snowyowl

@mandyjw "Touch a surface nearby with your hand and close your eyes. Is there two sensations, my hand and the surface? Or is direct experience of touching indistinguishable hand from object unless you think about it? " This is a great practical exercise, thanks! Makes a refreshing change from our usual statements of, this is the truth, obviously - including me of course With my eyes closed, like when I’m meditating for example, there is no skin or surface until I think about it, just the suchness of pure experience. 'Consciousness' vs 'body' looks like a made-up problem.

Also this appears to be the same post you made an hour earlier called "Enlightenment experience". Are you having a hard time right now? Being homeless must be rough, take care man.

"consciousness imagines everything" this implies consciousness imagines itself too, that's a real bootstrap! "everything is also made out of consciousness," So even consciousness is made of consciousness; there's nothing else to contrast and give relative meaning to the word. It's literally meaningless needs to be experienced, not understood. 'Everything' is what turns this into such a transcendent question. The self-reference paradox pops us out of duality of consciousness vs things, imagination vs reality.

The starting point is appearance. Appearance exists, perhaps we can agree on that? 'Real' means there is something objective, concrete, behind and causing the appearance. That sounds like a deduction, not directly known. 'Illusion' means the appearance is misinterpreted by thoughts, to create a wrong deduction, but it still relies on a layer of thought on top of the actual appearance. The thoughts about the appearance are the illusion, not the appearance itself.

Spectrum of awareness, a range of 3 techniques depending on where my mind's at. I learned it in Diana Watson's book 'The little book of being'. Focused awareness (concentration eg mindfulness of breathing, body scan etc). Choiceless awareness (mindfulness of the most prominent sensation). Natural awareness (resting in being, resting in awareness).

@Wilhelm44 that's a good koan too, as Alan Watts pointed out. How can you command love? Who is commanding who? My answer: there is only love, there is only Christ consciousness, yet it veils itself from itself.

it's an infinite fractal of holons within holons ...

There's the appearance of trees but no outside or inside

@ArcticMasai welcome to the forum, although I'm not a footie fan I can see the huge devotion it has and benefit to young people. It seems that the stage orange corporates will exploit people's loyalty and emotional attachments - just look what happens if you stay with the same utility supplier for too long! I'd suggest voting with your feet and supporting a different team instead but no doubt that's totally misunderstanding how sports fans feel

"God observing itself" is the strange loop, resolved when the distinctions collapse. Eg between 'God' and 'observing', or this and that 'domain'.

I don't like needles either, but accept them for the greater good. As a blood donor I give nearly a pint of blood every few months so the covid jab was no big deal. We can be biased for humans against the virus, thank you God

@LastThursday "They poke around, find it affects perception and conclude that the brain produces perception." Not produces, but if they realised the brain is perception they'd get it because there's no duality between physical and conscious. It's only two different thoughts. When I open my eyes, I'm directly perceiving the inside of my brain, only indirectly referencing the outside world.

Nice post, have you done the Mu Koan with a teacher? I never got as far as studying Koans (tho I did practice with a Rinzai teacher for a while). With drawing the circle, I can see how you need to do it unselfconsciously, spontaneously, it looks like a meditation in itself.

There's been some earlier discussion about TM: https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/57340-transcendental-meditation/ https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/60221-what-is-transcendental-meditation/ I found TM to be a perfectly good mantra meditation technique, although no better or worse than other types. For the price you apparently get checks for life with a teacher, but my main reservation is that you have to pay a large amount upfront before you've tried it. I'd feel more inclined to recommend TM if it was on a monthly subscription which you could cancel when you wanted. On the other hand there are online instructions to learn, just do a search for something like 'how to practice TM' or 'list of TM mantras'. The mantras aren't customised btw, they're allocated by your age (at least they were when I learned it, mine was 'aing'). The other limitation is that, as far as I can see, the TM people only teach the one technique (their Siddhi programme is something different). If that's what you want, then fine, but there's plenty of other teachers who have a broader range of techniques which can be tweaked to suit your needs as you go through your spiritual path.

Hi @Simhall it seems reincarnation is true after all No hard feelings, I understand some folks here are going through an unstable time. Best wishes whatever you decide I really hope it works out well for you.

