Telepresent

A moment ago I described myself to someone as 'extremely skeptical', and it made me think: It's easy to be skeptical of things 'out there' I don't believe in. It's harder to be skeptical of things 'out there' I do believe in. But the one thing I know for certain is that most (if not all) of my thoughts turn out to be demonstrably wrong. Yet I still believe them. Again and again and again I believe them. For some reason, applying skepticism to myself, to my thoughts and 'inner' beliefs - that keeps eluding me. And I suspect it's where skepticism is needed the most

@Joseph Maynor Thanks for the research suggestions. I'll have a dwell on what you've posted and reply once I've processed

@Annetta Thanks! I'm mostly a fear/anxiety person, really. I've hated in the past, but I can't say I hate anything now (aside from momentary bursts, which I'll discuss below). Maybe that will change again, but for now I don't. Actually, I'm having to address fear more and more as I move forwards, because it's becoming more... hmm... I feel like I'm getting closer to a core, and I'm starting to fear the process of looking at it. Like I'm starting to really see what makes my ego tick, and it all seems to stem from fear in one guise or another, and now I'm fearing the looking process itself! Like I'm imagining some big, bad, invisible I-don't-know-what lurking there waiting to engulf me, or something. And fear is an interesting phenomenon - I've realised we (or at least I) give it a bad name. It's a mechanism that's there to protect us. It should be respected, and embraced for the great job it does. But we rather mistreat it, dislike it, want it to go away and leave us alone. Which isn't very nice, and tends (in my experience) to make it strike back even harder. But back to hate. It's been an interesting couple of weeks for me: I live in the UK, so we've had several terror attacks, a very nasty high-rise blaze, a fierce snap-election, and the start of Brexit all hit us at once. And I'm seeing hatred EVERYWHERE. In the news, from politicians, opinion columnists, but most of all in social media. And it's so transparent: I can see so clearly that my friends and relatives are afraid for a future that is uncertain, where they don't know what will happen next, and they can't help catastrophising and imagining the worst. So they look for something or someone to blame. This political party. That newspaper. These stupid people who vote this way or behave like that or hold whatever opinion. It's fast, very fast, and these people who claim to be liberal and inclusive are the first to start throwing stones at anyone who they see as threatening. And I know that a few years ago I would have been like that too. And I still feel it spike in me - I'll read or hear something and I'll feel an instant spike in the belly, and a reactionary thought will slam in: always an automatic thought, always unchallenged, and always all about me. Somehow I'll take what someone else has said, make it all about me, and react with fear, anger, hatred. Instantaneously. Then I catch it, and the recognition makes it go away. This can all take place in the course of a second or two, and it's fascinating to watch, but the more I look around the more I see how many people are completely under its control

@Annetta As far as I can tell right now, it's fear. I might be a little biased right now, as I'm on something of a 'fear kick' - I'm noticing more and more how much of my self-identity is actually a defence mechanism based around fear-thinking and fear-imagining (i.e. all my little mental projections into the future - say when I imagine myself having a conversation with someone later today - are actually a fear mechanism attempting to predict and protect me from appearing stupid, etc.) Hatred, as I see it, is an extreme fear reaction. Most of my anger definitely stems from fear: it's another defence mechanism designed to protect either my body or my self-image from external attack. Seems to me that hatred is a longer-lasting version of that fear, which is why it can be so well indoctrinated. "This person is evil, they are dangerous, they will take away everything we care about and love, and they will kill us given half a chance. We must hate them". Something like that - I haven't expressed it very well, I fear (ha!)

@Joseph Maynor Ahoy! Your final paragraph, and the Descart reference, seem to me to be pointing towards the same thing: there must be an object doing the experiencing. Paragraph five is following the thinking of “judgement is happening in a moment, therefore something is judging that moment”. That “something” is what you refer to in your final question, “what is arriving at that conclusion?” So, it’s coming back to the question of whether or not awareness requires an object to create awareness. Your position is that you are the object. My position is that there may not need to be an object in the first place. There’s a word in the final paragraph which is very important: you ask “what is deliberating about and judging my question here? Is such an act taking place in your awareness?” The use of ‘your’ here is very important: it implies that awareness is owned or within an object (the ‘you’ of ‘your’). But the important thing I need to consider is that every point of reference I have to my ‘your’ being an object, exists inside awareness already. So I hit a chicken-and-egg problem: I am trying to find an object that houses awareness, by creating an object from the sensations found within awareness. Now, awareness is undeniable. Absolutely. And if you want to label it ‘I’, I see no problem with that. But there’s a leap from saying “awareness is arriving at that conclusion”, to saying “an object outside of my experience, which houses awareness, is arriving at that conclusion”, when actually, truthfully, I actually have no evidence pointing towards this object. I just don’t. It’s the brain-in-a-vat problem magnified to its ultimate level. Which can seem really frustrating – it can seem like a cop-out. Until you start tying it up to other avenues of enquiry. Research is really important here, and as much as people speak against it here, I think knowledge is too. The more I learn, the more I realise I don’t know. The more I learn, the less certain I become in my contextual map. Particularly when it comes to the whys and wherefores of the universe. But this learning also has to be brought back to experience, every time – the asking of what I know to be true. What I can factually prove is definitely true. Which is becoming less and less all the time…

