StephenK

I think Communism appeals to the ideal of the collective while Capitalism appeals to the ideal of the individual. A functional family, even in a capitalist system practices the ideal of the collective, such as a father willingly looking after his children and wife, despite the financial and emotional cost associated with doing so. Here' the father identifies 'self' as 'family' in an abstract sense. Communism however tries to take the ideal of the collective and completely remove the ideal of the individual, and this is where the violence emerges in Communist regimes. If humans were naturally wired to view the collective as 'self', then Communism probably would work. But this is not our innate nature. We as humans manifest the ideals of both collectivism and individualism, and the denial of either will lead to the total collapse of the system.

@Serotoninluv I'm not making any existential claims about reality here, nor am I interested in doing so and getting lost in words. I'm just stating what I directly perceive as a result of meditation.

I've had a few insights while doing noting meditation over the last few days. First, when objects are seen, they are also felt. For instance, when I reach out to grab an apple 1 meter in front of me, there is an anticipatory sense of what the object feels like even before I touch it. What's weird is that this sense of what it feels like is 'at the apple', not at my hand. So in a weird sense, the the entire visual field is imbued with tactile 'anticipatory sensations'. It also seems like thoughts arrive in three distinct stages: the desire to think a thought; the thought itself (sight, sound, feeling etc); and the mental impression of the thought (pleasant/unpleasant). These three experiences can play out in a matter of milliseconds. I've also noticed a rapidity to awareness itself: it seems like 10 to 20 distinct sensations arrive within awareness every second. Thoughts can be broken down into individual pieces that follow one after another in rapid succession. Awareness is not so much 'smooth' than it is 'high-speed'. Opinions? Am I misperceiving things? Any weird experiences/insights you've had while meditating?

@Serotoninluv That ain't my direct experience though. Some of my insights have permanently altered my perception of reality. Other insights, as you said, end up on the trash-heap. @abrakamowse Ego is like the god damn Borg

@abrakamowse Yes, insights feel as if they're changing the very operating system of your mind. It feels very sudden and pronounced. After that, thought arrives and tries to encapsulate what happened. Then comes the resistance to the insight, which can be a rather unpleasant.

@abrakamowse Yes, that's what I experience as well. A cool thing to do is ask: "What is my next thought going to be?" You'll find that a thought will just arrive out of nowhere, but as soon as it is seen, another thought arrives that says, "I thought that thought". A thought claiming it thought a thought that it didn't itself think... @Rilles Yeah, that's trippy.

Arguments from Assumed Spiritual Authority Because of the wide spectrum of views on this forum, there seems to be a form of one-upmanship going on between members to validate their world-views. I've noticed that one may ask a question and get two completely different responses from two people, yet both people that gave an answer proceed to say that the question is silly. More times than not, these discussion devolve into statements such as "you'll only know from direct experience. You're just not there yet. But believe me, I'm right". Members play this card against each other constantly and everything then just devolves into some form of an appeal to spiritual authority. To me, it seems that the most authentic people on this forum do not dictate what is, but just suggest practices, or posit a question that can be dwelled on. Ultimately this spiritual journey is only validated through personal experience, and so amount of self-assumed spiritual authority by others means anything for your subjective experience. Ultimately, you can't know who is correct on this forum until you validate insights for yourself. For all you know, everyone here is completely missing the ball... or not... These are the rules of the game it seems.

The transcendental has no shape, no form, no agency, no morality, no meaning, and is unitary and non-dual. It is only through awareness that qualities manifest as finite perspectives. It is in seeing the contradictions between the finite perspectives and absolute that the bondage to said perspectives is dropped. This shifting in and out of different perspectives leads to an awareness of what lies beneath the perspectives. This mind cannot know the absolute. And this is alright; it always was alright. To have a perspective is to create falsehood. This mind can only be born from a perspective – it has no other option. I now see this. And seeing this, how can I judge? How can I hate? How can I authentically feel anything other than acceptance for what is? Do I judge a baby for being born? Do I judge the tree for not being a bird? I can't judge mind for being mind. Yet, as time goes by, my perspectives will change, this body will grow old, falsehoods will be spoken as they must, happiness will wax and wane, but the transcendental nature of acceptance will be ever present between every shift in perspective. It is in the quiet space between moments that the nature of acceptance shines through. It is in seeing impermanence that maya becomes apparent, and it is in seeing impermanence that maya is loved for what it is, in all it's manifestations. Perspective Phasing and Embodying the Meta-Perspective When a perspective is let go of, there is a natural inclination within the mind to simply lock into another perspective or another 'self' identification. One might go from 'I am the body' to 'I am the mind' to 'I am my family' to 'I am my nation' to 'I am my race', to 'I am this moral ideal', 'I am this idea' etc. This often leads to a situation where we drop perspective X, only to replace it with perspective Y and fall back into bondage. The Meta-Perspectives is that which is present in all sub-perspectives. The Meta-Perspective notes that all sub-perspectives are falsehood. The self and other duality is fully dropped.

