UnbornTao

@Carl-Richard It sounds like you assume that the only option available in this contemplative work is to believe in something - usually something handed down from the outside. But personally encountering whatever is true is possible. We understand this intellectually, but I feel like you might be holding it as not truly possible - in the background of your experience. Odd thing for me to say, but take it into account. I've personally encountered this 'sentiment' before, subtle as it might be. There's a difference between a follower and someone who questions by themselves.

Hmm, you tell me!

@Sugarcoat Not lasagna!

It's been a while since I last meditated or did nothing for more than an hour while sitting. I actually find it harder to do now than I used to - not that I feel guilty about it. I wanted to make a few excuses to justify it, for whatever that's worth. I see meditation as a healing exercise in which one learns to control his/her mind, become more aware, experience state shifts, have insight, and so on.

What do diet and lifestyle have to do with truth in the first place? By all means - if you want to go vegan, go for it. If you want to be healthy, do healthy things. But how you live your life and the truth are different domains - at least if we're talking about truth in the factual or existential sense. Consider this: Gautama Buddha ate meat. Why? Was he a hypocrite? Or is it that life circumstances are ultimately inconsequential to the search for truth? (There could be other possible reasons, too.) At the end of the day, what drives your choice of what to eat - or, say, what to wear? It seems to basically come down to preference or opinion - a subjective choice. In a way, it's like asking which outfit is best suited for questioning existence.

Getting the hang of Morrowind - heavily modded, by the way (over 500 mods using the Total Overhaul list). It's a slow game - sometimes excruciatingly so. Depends on the mood, but overall, it's been an enjoyable experience so far.

By a felt mental connection, you're referring to something relative, whereas direct consciousness points to the domain of absolutes. It's not a ‘thing’ that can be apprehended - at least not through conventional means. Even mentioning 'a means' misses the mark, since that too is indirect and step-based. This isn't to dismiss feeling states or the value of becoming more present or aware. We can understand the theory, but don't have a conscious experience of what it is pointing to yet - hence our dilemma. But again, it's perfectly fine not to know what direct consciousness is.

If the mind can envision a negative scenario, it can just as easily envision a positive one. In either case, it's imagined - so there's no real reason to favor one over the other. You might as well choose the positive future - or stop mentally producing a future altogether. It takes finding that - and where - you are generating it in your experience. May be difficult, especially at first, but it is doable. That's true - but it has to be heard for what it actually is. Properly understood, it's freeing.

Sure. I'd bet that pretty much everyone does feel like that (that life or one's self is worthless) from time to time, to a greater or lesser degree. developers developers developers!

Credit to Werner Erhard for the quote, by the way. Notice that grasping the reality of the assertion is very different from believing in it and drawing conclusions about it. The former is experiential and grounded - and would instantly change your relationship to this whole 'meaninglessness' business, as the 'dilemma' would be seen as insubstantial from the start. Those questions already presuppose that meaning and morality exist objectively. In my view, a better question to ask would be: What is meaning? Survival requires evaluating and categorizing every perception as 'good' or 'bad.' What is interpreted is related to your self and its agenda in such a way that it supports your survival - through the addition of significance. Its function is to help us recognize what to pursue and what to avoid - what is good and what is bad for us. So, we naturally resist meaninglessness. What we find meaningless, we usually don't even notice because it has already been estimated as worthless or insignificant - yet another assessment of meaning. If meaninglessness is taken as something negative, though, that is still an assessment of meaning! Positive, negative, boring, insignificant, relevant, valuable - all are essentially interpretations filtered through the same paradigm. Doing some of the exercises shared a few pages ago - like the ones with the 'victory' and 'middle finger' pictures - helps us get a better sense of this. The sign itself is instantly made sense of and reacted to with corresponding feelings. Thanks to this relationship, we're given valuable information on how to deal with circumstances and life in general. Without this, we'd have no way to relate to or deal with life, as everything perceived would appear 'equal' or neutral to us - and this would feel intolerable for us. We need the 'charged' interpretation of meaning to navigate life. You'll likely keep finding meaningful the things you already find meaningful - yet if you're conscious of what that activity is, you'll see it for what it is and will be free from it as an objective reality that 'happens' to you. You'll realize that you were always in the driver's seat of meaning. We often resist this, though. Maybe because it feels like too much responsibility. To put it differently: existence transcends meaning. Life itself is free of it - like a blank slate. As the result of a process, it is added after the fact; what something is comes prior to the assigned significance. This means we're free to create meaning for our lives, or to enjoy a life with no ultimate meaning assigned to it. A Zen monk living his mundane existence illustrates this well. No thrills or pretension - just presence. And no suffering from the meaninglessness of it all. Like a child playing with his toys, there's nothing missing.

