r0ckyreed

Peter Ralston would disagree. In his book, he holds the idea of an objective reality outside of your current perceptive-experience that he calls Consciousness-Existence. Peter Ralston would say there is no ultimate purpose/meaning since it is all human invention. Ralston made some really good physicalist arguments.

It seems comparable to Skyrim. When you turn your head on Skyrim, new stuff appears. If I turn my back against an enemy, I can no longer see him. But he can still attack me. That enemy has no more visual existence, but the game is still rendering him being me (object permanence).

The colors and visuals disappear but the objects are still there only accessible by my other senses. I can close my eyes and my bed is no longer seen, but I can feel it and lay on it. The same with a lake, ocean, and with other people. I still have a visual concept in my mind of what a bed and lake look like. If another person closed their eyes, went blind, and said visuals cease to exist, I would tell them that they do for you but the visual world still exists for me, and the blind person is missing out on it. The visual world doesn’t cease to exist, their consciousness becomes inaccessible to it. The same analogy can be applied to other senses and even to awakening. The whole world isn’t awake but yet awakening still exists. What is your objection to this?

But if I close my eyes, the world doesn’t just cease to exist. It is still occurring in my mind-consciousness. You would think in a consciousness-dependent reality, that things couldn’t exist if you didn’t perceive them.

This is getting deeper. Thank you. But as I turn my head 180 degrees. I still hold that there is a seen world and an unseen world. I see new stuff, but the stuff I don’t see anymore doesn’t cease to exist. The sun I just saw still exists even though I cannot perceive it now. Some would say this is what is meant by “external world” due to object permanence.

But even if I deconstruct I am human, I will still be in the human form, eating and pooping just like every other human at the end of the day. I will still be faced with the limitations of the human brain and nervous system, as well as language and cognition. I haven’t experienced alien awakening yet obviously. But even if you awaken to alien intelligence, you cannot maintain that state.

But from your videos, you made it sound like all that I see, hear, and feel is all that exists. But it seems like God is more than just those perceptions even though perception is all I have access to.

Good clarification. Yes, and the ego and God are one. The ego is God dreaming itself into a form that is not God such as a human. A human has limited intelligence and so therefore, relative to a human being, what it calls the “external world” is Infinity/God. So from a human perspective, a human isn’t imagining poison. Whether something is poisonous or not is imagined by Infinity not of the form. But at the same time, what is conscious of this text right now is not human, it is God. It is hard to know where the ego ends and God begins. I cannot unimagine gravity, but God can. This I am still trying to understand. My answer so far is that the form cannot control The ALL. God is The ALL and I the human are one particular form of The ALL.

I think what he is saying is that the fine dish requires something outside of your imagination to create it. For instance, the cook/chef exists whether or not you are perceiving/imagining him. You can order a pizza from Pizza Hut, but there are cooks and factories and slaughterhouses involved in that process that you may have no direct awareness of. I am not aware of how any of my cells work. I cannot even imagine how they work, but yet they do. I couldn’t type this sentence right now without my biology and chemistry working together. I cannot confuse the limits of my imagination with the limits of Reality. That chef who cooked my pizza could have put poison in my pizza. When I order my pizza, I do not imagine poison in my pizza but yet that won’t stop me from dying. I think this would be the steel man of the objectivist position. An objectivist would argue that your direct awareness/imagination is limited and reality is beyond it. I am not aware of people behind me, but that doesn’t mean they can’t hit me over the head. The fact they can hit me over the head without me perceiving them shows that there is a world I am aware of and a world I am not.

God has no desires. All desires are generated by the ego/selfishess.

American Flag

Fireworks.

If you bring with her isn’t growing for you, then what are you doing? Be careful with chasing for the greener grass and be careful with settling. Relationships arent for everyone. Maybe you should ponder why it is you want a partner. Is it stability, sex, or what? Don’t expect women to fill up all your needs. It is normal to have friend groups where you can get intellectually deep with and have a partner who you can be emotionally deep with.

I got Peter Ralston’s new book Whereof One Cannot speak. I just started reading it and am noticing one thing that doesn’t seem right. Peter Ralston states in the book that experience is subjective/relative/indirect and isn’t what is true/objective/direct. It seems like he is hinting at a veil of perception or something when he says our experience/perception isn’t truth. But it is. Qualia is Absolute Truth. Experience is what Truth is. I can understand if he was referring to something subjective within our experience, but experience itself is Truth. It cannot be otherwise. He also seems to hint at there being an objective world in which we interact with. I will continue reading and contemplating to see if any new understanding comes about, but it seems like Ralston may be meaning something totally different when he refers to Consciousness and experience/perception. But they are both the same in my eyes - no pun intended. Let me know your thoughts.

Peter Ralston goes into it in his book on why Now only exists. The past and future are conceptual in nature. They are images in the mind occurring in the Now. Time is nothing more than the conceptualization of change occurring Now. Now is all that exists.

That isn’t about Existential Time. It is about investments. I’m talking about answering the question: What Is Time? Of course, I don’t need Leo to make a video. I can contemplate it myself, and I have already come to some insights on the matter from my contemplations. I just see it is a core missing part. When you contemplate what is time? You are run into the question of what is Eternity.

So for instance, Peter Ralston discussed time in his book. He went into depth on it. But basically he says Absolute Existence and Now are identical and that Now is all there is. Any truth is always about Now/Existence. Now is not an infinite string of moments but is One Eternal Moment imagining past and future. He says that Now is eternal and change is occurring in the Now but our minds conceptualize time out of it to make sense of reality. I just notice that there is no specific video or teaching about time from Leo Gura. He has one on impermanence but not on time.

It’s not wrong per se. God refers to The Infinite and that was what Ralston was pointing to. He just avoids that word.

I finished reading the book. It was overall really good. His writings and communication are deep and direct. Some things though that he gets wrong is he doesn’t advocate calling Existence God, he doesn’t address why Existence should be called Consciousness. And he seemed to use physicalist arguments to argue for the non-existence of the ego. In addition, he did not go deep into Absolute Beauty/Love. But I loved his writings on time. I think contemplations on time are what is missing from actualized.org. I really enjoyed the book and would recommend it. So many great exercises. In some ways, his communications on Existence make more sense than actualized.org. Peter Ralston still holds the idea of an external world and other minds. But he just calls it Consciousness instead of “external world”.

I miss the old font

I’m almost done with the book. I will post my full critique here when I’m finished. He is starting to break the matrix near the end of the book

Yeah. He keeps going deeper into Physicalist explanations. Nothing wrong with it per se. It is a different perspective.

He explicitly states consciousness is caused by brain states. That what you are is a body and mind doesn’t exist. Idealism would say the opposite.

Peter Ralston is a physicalist. I’m 3/4 done with the book, and he is making physicalistic arguments. He basically says consciousness is a byproduct of the body/brain. Anybody else get this vibe?

Soaking.