snowyowl

@VeganAwake agreed, except from the seeker's pov we don't realise at first that to save ourselves is to lose ourselves, it's kinda an impossible thing to understand and accept, but also we (as seekers) can't stop seeking either

So in Buddhist language, samsara is the illusory experience of a separate self, which is contained within the wholeness of nirvana. But nirvana is veiled from this illusory pov, and we keep seeking it. But the problem is, the veil is the very separateness which creates the seeking self. Therefore this type of life is, suffering, dukkha. We're damned if we do and damned if we don't. Or blessed! There's no self to be reincarnated, rather it's karma which incarnates, ie the conditions which perpetuate the illusion of separateness.

Wanting children is life seeking life, love seeking love, at least in human form. Since I became a dad I've also become much more part of the community; it takes a village to raise a child. It's like the regular way to experience connection and dissolve the individual ego into something larger. Fall in love and become a couple. Have kids and become a family, be part of the community, see myself as just one stage of the ongoing cycle of the generations. Kinda makes me feel complete to know I can hand over to the next generation, I don't need to cling on when this work's done. There's other perfectly valid lifestyle choices too, other ways to be connected to the web of life, but family is a spiritual practice in itself.

If you're a realist the answer is yes, the tree exists objectively and makes vibrations in the air (sound can mean both air vibrations & the heard qualia in the mind). If you're an idealist, then the answer is 'mu', because without any consciousness to observe it, the tree doesn't exist anyway so there is no forest or air at all. Hang on a minute, what if the whole material universe is consciousness (two sides of the same coin), then the tree could ask the same question of you - do humans exist if I'm not there to sense them - don't be speciesist

Imo there's quite a lot overlap between pursuing your career and spiritual work, more loosely labelled personal development if seen as connected. Healing past traumas, training your concentration and mindfulness, physical and psychological health, relaxation and letting-go, facing up to your fears. Just some examples of practices which can benefit us both professionally and spiritually. So go find some practices which help you feel good and you'll develop in a rounded way.

Amen to that (so be it) Like God's will be done, not my will?

Could be there's a genetic component to it, after all we're descended from a long family tree of organisms (including our non-human predecessors) which were the ones who survived the natural selection process and bred. If you don't have a hard baked survival instinct you don't pass on your attitude of non survival. Maybe that's why it takes a lot of work to dig beneath the survival instinct, ie the ego, to see what's beyond it.

@roopepa no I noticed the same thing too, there's a gap between Saturday morning about 1.45 and this morning (Tuesday). Not sure if it's on other subforums too. Hey my signature has reverted to my old one too, I changed it at the weekend!

There's some acting out of death in the ancient mystery religions, as far as I've discovered from some reading and TV documentaries. There's underground tunnels you can still visit where the person undergoing initiation travels to the underworld, crosses an underground river Styx and remains in the dark meditating for 3 days, hopefully have an awakening (maybe with the aid of psychedelics?), and re-emerge into the light in a symbolic rebirth. I vaguely recall that Freemasons have a similar but less elaborate symbolic death ritual. I read a book (I forgot the title but could look it up if you're interested) with a theory that when Jesus's family fled Herod into Egypt, where there was a substantial Jewish community at the time, he got into mystery religion, and his death & resurrection later on was a kind of Jewish version of it.

Thanks, interesting explanation. I'd agree with the main point that this isn't reducible. Mind isn't reducible to matter, and matter isn't reducible to mind. Because neither really exist, they're the dualistic way of describing Being or Suchness.

@RMQualtrough I think I do see what you mean, inanimate matter and subjective awareness are converted into each other - "then" in your last post. I don't make that distinction, I don't have the "then", but at the same time, I'm only aware of my own awareness, no-one else's. In our biology lab at school we had a real human brain preserved in formaldehyde, it just looked like a lump of grey tissue as you'd expect, not a magical crystal ball of awareness. But to the person whose brain it was, it was their world of awareness. So who am I to say that light or chemicals aren't also aware in some form?

Helping people often needs much more wisdom than we realise. Helping a cruel person to be less cruel for instance is possible, but you need to be highly developed to succeed. Also look at all the attempts to 'help' the Middle East and Africa which failed because good intentions mean nothing without streetwise common sense and wisdom. So we need to work on ourselves too. Why bother? Well, what type of world do you want to live in, and for your children and grandchildren? And be honest, how many people have helped you get where you are today?

ok I take your point, but looking at a bunch of grey matter in someone else's brain - not your own please - isn't the same as looking at a blue wavelength of light. Therefore there's a different chemical reaction happening in your grey cells. That difference is the subjective difference between blue paint and grey brain matter.

@RMQualtrough I think we're at cross purposes here. You seem to be saying (please correct me if I'm wrong) that subjective awareness of blueness is different from the objective wavelength of blue light in the physical world, so you keep asking me, what is it? . I'm saying blueness is x nanometres of EM light (sorry I forget the exact number), processed by the eyes and brain neurons into a chemical reaction. That chemical reaction is sensitive to itself, aware of itself, and another chemical reaction called 'thinking', calls it 'blue'. Any good?