What arises as a question is: “What is causing this perceptual-lock to take place?” First, there is a constant use of pronouns, such as I, Me, Mine, Yours, Ours, Theirs. This leads to a view of doership and ownership of reality. Language is foundational to how we cognize the world, and so dropping pronouns from the internal narrative should loosen the grip of self/other dichotomy. Instead of saying “I am X”, acknowledge reality and realize that, “X is occurring.” To presuppose the notion of 'I' is to create the illusion of duality, as it then implies 'other'. Second, one needs to cognize what the world looks like absent the notions of self and agency. Absent the notions of self and agency, as reality really is, positing causal relationships such as “A caused B” are seen to be illusory, as A could have never been without B and C and D. That is, in an interdependent universe, causal agents don't exist. Third, one must acknowledge that objects do not exist because of the causal relationships between everything. Objects are merely hyper-processed abstractions that the brain uses to navigate reality. For example, we think of a chair as a 'real' thing. However, without the ground, we would not be able to sit on a chair; without gravity, sitting would make no sense, and in general, without the laws of physics, the chair wouldn't be able to exist. Additionally, to call it a 'chair' is to take a utilitarian view of reality, which is completely illusory. To a dog, a chair is not a chair, as the dog can not sit on it! To a termite, a chair is food. So this thing we call 'chair' is only so as we have defined it to be so! So, what really is this thing we look at called 'chair'? Absent the inference of a utilitarian view, it is simply color and form! As such, we realize that what we call a 'chair' is actually an abstraction of the universe itself. Maya is infinite and in every perspective we can take!

This thread...

The presupposition of an external universe can not be taken to be ultimately true, and hence the presupposition of causality can not be taken to be true. We simply do not know that the universe did not come into being 10 seconds ago, and that all self-referential narratives from before are simply an illusion. All the axioms underlying logic (that we use to determine causal relationships between thoughts) are also simply assumed to be true. Since this is the case, nothing can be truly known. Any talk of what is/isn't is falling prey to the axioms of logic and materialism. Since these axioms are assumed to be true, how can any claims about reality (such as the Absolute or Relative) be taken seriously if all of them use these axioms to validate their nature? That is, give me an answer without falling prey to one of these axioms. It seems that the only thing that is true is awareness itself – anything we infer beyond that is simply conjecture.

@Joseph Maynor That's the thing, all my knowledge is starting to look like illusion. Knowledge appears to be just more thought (which is just made of feelings, sounds, sights, etc). Every perspective I take seems to eat itself logically. The desire to have a perspective is falling away. All that is left is the immediacy of consciousness in this present moment.

@Outer Papa, that's just color and form -- I don't see a thing called 'tree'.

To infer any meaning from the words you wrote, you assumed the logic underlying the syntax of the English language. I don't see how one can make authentic claims about the relationships between experiences without assuming some set of rules which govern those claims. When I drop all assumptions about what is, all I see is experience -- nothing else. Anything beyond this seems to be an assumption.

@vanish Holy sh*t! Agent Smith was the good guy all along telling NEO to let go of his ego!

@abrakamowse You telling me if this cute little guy told you "Death or Taxes", you'd have a problem with it?

Nationalism or Globalism, someone is coming to your door and threatening you with prison time if you don't pay your taxes. I think I'd like Globalism if it was run by a Artificial Intelligence (no humans in charge!).

@MarkusSweden I'm a South African white male. Currently sitting behind barbed wire and a electric fence in my home. Ask me anything.

@MM1988 Interesting. All these thought experiments seem to point to the idea that any particular configuration of matter does not give rise to consciousness, but that the perceived set of rules governing this universe are merely a way for consciousness to explain itself (that is, consciousness made the universe we perceive-- not the other way round).

@MM1988 I created a thought experiment years ago along similar lines to the one you posted. It goes like this: Suppose you're going into a hospital to participate in a test for a brand new anesthetic entering the market. You walk into the operating theater and lie down on the operating table. An anesthetist walks over to you and administers the general anesthetic. You are told to count to ten, but by the time you get to four, your awareness begins to fade away. You're now unconscious. The anesthetic appears to work. Unbeknownst to you, a mad surgeon from the future (with futuristic technology) begins to cut open your skull. He has conceptually divided your brain into 1000 different sections. He removes section 364 only, which happens to be a section of your brain in the hippocampus. Several memories are stored in this region of your brain. But fear not! Inside a box labeled B, he has an exact copy of the removed section 364 of your brain, which he then inserts into the area he cut out and connects everything together with his high-tech instruments. You wake up, and since the functionality of the inserted brain region 364 is the same as the removed section, your memories function as expected, not being aware that anything has changed. However, the mad surgeon makes you undergo anesthesia again. This time he removes region 651, replaces it with a copy and wakes you up. You look around and everything seems fine. He then puts you back to sleep, this time removing brain region 123. He repeats this process of waking you up and putting you under 1000 times, until each brain region has been replaced. After the final surgery, you have a completely new brain. In fact, you wake up and see your entire brain lying there in front of you. So, how is consciousness in your brain?

Agreed. When it comes to spirituality, nature, economics, data transfer, fluids, societies etc, there is a constant drive to follow the path of least resistance -- that is, movements towards systems of greater, unimpeded flow. It's really quite beautiful.

I think that's a rather narrow way of viewing society. When one looks at water for instance, the higher order property of 'fluidity' emerges from the interactions of H2O molecules. As such, the property of fluidity could be said to be a H2O-made system, even though no single molecule of H20 displays the property of fluidity alone. Society can be seen as both a man-made system, as well as an organism -- these views are not mutually exclusive and depend totally on the scale at which the observation is made.

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is a phenomenon whereby larger entities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities such that the larger entities exhibit properties the smaller/simpler entities do not exhibit. A molecule of water is as basic as it gets—just an oxygen atom with two hydrogen atoms adhering to it. But throw a jillion of them together you get a substance with characteristics that the individual molecules do not possess on their own—liquidity, for instance. Emergent properties often beget emergent behaviors. When it comes to Spirituality, does emergence also play a role when it comes to discourse, as well as what we deem to be true? The scale at which a situation is viewed seems to be integral to what appears to be true of the system itself. In fact, could it not be that many of the perceived paradoxes in life are as a result of trying to reconcile truths that exist at different levels of emergence?