UnbornTao

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.

I think he's just saying that you can't clip your nails with a hammer - that's all. I mean, you can, but it won't be pretty.

Well, we live with meaning as a necessary aspect of our lives. But if you're trying to find out and assume that it exists objectively, where would you even begin to look? You yourself said that meaning is created - the point here is to realize its nature. Thinking about it isn't enough, and neither is believing an assertion, no matter the source. Getting it for real would likely change how you relate to it. It doesn't seem to be an object, does it? Sorry if I'm being a pain in the ass; I like exploring these things.

Isn't meaning, in this case, one element among several - interpretation being one of them? One can interpret something without necessarily imbuing it with meaning, as interpretation occurs prior to meaning-making. And we'd likely agree this isn't quite what we mean by 'experience'. You might be implicitly pointing to - or perhaps I'm just using this as a pretext to make a point - the possibility of experiencing a thought rather than merely 'having' one; that is, directly experiencing the activity of generating thought as it unfolds. This contrasts with our usual mode of experience, where we seem to be at the effect of thought, as though it arises from outside ourselves. Just throwing around some questions - and claims.

Thanks. And what is that, really? For example, when asked about the same circumstance, two people might have different reactions - or an entirely different relationship to it altogether. They can, quite literally, experience the same event differently. So what we're trying to clarify now is what's experienced in actuality or perhaps what's really happening - as distinguished from the added elements you mentioned above, like worry, belief, attachment, thought (interpretation, charge, value), and so on. Do you encounter the 'writing to me' as it is experienced, or could it be that the 'other' (me) is imagined on your part and not actually experienced? What is experienced when all conceptual activity is set aside - or transcended? That sounds like quite the contemplation! Are we able to encounter something - such as an object - for itself? Do you experience the act of writing as it is, or are there doings like interpretation and 'charge' superimposed on it - things that aren't the mere 'writing'? Also, we can unpack that activity and still probably find things within it that are generated, as opposed to "just there."

What is - at any level, from what is absolutely true to the nature of emotion, experience, others, relationship, the body, and so on. It is not what we think about something, but what exists in and of itself, both factually and ultimately.

Not sure I follow you. Why are you bringing up attachment, meaning, and effort? Are you suggesting there's no experience? Your lived experience (is there a better word for this?) of writing on a computer could simply be called 'experience' - as distinct from thinking, assessing, interpreting, judging - maybe - even though these can also be experienced for themselves. I'm just trying to clarify the distinction for our own sake. You're having some kind of experience right now. What is that about? I was joking. It was a good question - one that calls for some insight. That's why I didn't answer it. I could say that experience and awareness are relative and forms of consciousness, the latter being the 'mother' of them - but that just turns into meaningless chatter unless there's a conscious experience of what's actually true in the matter. So, that's the goal.

@Eskilon Wrote this regarding purpose on another thread: Undermine might not be the right word here. I'm pointing to the tendency we have to invalidate, in our own minds, anything we consider to be 'invented.' Right from the start, we often have a negative relationship to the idea that something useful, familiar, and lived from may be constructed - as if that automatically makes it fake or wrong. But that misses the point of inquiring into these things. If something like meaning is invented, that doesn't imply you should feel bad or hopeless about it, or stop pursuing entertainment, learning, money, or any other healthy and functional activity - whatever it is you do, really. It just shines light on its nature. So, why not enjoy our action figures? As for it being subjective and circular - it really isn't. Where is meaning found? The particular meaning we assign to things might be subjective, but the fact that it is assigned is a claim about its nature. If no meaning is assigned, then no meaning can be encountered.

Don't we generally tend to take statements like that rather trivially? It might be the case that it is a concept - yet there could be more to the story. We might hear such a claim as "it's just a thought, a trivial and superficial activity that has little to no influence on my experience," but it can actually be a very powerful one. And even if it is made up, that doesn't have to mean that purpose is bad, negative, or wrong. In fact, reacting negatively to such statements can be a red flag, as they're likely being misunderstood. We hear words like "invented" or "generated" and suddenly begin to lose "faith" in the value of the invention - as if recognizing its nature somehow diminished its power. But this is a mistake on our part.

Is it? Also, undermining one's enjoyment and feeling hopeless, etc., as a result of this inquiry is a trap and not the point. Just wanted to put that out there as a reminder.

oh boy

Exactly. When asked to point to experience, we usually tend to focus first on sensations, bodily feelings, emotions, actions, and so on - not on beliefs or opinions, for instance. We may notice that a thought about something is not the same as our "direct experience" of it. For example, we might recognize the thought of 'value' as an ancillary activity - produced by us and related to something encountered through the senses. When this mental activity is contrasted with a more raw or immediate encounter with that something, it might become clearer what experience is - or what our concept of experience might actually be pointing to. "Therefore, Ānanda, you should know that when you say that experience is the creation of attachment with thoughts, you state what is impossible." To be fair, I might have misinterpreted your original assertion. You can focus on your perception of an object, and on your disgust or affection for it - and we say that all these activities, although different in nature, are happening in the present. They may seem to arise in unison, as if they were inseparable or part of the same process. Don't we tend to think of experiencing as a vague occurrence in which various activities are blurred together? Where, then, would experience be placed on that list? See above.

Yeah, each of us has to sort that out in our own experience. Just for fun: I'm conscious - that seems to be more fundamental than experience. Not sure if awareness applies here, though. What's clear is that we haven't realized their nature yet.

People are isotopes. edit: I meant idiots but this will suffice

So, we might have gotten depressed or something.

Love this thread!

What would you say your experience of this moment is? How would you go about describing it? Where would you put your attention on?

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We say that existence is - independent of us humans or sentient beings as a whole. As experience is ascribed to us animals and perhaps other living beings, wouldn't you say that Being precedes and allows for experience? The latter seems to require living beings for it to occur. So, not separate, but distinct - perhaps. Anyway, we don't know what Being is. Granted, I don't want to move the discussion in the direction of speculation - despite my attempts to the contrary.

So we agree that we are puzzled by this topic. @Anton Rogachevski What do you think?

I've heard he is notoriously difficult, so stay open to the possibility that your conclusion might not be the whole story to what he tried to get across. Where does he say that, btw?

Is > direct experience > process (self is included here). Being might be absolute. I'm just making something up here. When you say "a being," it makes me wonder whether you're actually referring to 'self' - to what we think we are - since you seem to be holding being as an entity. Being could also be thought of as what is, prior to the existence of an entity. Impersonal, in a sense. Maybe. It seems that what we generally mean by 'experience' is perceiving something - "I see the pineapple, so I'm experiencing it."