UnbornTao

Okay, thanks for playing. Appreciate it.

Oh boy. Another religion. I'm a believer

It sounds like there's a conflation being made here. If you want to so-call raise your consciousness, the only real requirement is to contemplate. If you want to feel the body, then do that.

What do you mean? Contemplate anything, like what a belief is, for example.

Good You're wrong in my case, and I don't know about the others.

How are we supposed to brag about ourselves, then? I wouldn't be so quick to presume that, anyway.

You seriously need the Empowering Listening video like a fish needs water. Again, you think you're special or something, but consider that people just don't bother bragging about these things, nor do they make them true. One can be very committed to a fantasy, and the fact that you can't tell a charlatan from a skillful facilitator should ignite curiosity about this principle. This is an artificial frame coming from the use with the drugs, so yeah, it's not true. It relates to experience.

I honestly don't know how to respond to this. I'll say a few things anyway. Your mention of "continuing the tradition" hints at where your mind is coming from. As with Ramana, you seem to think you understand him - and this is precisely one of the clearest examples of very poor listening. For starters, one of his most straightforward points, regarding drugs, was completely missed. How did that happen? How things look, and what people say, is rather secondary, yet this is what people tend to get hung up on. The students likely had this distinction more clearly grounded in their own experience, which is why they paid closer attention to their guru and were much clearer on their own ignorance.

The thought of it doesn't just occur on its own (which is the impression I got from reading your paragraph), you generate it. You can change it, or stop doing it altogether. You can even change your relationship to the apple by shifting your thinking about it. Yet, these are extraneous or supplementary activities added to something perceived as objectively existing. This is the distinction to notice, which is already operative in our lives. How does harm come to exist? Not in perception itself, but in how you, and not some fixed system, interpret and react. The malleable nature of this process suggests a deeper layer of perception that remains untouched by subjective distortion, which is the realm of objects as they are. Consider this: Have you ever taken offense at something someone said, only to later realize you misunderstood? In such moments the harm vanishes instantly. This reveals that the relationship between perception and reaction isn't as rigid or fixed as you made it out to be above. Interpreting something plays a big role in how we experience things. For example, the act of perceiving an object hurtling toward you only delivers raw sensory data and so doesn't inherently carry meaning or intent. The "harm" arises from how you process that input. This difference is what we're trying to clarify for ourselves. I'm not trying to imply that this matter is as easy or simplistic as simply "having different thoughts." There's a reason this is experienced as solid and fixed. It might function like the kernel of an operating system.

Fair enough.

Is this related to the drugs? Because it's good to apply it to yourself, especially in this context.

My bad, I think I mixed up Syria and Iran. Hey, it doesn't hurt to ask.

@integration journey You doing OK?

Oops... Where did it go?

@BlessedLion Well said. Still, I noticed you used universal instead of absolute. I wonder why. In any case, people claim all sorts of things all the time. What's really in question is the realness of what's being claimed. And this is what's easily missed by people. The same argument could be made the other way around: if someone were directly conscious of X as not absolute (or whatever), then - until that is directly perceived - the matter wouldn't be resolved. Being assertive is just that, and doesn't make anything true. The issue is that, particularly with this topic, people want to believe it, as you alluded to. As far as love goes, who wouldn't want to be willing to be deceived by it? If anything, it's the one thing about which no one really cares what the case is, as long as it feels good, is affirming, or validates a belief system. It'd much harder to swallow a worldview in which Nothing would be the case (for example), even if it weren't really understood. Add to that sweet notion some drugs and a particular good-sounding worldview, and you have a recipe for deception - a self-affirming one, though.

The cult the ego makes.

You keep going for a certain kind of apple, and not the images. Why? We can differentiate between objects and the thoughts we have relative to them. And we already do. This is our lived experience right now. One is made by you, while the other is so-called objective. When a rock is thrown at you, you make sure to step out of its way, regardless of whether you hold the rock in high regard, like it, despise it, and so on. That's my point.

Definitely. And here's an exercise - or meditation, if you will: What's an experience of reality prior to "language"? What was life like before the addition of this layer? Not easy.

This matter is a bitch. Not every concept is language-based, it seems to me. And they're not the same. Hmm. But their relationship is certainly close. For example, we say that we experience emotions, and yet they're conceptually based at the same time. But this assertion flies in the face of our shared reality. I suspect emotion was possible for humans prior to the invention of language - or feeling, at least. We also objectify emotions as something real and "fixed," whereas the more likely scenario is that people of old experienced them differently. As usual, a lot is being taken for granted by us, arrogant humans! There are more questions to be asked.

An insight is rarely transmitted when people think they understand the form an explanation or claim takes. Insight lies outside the bounds of one's world.

Same. Jesus fucking christ haha

I was wondering whether that's enough time for the mix to properly cook. Have you tried putting it in the oven for 10-12 minutes at 170ºC? I'm curious what the end result would be.

Definitely. You're doing both, then. First you have the emotion and then react to it. Yep, 'wizard' is fitting. It's a shame that his career at the top was so short-lived. Messi and Cristiano went at it for more than a decade.