Two different inputs could lead to the same output couldn't they? Like when you load a file into a computer program with new fonts not recognised by the program, it simply displays them with the existing, 'normal' font. As far as I know, our eyes are only sensitive to the visible part of the EM spectrum, any wavelengths outside it are invisible, like you can't see radio waves or X rays. However, other materials can, like metal aerials or photographic film. The whacky part for me is that those are also awareness, although of a different order to 'my' brain. More conventional people I know talk about consciousness as an 'emergent property' of the particular structure of brains, however I've yet to read a good scientific explanation of emergent properties, it sounds like more magic to me

@RMQualtrough This is my (probably simplistic) understanding. Our retinas in our eyes have two different types of cells, rods and cones. Rods are sensitive to black & white, cones can distinguish colours. Different animals see in different ways, many are colourblind, eg bulls so it's a myth about waving a red rag to a bull. Some insects can see ultraviolet. This is all explainable from the materialist lens. The problem is, we don't really believe matter is itself conscious, so there seems to be a "gap" between the physical processes and the conscious awareness of them. But I don't see a gap, perhaps I'm talking myself into panpsychism here

If mind & matter are one (neutral monism being my preferred term for this), then the difference between redness & blueness in our awareness is identical with the different electro-chemical reactions occurring within the brain. Red & blue correspond to different frequencies of light, which are translated into different signals by the eyes. I can't see a hard problem here, but maybe there's a hole in my logic somewhere

I'd like some more transparency around the mod-making process. I get that it's Leo's decision, and I also read somewhere that the mods have their own private forum. Do members apply somehow, or are they tapped on the shoulder one day and asked if they want to be a mod? I'm asking because I prefer openness around processes, not because I want to be a mod (I don't have time for one thing). Sorry if I've missed this in the forum info & guidance somewhere.

From the lens of spiral dynamics, kids go through the stages starting at beige as babies. Teasing and bullying sounds to me like the child has reached stage red, so it's about creating a pecking order, one child trying to raise their status in the group by putting other children down. It happens everywhere, and needs mature adults of higher stages to deal with it constructively. With good parenting and teaching however, the children should grow into community-minded stage blue.

I think self-inquiry can help too, or simple mindfulness. When resistance arises, where does it come from? From the ego-mind pov, it feels like I am identified with the resistance, and there's a separation from what is resisted. It's bound up with the belief in free will. But from the pov of non-self, the resistance is just another phenomenon arising spontaneously, I'm no more in control of it than my efforts to stop resisting (resisting the resistance lol). From this mystical meta-level, the distinction between resistance and resisted falls away, and you've arrived at zero resistance, emptiness.

Quaker style prayer / worship chimes best for me. Not just talking at God, but spending most of the time emptying myself out and listening. Waiting on God, waiting for the Holy Spirit to come and fill me up, merge with me. Remember we have two eyes, two ears but only one mouth lol <3

The humanly constructed rules of science dictate that you have to repeat experiments multiple times and get consistent results before the hypothesis is proved and becomes a theory. So, no surprise that science is stable? Remember when you did experiments at school, eg say you're measuring the speed of light. Most of the measurements fit nicely into the expected value, but there's always a few outliers. Do those outliers mean the speed of light isn't constant? No, science rejects them as errors and ignores them. But is that rejection itself scientific? Science takes consistency as a dogma and uses that to "prove" the nature of reality based on a majority of the experimental data.

This is a subject that's sometimes used by creationists as evidence of the traditional creator God: the laws and constants of Physics appear fine-tuned for the emergence of biological life. It also reminds me of the Anthropic principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle which states that the universe appears the way it is, because we are here to observe it. Other universes may exist with different rules of nature, but they'd be incompatible with our type of life, so we can't see it. I find it all a bit mind-bending to try and understand it to be honest, but it kinda makes sense that our consciousness affects what the world looks like, and how we create our science.

" i believe i am located in the head" in conventional psychology and brain science, there's something called Executive Function which is sort of the control centre of the brain, associated with the pre-frontal cortex at the top front of the brain (behind your eyes). Could be this is what feels like 'me' although it's just another brain function. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_cortex The prefrontal cortex is a modern development in human evolution; compared with other areas which we share with other species like the brain stem ('reptilian brain') that's responsible for more automatic functions like fight-flight-freeze mechanism, that feels like is happening to us, rather than by us.

I'd say not because if there's nothing to observe, then there's no need for an observer. In Buddhist language, it's a mutually arising pair. But in any case, they only exist as thought in the mind, so I guess if you want to think of reality as pure observer that's your freedom. It's a dualistic pair too, and one of my first awakenings was when the observer-observed distinction collapsed into a unified field of awareness or being. But my recent contemplation of duality insists there must be a third element - the relationship between the two. The observer (or subject) needs to be connected to the observed object to be able to see it. So I'm saying there's no such thing as a duality, it's actually a triality of three: observer, observed and relationship between. For example, when I look at a tree, there needs to be photons of light coming in from the sun, bouncing off the tree, entering my eyes, going into my brain neurons before being mysteriously converted into "seeing". But I'm actually seeing the sun, filtered through the atmosphere, and deflected off the tree, rather than the tree itself. Therefore, that connection between "me" and "the tree" is in fact the whole universe. Relationship implies the whole, it's the healing process to mend the apparent separation. When we create a distinction like this, we're also creating the connections between the parts, because existence can't really be split asunder.