@SOUL Damn we're @SOULmates. I do appreciate the 'keeping it real' spirit.

You once made the same spelling mistake about a year ago, and then I made this with AI: #toaistreligion

@Anton Rogachevski

Playing devil's advocate for fun. This applies to any tool misused or unfit for the task: In the domain of absolute consciousness, intellect doesn't truly reach. That's why enlightened people might see others as poor chess players in that realm - regardless of how sharp they may be intellectually. Being highly intellectual doesn't guarantee real intelligence either. It's worth asking what a tool is, what its purpose is, and what it actually accomplishes. In the case of intellect, how can we use it powerfully? Something to meditate on.

Appreciate it.

It means that it is factually occurring. You are perceiving and experiencing, are you not? Does it mean it is ultimately true? Not necessarily. Now, this is tricky. For example, one might automatically assume that, since they believe in something, then that means the belief is true because 'it is occurring.' This is a mistake. What's happening here is that the activity of believing is taking place - not that the content of the belief exists as being true. It exists as something that is imagined. Slippery distinction. I don't know. Actually, go over this dialogue: It could be put as what's present, has always been and will always be. Contrast that with activity and invention - the relative domain we live in. What is can only be now - something to contemplate. Depends on what we're talking about. You might recognize that you are angry, and this would be a fact - true in that regard. Yet, we might recognize anger as generated to serve a purpose. As a process, it can't be about what exists now - in this case, the emotion relates to a past imagination. Without the activity of generating anger, it does not exist.

It's cloudy today.

"As though" it arises from outside ourselves - as in, it comes to me. It seems to me that interpretation must come first, before any meaning can be attributed to something. Hugely oversimplified "dialogue" with yourself, but you get the idea. Okay, thank you. But could you clarify this a bit more, maybe expand on it?

Appreciate it. It might be slightly blown out of proportion, though. It sounds like you answered your own question. You can consciously experience both the having of a thought and the resulting thought, as opposed to the usual, automatic 'thinking a thought.' It's a subtle distinction. We could say the difference between the two activities lies in your level of participation in the encounter.

Is that a personal experience, or an extrapolation based on the failure to grasp it? Every adult human seems to have the capacity for meaning-making, so, strictly speaking, why would intelligence be an impediment here? It is pretty much an innate ability, as far as I can tell. You can get it, but it takes work. And it's always different from what you thought it'd be.

Perhaps - but this is conflating things. Becoming conscious isn't dependent on intellectual prowess, contrary to what we might think. The latter doesn't hurt, though. Whether you are intellectually above or below average is secondary to enlightenment - even irrelevant, up to a certain point. Also, intelligence isn't restricted to the intellect, in case that's assumed. What a practice can do at best is ballpark your efforts and allow you to control your mind, so in that sense it depends on what's required of the participant. Apparently, Nisargadatta was semi-illiterate, and Ramana attained his profound enlightenment as a teenager (not that this means they weren't or couldn't be intelligent). They lived in the East but the point still stands. Without attributing their awakening to some external source like intuition or karma - which essentially boils down to “chance” - what really occurred is that they got it. And everyone can get it - regardless of circumstances. It isn't likely, but it is possible. Obviously, being stupid doesn't help in any way, but again, I'd rather not limit intelligence to the intellect. One can be highly intellectual and stupid at the same time. What's being said, essentially, is that a nail clipper and a hammer each has a different use. Now I'm probably the one who's reading too much into it.

I don't think distinction itself is conceptual, much less intellectually-based, although you can certainly make them within the intellect. It seems to be more closely related to awareness. Those are important tools, too, so I don't think they should be dismissed. Again, a tool is used for the purpose it was invented for, and only to the degree it can serve that purpose - if it works. You can also use a tool for something it can't accomplish, but that's on the person misapplying the tool.

I think you're reading too much into it. Take Zen, for example. The purpose of koans is pretty much to short-circuit the "logical mind" and hopefully prepare the student to make a leap beyond mind - and even beyond perception.