Is a 13 yo child allowed to be out alone in the US? They aren't in my country. If we're looking at the broader context, where were his parents/carers? There's huge risks already with unaccompanied kids, even before there's a handgun added to the problem. We need good parenting as well as good policing.

''God permeates the constructed order but it is not the constructed order''. Sounds to me like panentheism (God in reality) which is a pretty standard theology for dualists who want to avoid the unity of pantheism (God is reality).

Most folks want to be a bit richer than we are now, and higher up the social pyramid, so that competition fuels the money system (you can more easily hoard money than most other resources). Also, cheap prices for buyers means low income for sellers, it's a duality of the transaction which creates the current belief that a small but positive inflation is desirable. Sellers want high prices but buyers want low, it's supply and demand. We could have a moneyless system in a hardline communist state where everyone is given a ration book by the govt and selling privately for cash is criminalised. But I'm not seriously suggesting it, maybe in an emergency situation if the regular economy breaks down.

This is a massive tragedy, I'm so sad to hear about it. In a society awash with guns, the police need to be armed too, otherwise they can't do their job, so the answer is to de-escalate the arms race for everyone. It's the same problem with knives, young people in some areas feel they need to carry one for 'protection', and ofc that makes it more likely they'll be involved in a fight. Fewer weapons on the streets means less fear and we're less inclined to 'carry'. It's our choice: vicious circle or virtuous circle, but it's all relative don't expect perfection.

Another point about the so-called New Age movement is how much stage orange it has integrated, compared to mainstream religions. I've been to a few New Age fairs, which were like market places with small traders all selling a product as a business. It's commercialised spirituality, nothing wrong with that in principle, but there's something missing of the stage blue community which will hopefully re-emerge when there's more stage green emerging. How does the diversity of individualised therapists deal with poor people who cannot afford the rather high prices, for example.

My observation is that the New Age movement is mostly defined by people on the outside, and many of those are critical: so the whole concept is a straw man. I mean, there's a lot of folks who use crystals or do Reiki etc without considering themselves to belong to the New Age. Much of the narrative is self-serving, referencing those woolly-minded people over there, vs me with my slick beliefs over here. Originally, before this straw manning, the New Age (Age of Aquarius) was a theory based on the precession of the equinoxes, which is based to some extent on sound science. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Aquarius However it then brings in astrological ideas about cosmic energies affecting us here on Earth, with the age of Pisces (effectively Christianity for westerners), replaced by Aquarius at some point: more fluid, watery. At some point around the 1980s this became the slightly derogatory umbrella term in use up till now. My hope is that it will change in future and become a more positive term for a smaller, more succinct but real movement.

Feel for you man, I reckon you need hugs more than words, here's one virtually Forget about the Ox, just try surrendering to your breath instead, and relax. Then try going through your original post, replacing 'kill' and 'die' with 'love'. How does that feel?

But didn't Russia already invade Ukraine a few years ago when they occupied the Crimea? Not to mention support for pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine. If that's all forgiven and forgotten by the West then I'm not surprised that Russia wants to keep pushing Westward until all Ukraine becomes a puppet for them. If the West and NATO don't draw a line somewhere, their enemies like Russia and China will continue pushing. And probably vice-versa to be fair, although as a disclaimer my preference is for the West to have the upper hand. Russia has for centuries been worried about its long borders which are expensive to defend, and constantly campaigning to have a friendly buffer zone around them.

@sat2493 "I was speaking with a friend today about history", "What do you think can be labeled from this collective consciousness reaction I just described? " Have you seen this in a broader context or just with your friend? You could be extrapolating maybe? I don't see it much in my area, although there is some discussion about "politically correct" people having an asymmetric critique of events eg on a racial basis. But with Hitler and the Nazis, it's only a tiny minority in denial about the holocaust, for example.

I'm no expert in French but I looked it up and got Dodo's translation 'I am everywhere'. Also it was the name of an old right wing French newspaper from 1930-1944. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_suis_partout Edit: I found this explanation of the modern use in Portugal, it's an anti-masonic movement apparently. The English translation is available on the drop-down menu at the top. https://www.freemason.pt/je-suis-partout-um-sticker-antimaconico