wallet if I follow the evidence and track him down? There would be no use in having a detective because a body on the floor wasn’t murdered by anyone. But we can find the killer. What if there was video footage of the thief and killer and you were wrong in claiming that nobody stole or killed? See how the killer and thief are mind independent but the knowledge via video footage is mind dependent? That should disprove this.

I hear you. But it’s just not parsimonious and logically sound. I see you even have an assumption that sperm donors exist too. Everything has an infinite chain of causation. We can look at a child or even a leaf and trace it back infinitely and go infinitely forward.

@Leo Gura How do you explain that reality appears to be mind-independent. A lot of objections I hear from people is that there are plenty of things we aren’t aware of but yet still exist. For instance, if I see my car window broken and find my wallet gone, then I’m gonna infer that someone broke into my car. This seems like a more parsimonious explanation. How do you explain that there are things that happen outside of our experience if Consciousness is Absolute and there is no external world? How could my car be broken into if I did not perceive the thief? It seems like the thief is mind independent. This is what I mean by mind independent reality. The thief still exists even if I don’t perceive him.

I am gonna keep contemplating this and then will get back to you. Some empiricist would disagree and assert that experience = knowledge. You couldn’t know color without experiencing color. But knowledge is much more conceptual because you can have experience without knowledge, but you cannot have knowledge without experience.

If I go to my car and my window and broken and my wallet gone, I’m gonna assume someone broke into my car and took my wallet when I wasn’t aware of it. When you go to the bar, are you really gonna leave your drink on the table to use the bathroom? The drugs someone puts in your drink is gonna be independent of your awareness of it.

Good points. I will contemplate them more before I respond. I don’t know how anything is possible let alone understanding it.

I am not sure I agree. I agree that knowledge is entirely mind dependent, but human trafficking is happening right now independent of my mind. If I died right now, human trafficking would still be happening as it was before I was born. Things can still exist even if I am unaware of it. You think me saying human trafficking doesn’t exist because I have never witnessed it is a plausible claim? I could use your argument against you and say that human trafficking doesn’t exist because I am not witnessing it right now. We meet this interesting contradiction because when we say something exists, we also seem to imply that we can become aware of it. So when we say that police brutality and racism exists, it implies that it is in the field of consciousness if we bother to look. Of course, people can deny racism exists, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t. Of course, we can only know racism and trafficking exist through our own consciousness because like I said knowledge is mind dependent but trafficking is mind independent. Edit: Putting it a better way, this dream if you wanna call it that, requires that to have children is to have sex. This seems like a pretty consistent rule. That means for every child you see, you can infer there was fucking behind the scenes. Of course, have I ever witnessed the kids parents having sex? No. But this seems like a more parsimonious explanation than a child appearing out of thin air.

Consciousness can have some relative knowledge. For instance, we have knowledge of survival, how to make houses, and how to direct electricity. I probably was wrong in saying that consciousness is permanent. I do not know that for a fact.

Consciousness is permanent but states aren’t. Being sober, depressed, high, happy, paranoid, and drunk are states. But they are temporary.

What I’m saying is that those methods will not guarantee you truth. Some of those methods can put you further into delusion depending on how they are used. You might say, well, then you weren’t really doing psychedelics, meditation, or contemplation “properly”. But what is properly? How do you know what properly is? It begs the question and assumes you already know what’s true.

What is an insight but a state of consciousness? People can think they have an insight but can be wrong. There are certain states of consciousness that even though they are always occurring inside of Absolute Truth, they are still wrong, which means they lack understanding about reality. A conspiracy theory is a state of consciousness and so is having an insight into oneness. Realization, insight, knowledge, understanding are states of consciousness.

The only method I have found that somewhat gets me results is contemplation. But even that isn’t a definitive method because the mind is very foolish. But overtime as I continue to contemplate, it seems like I get the kinks worked out. Contemplation for sure is a more reliable method than faith, belief, and dogma. No method is going to be perfect. Knowledge is relative.

But isn’t awakening an insight into the nature of being/reality? An insight can be false. The only thing I can think of that is beyond knowledge, which you already pointed out is truth/existence/reality. There cannot be knowledge or insight without a reality to have knowledge/insight about. How is understanding possible? It seems like there is no definitive method, which means there may not be any definitive knowledge/understanding/insight. I agree that the only thing I can know for certain is that consciousness exists, but that is all I know. That’s all I can really say exists. But I also cannot say that consciousness is all that exists because I cannot get outside my own consciousness to know that. It’s an impossible problem. Yet, it seems like my whole sense of reality tells me there is more to reality than my consciousness. For instance, the news tells me that there are things happening “in the world” that I wasn’t conscious of.

I feel like I am finally grasping what epistemological solipsism and anarchism are. There is no ground or basis to base knowledge off of. Knowledge has always been about the mind. It’s scary because I have always based it off of science and rationality and now to realize how inconsistent and unstable they are in being by definitive, I am left with epistemological anarchism/solipsism.

We can only know anything through our awareness. But we can’t forget that appearances can be deceiving. What if there is an objective reality but I can never know it and access it. For instance, there are colors right now that I do not have access to. There are also millions of planets that I have never set foot on that exist without my awareness of them. Knowledge is mind-dependent but that doesn’t mean there isn’t such a thing as mind-independent.

Right. But there is an assumption that our experience is direct. Your “direct” experience is filtered through the lenses of survival. Experience is not as direct as you think. Our course experience is all that we have, but that doesn’t mean it has total access to reality and is unbiased. There are plenty of things I don’t experience right now but yet are true. Everything is filtered through the human nervous system, so how can objective reality be known if everything we have access to is experienced subjectively? Definitive knowledge seems impossible, but my intuition tells me that definitive knowledge possible. It’s hard to know what to listen to and whether my rationality, intuition, etc. are correct.

So then what the hell is awakening?

But even your direct experience can deceive you. Even your doubting and skepticism can be deceptive. I don't think anyone here grasps what I am trying to communicate. How can you know anything definitively, especially given that there is no reliable method for discerning truth from falsehood? It seems like there is absolutely no ground for definitive knowledge.

Sure. But nothing beats the relationship with Self. I don’t want to chase. I want to attract.

@manuel bon Yep. Those are the limits of Buddhism. What Buddhism gets right though is not coming from a place of attachment and neediness. We need to be mindful of our biological cravings and be aware that we don’t need sex and relationships to find our fulfillment but rather relationships are about us sharing our fulfillment each other.

Amen.

What leads you to that conclusion?

What could help you with that is seeing how you yourself behave and believe false nonsense just like the religious fools at some level. That empathy can create humility. Just think there’s someone above you ridiculing you in the same way you ridicule the religious fools.

ChatGPT and Claude are amazing. They are both too good to not have both. I like them for different reasons. I find that each model performs differently depending on the question. For some questions, I’ll use ChatGPT and others Claude. I tend to default to ChatGPT for anything fact wise since it’s connected to the internet. If Claude could remember my previous conversations, then it would be my default.

You aren’t gonna change anyone who doesn’t want it. Part of being stage Turquoise is letting go of the desire to control or change others. That is a distraction.