Hi Joseph. I'm not going to engage your whole post, because there's a lot in and truthfully I find where I am at the moment to be rather difficult to express in writing: I'm between positions, moving between perspectives, where nothing is certain and as it's all still developing and processing I find it very hard to find words. I often find myself attempting to reply to someone here and giving up halfway through, because I realise what I am writing makes no sense whatsoever! However, I'm going to have a shot here. It seems to me that your whole argument pivots around this centre I would suggest that this idea - judgement is happening, therefore there must be a judger - can be debated. To begin with, I have to wonder what 'judgement' is. A quick search on an online dictionary gives me: "the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions", or "a misfortune or calamity viewed as a divine punishment". What strikes me as important about these is that they do not sit objectively: they require context. Subjectivity. In order to make a considered decision or come to sensible conclusions, we need input of information to form a contextual map. In order to judge calamity, we need a contextual map of what is bad or calamatous (which is a combination of inherent feeling - emotion and thought - which themselves can be considered input, and information we have been educated with: again, more input). So we require a conceptual map, and that map is basically formed of information; the interaction of this information by whatever process (what we tend to call 'thinking') produces an output - or judgement. Now, ignoring any preconceptions we have at the moment about what human beings are, does this process require a 'judger'? Well, maybe, but then whatever thing we point at and say "that's the judger" is just an object that is capable of going through this mechanism, right? Maybe we consider the mechanism itself to be a judger. Great. But then does that have to mean something significantly existential about human beings? Does it have to mean there is that central 'self' or 'judger' exists as an objective, extant thing? As a means of comparison, let's think about a computer. Computers are able to process incredible amounts of information, and work on an input-calculation-output basis. It does not take much imagination to conceive of a program which takes incoming data like that of this conversation, calculates it against whatever it has previously been programmed with (what we might say it 'believes is true'), and then creates a true/false output (what we might call a judgement). So, the computer has reached a judgement, much by the same mechanisms humans do: data is input, calculated against previous programming, judgement is output. Of course, the mechanism is different - the computer's output is text on a screen, or maybe a printout; a human's output is thought, emotion, and the behaviour that follows. But would we say that the computer in this scenario has an existential 'self' which is a 'judger'? Or would we say it's just a machine doing what a machine does? If that is the case, what essential difference is there between the no-judger computer, and the judger-human? What bridges that gap? I have a sense at this point that my output (my thoughts, my emotions), want to point to subjective experience: I know I'm here! I know it! I can feel it! But, what if, just what if, that sense of 'I am' is actually part of my pre-programming, against which all my input is calculated? What if this is pure process? See, I get a little stuck there, because aside from my thoughts and emotions demanding that yes there is an existential self which is the experiencer, I can't actually offer any reason why I should presume there is a judger or self involved in this calculation process. Of course, we then land on the 'but what is experiencing?' question: the only thing I can't deny is that I am experiencing, so I must be that experiencer, right? I said it right there: I am experiencing. But, but but but... that's output, isn't it? That's just a word. I. I, I, I. So obvious and useful and self-evident I don't need to question it. I must be the experiencer, who experiences the output. Great. Job done. Except... (and now I go into the bit that I can't really talk about properly, because it will start to sound like gibberish, but here goes...) at what point have I definitively proven that there needs to be an experiencer in the first place? I'm probably going to stretch your credulity for a moment, but please bear with me. I want to imagine an existence, for a moment, where there is only awareness. Just infinite awareness. Of course, infinite doesn't mean 'really really big', not really. It means indeterminate. It means every size, every shape, every colour and feeling and sensation and possibility. So, what is this awareness aware of? Well... everything. It's infinite. But what is everything? See, this is where perspective really hits a wall. If we stick with the observer-observed paradigm, we're not getting past it. So please bear with me for the sake of argument. Let's say there's just infinite red. Just red. Forever and in all directions. For all intents and purposes, what difference is there between 'red' and 'nothing'? There's not a difference - we've just labelled the everything 'red'. Only that label can't exist, see, because that would mean there is something other than the experience of red, which is impossible because red is all there is. Ok, so for there to be something (from which we can derive everything), there needs to be contrast, change. Great! We know this is the case, because we know there is more than red. We know there is awareness, and we know within awareness there is a changing mass of different sensations. But where have I got my determination that this awareness must be infinite? Well... that's for another day, perhaps, but it's tied in with quantum physics and multidimensionality, and I just don't have room to go into it here. Just please take it on faith for now. So, I am suggesting an infinite awareness, which must involve changing and moving sensations because we know this the way of things. But if it's infinite, that means it has to run through every single possible combination of sensations. All of them. Including the ones with the appearance of input-calculation-output. In fact, we can reduce it to input-output at this point: either your calculation is consciously experienced (at which point it is itself output), or it is not (in which case it is assumed to exist, that assumption itself being a different piece of thought-output). At no point in this process has there been a 'judger', but the sensation is exactly as if there is. Of course, at this point it's very easy to dismiss all of this as an intellectual argument or flight of fancy. Perhaps. On its own it's not enough to provide any kind of 'proof'. But, it's very interesting when you start to consider this against our deepest understandings of how the universe works, as well as really, really applying Occam's razor. The more I investigate, the more I am inexorably drawn towards the conclusion that the 'self/judger' is actually not necessary in this calculation.

