Anton Rogachevski

If everything is presumably God, how can the devil exist? Is the devil also all powerful in his deception? Then how can an enlightened person so self assuredly claim that he so easily overcame this all powerful deception? How does he know for certain that it's not just another trick by the devil that made him think that he's "god" and that now he knows everything? Does Enlightenment remove all doubt from the system?

@Someone here "Reality" how does that relate to experience? I don't know if it exists. Names are meaningless beast noises. I don't think anything at all. There's just experience. I guess I can live with that. I think it's too optimistic to hope for an ontology beyond that.

@Someone here Dunno what you mean by "energy" or "nature", haven't we just agreed that there's just experience?

So in your view the Devil is not a problem at all? There's no challenge to overcome his deception? Is there devilish deception?

@Someone here So experience just is - sounds like phenomenological ontology. Where's the epistemology here? Why do you call your experience truth? What does it mean for it to be truth? How do you define "Truth"? No siree nothing obvious at all, or else I wouldn't post this topic.

@Someone here That's quite simplistic. I guess I want a better established ontology. But if I deconstruct skepticism wouldn't I just believe anything?

@Someone here I guess the deeper meta question is should we also deconstruct skepticism, and if we should then how can it be done? It seems as though I'm trying to skip epistemology all together and just focus on ontology. Does ontology need an epistemic basis?

How can I trust I not to deceive me? How can I know anything at all, or could it be just pure mind fiction? I guess even logic is showing us it's a complete and endless hallucination.

@Someone here So how are they different? Isn't that a meaningless statement then? Like 1=1?

Finally something that starts to make sense! Thank you for your reply.

@Breakingthewall So where's God in your conception? How does he interact or relate to what you call "devilliry". My question was ontological in nature not theoretical or metaphorical.

@Santiago Ram @Hojo My question is the same. How do you know that? How certain are you?

How do you know that?

Leo, is that how you experience reality?

@Leo Gura I can't see why you say animals are zombies and that they can't recognize beauty. Their consciousness is probably not that much different from ours, except ours is more complex. Sure they don't have ideas and abstraction abilities like ours but simple direct experience of the senses, some basic recognition of symmetry and the release of dopamine as a result of biological evolutionary programming may trigger a feeling of beauty I presume. I don't know why I have to prove or anyone has to prove the existence of beauty. But if one would want to theoretically I guess it would be as following: One day when we could scan a brain and separate the experience of beauty we could say here this is beauty, it consists of these frequencies in the brain. If you can make a conscious robot that can have the same experience of beauty, would that be proof? ------ About the limitation of rationality part, I don't think rationality is one of the frames, but a meta tool to analyze them all.

It's not like your hardware is much different to ours. You did feed it many weird substances. How is it in a practical sense? Is your life more amazing and fulfilling post enlightenment?

I'll grant you that logic is part the infinite hallucination that you call Reality, but I'm highly skeptical that the inside of the cave is all there is. I don't believe the hallucination just yet. Since I'm not yet enlightened, I still believe there may be something we don't see or can grasp or know outside of perception. I also highly doubt the ability of a monkey jungle brain like ours to actually understand anything about ultimate reality. I'm even skeptical of the ability of skepticism to properly question delusion. So I don't even know how deeply I don't know anything at all. I guess this is an infinite hallucination.

@Leo Gura Logic is the grammer of the way thoughts are interacting. The fact that logic can hold a paradox shows that it can't be truth. A paradox reveals to us how inadequate thought actually is for grasping reality.

The baboon is truth, the banana is truth. It doesn't need to think about the banana or equate a banana with a banana in order to be God, it already is it, even though it's not conscious of it. If logic is Truth than anything is. But it's not so.

It can only work within a logical framework. But logic is not Truth.

Since self-deception is caused by the self, wouldn't it make sense to ask for guidance from outside the self and ask the therapist: "Where am I deceiving myself?" After more than a year in classic CBT therapy I can say that you can make a lot of progress and discover many hidden patterns of behaviour that you'd never even imagined you had. The therapist sees it all so clear, it's amazing actually.

@Leo Gura Leo, isn't 1=1 a meaningless statement? So truth isn't even worth talking about, because it only consists of meaningless self-canceling statements like: "God wants for you what you want for yourself." (Which in some way is true and profound if you still think God is something external outside of reality.)

@Breakingthewall Agree. It's almost impossible to truly understand someone else, cause we don't have access to their experience.

@Lyubov Thank you dear fellow traveler

@Breakingthewall I also used to think it's a scam. It took me half a year to let go of all these ego defences to see that I'm simply resisting change. The ego apparently has a tough outer shell.