UnbornTao

With all the threads on this topic, one might as well pay closer attention to them. But you keep insisting on your cosmology. Okay. Arrogance can sometimes show up through a veneer of spirituality. Closed-mindedness, too, can be made to appear as its opposite, it only has to look open. Perception itself is a process. For example, ask a color-blind person what purple has that is absolute. You need to put the pipe down and stop labeling experiences as "awakening" so flippantly. It's essentially a very elaborate and unconscious form of confirmation bias. The cult awakening was also dead sober for me. To bridge that gap, revisit the pertinent threads.

This is what a cult does to one's thinking. Oh, I also forgot you guys were talking about experiences with the psychedelic drugs.

Keep at it. And remember to do it experientially, not just think about it.

Maybe. But it keeps bugging you, so there's likely still more to be grasped about the emotion. Let the thoughts arise but more importantly, let the anger arise. See what you can uncover about it. It looks like the anger just arises on its own. This is convincing, and it's what we tend to assume. But it might not be true. Try to pay attention to what you do prior to feeling anger. Maybe it is you who generates it, and the circumstances merely help you create it. Anyway, the theory is easy on paper. In practice, it can be more challenging. Good luck.

Yes, it can feel that way. To be clear, there's a difference between letting the anger arise on the one hand, and acting out it on the other. Feeling it without suppressing it nor acting it out is what I'm talking about here.

Not necessarily. Perhaps it's like playing a game. The recognition that it is a game doesn't prevent you from taking it seriously, fully enjoying it, or mastering it. It just means you know that, in the end, it's an invention - completely meaningless on its own and ultimately unnecessary. But then you have to do the dishes and walk the dog, so that's that.

It's an activity you are actively generating, not a curse. You want it (unconsciously) because it is serving a function for you. Maybe start by allowing yourself to feel the anger completely. No need to act it out, just feel it. Then you'll be in a better position to ask what anger is and why you are feeling it in this case. Investigate your experience of the anger as it occurs. What is it? Find out what it is for real. What makes up the emotion? For example, it seems to me that it exists in relation to a past time. It's about something that has passed, even if only a millisecond ago.

Yeah, that seems to be the case.

You could reflect on why you feel hurt - let's assume for the moment that this pain is what anger is based on. It's a tricky topic. Even though it seems like circumstances are causing your emotional state, it's actually you who are generating it, including the anger. The tricky part is turning this abstract idea into a real insight. For example, you can probably feel anger toward your father even when he isn't physically present. What does that tell us about the emotion?

It's interesting that you brought up nonduality, as if we were contrasting one philosophical system with another. Still, is the absolute a state? You speak of insanity, this and that, abstract, dimension, process. It's tempting to think of infinity as an ever-expanding room that gets filled with items, like outer space. Mentally grasping that an absolute is absolute is relatively easy. Even then, as a notion, it is itself relative. It is everything and all-encompassing. In our minds, it could be formulated as "everything is absolute. There is nothing that is not absolute - including nothing." But claiming that a cauliflower is absolute muddies up the waters, in my view. We don't even perceive the thing itself. It's likely that people end up believing that the concept of a cauliflower is somehow not relative, even though that notion might not have precise boundaries and is rather abstract and non-objective. And "profound" is relative - a property that appears only in relation to what is not profound. As for form and no-form: aren't they relative, too? What makes something relative is that it is particular and defined, including formlessness. How it shows up in our experience is as a discrete thing. It is not every thing that exists - it is "that" thing. Our experience of everything is relative. At some point, we might claim things like: everything is relative, nothing is relative, everything is absolute, nothing is absolute - plus both and neither, and/or both or neither. How would that help us begin to mentally unpack this topic? (Not that it could be done through those means, to be clear). I'd stick with "everything is relative" as the common ground of our shared experience. I'm absolutely astonished and relatively excited.

Fair enough. I was thinking that being original is different from being different from others - like dressing up differently, having a different appearance. It may not be about novelty either. The etymology of originality is something like "being at the source."

I don't know, Rick. Like with the multiple infinities, or the "beyond absolute" bit. It's all relative. Are you sure you're not talking about a state? Absolute Dis-may-a Awakening. Also, what makes you think I'm talking about nonduality, or coming from that stance?

When you say that something does not exist when it is not imagined - referring to a distinction - you are speaking of a relative thing. It is recognized only through contrast with that which it is not. At this point, you could take any relative thing and qualify it as Absolute - Absolute Pain Awakening, for example - which would be silly. The thing exists precisely by virtue of being relative. Pain is not absolute. Absolute (Relative Thing, Process, Activity) Awakening.

It is relative, then. It's like the Absolute Cinema Awakening joke. You should've added absolute in quotation marks.

Yeah, that's the point

Then it is something. It is abstract because it is not concrete. So it is a form, just not one with precisely-defined boundaries. And you just said it is like an opposite of something else - that is not that same thing. Absolute Nonsense.

Absolute Cinema Awakening.

@gengar I don't see why you'd bring up morality in response to my post above. As far as I'm concerned, it's irrelevant to the main point, which is that the goal - experiencing the truth - stands on its own. Culture, environment, and other factors obviously play an important role in our lives, yet they don't alter that requirement. This kind of ignorance is neither culturally derived nor culturally remedied, because it is existential. The human condition remains unaffected by extraneous factors such as technology and the like. Perhaps it's a bit like thinking that our accumulation of knowledge over the years could somehow grow the human body a new foot - or something along those lines.

The main question would have to be "What is it?" What is it to be attached?

It seems that the motivation to feel special - even though it isn't very glamorous to admit - might underlie, in large part, this search for originality; also, arrogance, in a sense. Not sure why. Might elaborate at some point. Aside from that, yes. Although those domains were rarely invented by a single individual, so it's hard to pinpoint the source of what might have enabled their creation. Regarding your last point, insight, yeah. That already includes possibility. Not sure about recontextualization, though.

It is about whatever is true - and it's not going to be what you think. If it turns out that nothing is true, then that will be the truth of it - and it will be a direct encounter, not just a thought or a belief. Then again, that's currently an unknown for us. In any case, we're spinning our wheels. If you don't grasp that you really don't know, there won't be any real questioning.

Like Homer Simpson, Trump would've killed for the peace prize.