Yes

@Mert No worries. Shout if you want to discuss anything that comes from it: I'm constantly processing it all myself. In fact, that's my advice to your question Process what you know, but crucially what you don't know, but think you know. Sounds like gibberish, maybe. But this is what self-inquiry is. I hold to the idea of Spiritual Autolysis rather than self-enquiry, but only because it is written down rather than done in the head. If you read the book that you find through the link I sent, it discusses this, and what I like is that Davis suggests that the typical self-inquiry question "what am I?" might better be "what am I not?" As much as you might want to experience things, you might want to meditate and experience a way into enlightenment, that's only part of the journey as I understand it. An important part, as it helps to separate you from your thoughts, feelings, and (maybe) beliefs, but there's a deeper challenge that faces us which often seems to go overlooked: If you are trying to understand consciousness, you have to debunk how you think the universe works. Why is that? Because how we typically think the universe works is a conceptual model, and is actually quite falsifiable (one of the reasons the Holographic Universe is such a head-fuck is that it falsifies the universe as we think of it, but we don't want to accept that so start making excuses for it). It doesn't account for the most basic experiential conditions (i.e. the only thing I know for certain is that I have experience, yet by the standard objective-physical-Newtonian model of the universe my lived experience, the qualia which are the only thing I know, are not answered for), and makes massive, massive assumptions to the point that hypotheses are taken as facts. For example, in your inital post you ask why you can feel your pain, but not the pain of another person. I suggest you have no way of knowing that the other person experiences anything; that you cannot know that they are not just the shape and sound and feeling of an object that claims to experience, but does not provide evidence. Bold claim. But one you have to face. What does this have to do with Spiritual Autolysis or self-enquiry? Both are avenues into exploring these questions. What do we know? What do we think we know, but actually only believe? What are we taking for granted? What are we taking as fact but is in fact a fudged "that'll do" we came up with when we were 10 years old, but doesn't remotely correspond to life, or to our understanding of string theory (for example, as it's my latest thing)? I recommend Spiritual Autolysis simply because the act of writing forces you to clarify your thoughts, to put them into clear language, and helps you to see the gaps in them. It can also highlight when you are going in circles, or repeating the same thing over and over again without actually developing your thinking. Self-inquiry should be able to do the same thing, but it's much, much harder if you keep it all in the head, and (in my experience at least) tends towards asking the same broad, un-specific questions ("Who am I?" "Who is thinking this thought?" "Who is observing this thought?") without any actual progress being made. (Incidentally, do you see the flaw in all of those questions? They presume a 'who', which suggests an object, a separated entity, a separation of observation and thought, a limited thing. It's hard to catch those kinds of hidden assumptions without writing things down, in my experience)

@Dodo I'm in the UK; Oxfordshire. Not too hard to get into London from here either.

I just encountered this short video which sets out to explore what a 'zeroth' dimension could be - in other words, what 'nothing' actually means. I'm going to be processing this one for a while, I think, but it's struck me as remarkably important. Definitely opened a door for me:

@Dodo Aha! Thanks - I'll have a dig through that thread then

Hello! I just tried to write a reply to this but it turned into something of an incoherent mess and probably would only be more confusing. So instead, I'll link you to a series of videos which really, really helped me on some of this stuff. Enjoy: http://www.butterfliesfree.com/holographic-universe-workshops/

Great! So define for me the word "I"? Thanks x

@Nahm Cool - thank you! Nice clarification Also apologies if I was aggressive - as a teacher of budding creatives, I get defensive

I don't see them as similar. As someone who plays many instruments, who works in the theatre - in interactivity, as riding an playing on people's responses, where you have to learn an entirely new skillset - let me promise you that playing an instrument and playing a group of people, helping them to move from emotion to emotion is a very different thing. And let's not pretend that out of the millions of DJs out there, those that are famous haven't got there for a reason. You're right, it does take talent and inventiveness, even if you don't recognise it. How many clubs do you go to? How many DJs do you see perform live, or listen to mixing on the radio? If you're going to talk about talent and inventiveness, you need to know the medium before you can recognise these things. The Beatles were just another guitar band for people who didn't understand guitar bands, you know. Don't play on your age (and I don't know how old you are, and you don't know how old I am, so saying "I am older" is currently meaningless) to mean that you know more than someone else. We both know that age doesn't equate to knowledge, wisdom, or truth. Describing DJing as betrays the exact point that I made in my point: that you misunderstand the medium. Now, please be careful here to not take offence and believe that I am attacking you. I am not. But there is more to DJing than that, by a very long way. This might not be the case for whatever DJ is on the local radio station. Fine. But don't pretend like you understand it just because you don't appreciate it. And don't you dare discourage someone from something they are passionate about because you don't value it. That is the absolute in judgement. I am really hoping that @Anirban657 comes back here and reads this, because otherwise you know what this thread is? Let's strip it down: A: "I have a passion" B: "Your passion is a complete irrelevance" C: "You passion is complete bullshit because it doesn't tie in with what I define as a talent, instrument, or skill" D: "Actually, the thing you are interested in is a worthwhile pursuit" C: "Bullshit, it's not creative. I'm older and wiser and I know better". So, I don't know. I expect you're going to react angrily and negatively to this and yell at me via cyberspace. Fine. I hope other people who read this see what is going on

Although, of course, the core skill you definitely can practice in your bedroom

I disagree. I'm not a DJ, but it strikes me that the instrument of a DJ is the crowd: riding their emotion, helping to push it to peaks, to drop it to calm moments before taking their potential energy and throwing it through the roof... I suppose the difficulty with that is that you can't practice it without doing it, in the same way as any instrument, but that you can't practice it in your bedroom

I find that it is important to consider what you are needy of. We tend to talk of 'neediness', or 'helplessness', or 'strength', or 'power', or 'trust', or 'fear', or 'closeness', or 'love', or whatever else, as though they are OBJECTIVE things. Like they have a substantial existence outside of circumstance. They aren't and they don't. So the first thing you need to do is ask "in what place and in what way am I needy?" Now, the answer may well feel like "in every place and in every way". And that's ok. You're already exploring and asking which means you suspect it doesn't have to be every place and every way, so keep doing that. I'd recommend writing dialogues to yourself exploring what you think neediness means, while at the same time discovering videos, books, articles, blogs, vlogs, audiobooks, TED talks, etc., which are based around this and related issues; such as shame, or guilt. You ask and as much as anyone might say "the answer is XYZ", the answer is unique to you. If you want to flip a switch and be rid of this feeling, I have bad news for you: that's not how it works. And I'm writing this as someone who is in the midst of a breakdown and writing this as a way of avoiding confronting my own problems (and grinning like an idiot as I confess that). There is no correct route, path, or technique. Only you know. You feel it. You know what is right for now, but if I can offer some advice I would say save everything, because sometimes in places like this you encounter something which you are not ready for, but a year later is exactly what you need. Explore what the world has to say, and compare it against yourself

Steven Davis' work was a big catalyst for me breaking through this particular issue. His website offers a free ebook (or audio book), and a five part video workshop. Well worth checking it in my opinion: http://www.butterfliesfree.com/

Hello all the folks! I hope you're all well. This might sound odd, but... I have a compulsion to post on this forum, yet don't have anything specific to talk about. I'm trusting the impulse to write here, but don't have any particular questions or discussions I want to raise. So come say hello, and whatever arises arises

Yes! Absolutely! Use it to your advantage and joy! But so long as you are attached to it, you at not using it. IT is using YOU! You can feel this in the emotion. You might be finding this to be an emotional conversation. For me, it's a bit of a side-piece. Is either of those 'wrong'? No. Filter filter filter

@echoes (sorry, my phone: "But isn't the whole point of it that it's always "me" who is manifesting?) Actually, no. That's the whole argument that I'm making. I may have preferences about how my experience pans out. But the actuality basically never has any thing to do with my personal preference. I don't live in the world I think I want. Don't make that mistake. But I live in the world I trust

So let the fuck go of any concept of any ideas of any rules that tell you that this is how the world works and that you need to manifest shit to make you feel ok @Echoes

ah, sorry, my phone posted halfway but the 'feeling' of I, and the consciousness that determines what that feeling of 'I' is (& as a hint, it's nothing you will ever ever encounter from another person) NOT THE SAME THING

The point that I have to suggest is that no, you who thinks you are you, and I, cannot have a straight conversation. No, it is not you who are manifesting. No, it is not you for the negative feelings you have in response to this post. The 'feeling' of