UnbornTao

I'm not entirely clear on what you're trying to say. I guess it depends on what you mean by consciousness, but in that segment, I was talking about perception. I'd rather not speculate on these topics, though.

@Princess Arabia @AION Links to YT videos are allowed.

What insight? Get a lobotomy and see. Without a body, experience can't occur, can it? It's a matter of biological mechanics. We don't say that a dead person has the capacity to experience. If, as you said, experience is all you have, what allows for that? Do you think you're just a mind floating around in empty space? Without a brain, obviously you wouldn't be able to be writing here. Granted, you seem to be holding perception more metaphorically when you qualify it as absolute. In any case, is it? Can perception occur without a body? If not, then, in the conventional sense, it can't be absolute - because it is a process (a biological one, it seems to me.) We can claim and believe anything; our actual experience is another matter. It's a bit like believing that "anger is illusory and we're all one" - and then cursing at other drivers in traffic the next moment. That's the discrepancy I'm pointing out. Whether it's true or not isn't realized by virtue of simply believing in assertions we've come across. Again - just trying to ground this consideration a bit. Makes the work harder but keeps it real. disclaimer: do not get a lobotomy

Regardless of what you take niceness to be or mean, not being nice doesn't necessarily imply being the opposite! That's a jump we often make.

That's great. It doesn't necessarily imbues one with insight into what a thing is, though. That depends on what the practice is based on and what its goals are. I'm sure your fantasies would be promptly set aside if a bus were coming your way and the only option was to step aside. Again, look beyond hearsay - at your experience as it is actually lived. The mention of 'self' was in response to your introducing a perceiver. Then again, we're tackling what perception is.

@Sugarcoat très bien!

@Breakingthewall I understand the difficulty of articulating these things, and I get your frustration - but that frustration is more about you than about me. Have you even bothered to understand - and properly answer - some of the questions I asked you above? If you're as open as you claim to be, consider that you might be wrong in your stance on some fundamental things. Being open doesn't mean "everything is possible," nor does it mean "I can say whatever I want and that makes it true." It isn't merely a fantasy, an intellectual artifice, a social posturing, or a character trait. You need to be grounded and reconsider your stance on principles such as listening and openness - that is, if you care about being honest. You can go over the questions and try to respond to them. Or keep babbling away. Once you decide how to respond to this, we can switch back to the topic of meaning.

But what's your experience of the matter, though? Ah, this is the trick. I know we like and even cherish our spiritual beliefs - but they aren't true. When all is said and done, what do you have relative to these things? This is where I'm trying to push the conversation. Don't assume that just because I'm saying 'perception occurs', there has to be a self doing the perceiving. The occurrence of perception is hard to deny, isn't it? And it couldn't occur without a body - just as a computer needs hardware to exist. This is a kind of 'law' of objective reality. For some reason I thought you were the one who started the thread.

That is a peculiar use of 'perception.' Would you be able to perceive or experience something without your body? Could you see without eyes? What if you were told that you can perceive something prior to what you're calling interpretation and experience? We start to find different activities within what was previously - and vaguely - held as 'perception.' Would you say your dislike for a particular object is the same as perceiving the object - or the use it has to you as being the same as your sensory encounter with it?

You said that by perception you didn't just specifically mean a mental interpretation. I was making a distinction between the two in case you were assuming they're the same thing. If we were to define perception as the biological process of encountering data through the senses, where would you place it in 'the field of consciousness'? What do you mean by that? Is that what you're taking to be perception?

Nice.

Interpretation isn't perception.

Good pointing.

You should have noticed that you immediately interpreted the scribbles. Actually removing language-interpretations from your experience of them isn't necessarily easy and takes a concerted effort. You already distinguish between objective and subjective: you distinguish your preference towards a particular object from the object itself. You might also say, for example, that pain is illusory, and the next moment be in pain. So, notice the discrepancy between what one thinks and one's experience. How do you see perception? If it's absolute, why add 'perception' to it?

But GPT told me my drawing was amazing!

Why?

Of course. That way I can recruit more members to my cult - Meaningism. Join in! Free pizza on Thursdays. 🍕🍕

Not so different at all. Humanity as a whole is about wellbeing. It was a lame joke, anyway.

@Breakingthewall I understand you see it as me reacting, but that's not the case here. Don't confuse bluntness with reactivity. It seems you have your fair share of experience taking things personally, so to stay in that vein, I think I paid far more attention to what you wrote than you did while writing it. Did you read what I wrote? Perception and form are also limited. They aren't everything that exists. Okay, no more extrapolation for me. This screams BS. What do you take perspective and perception to be? And what about meaning? Again, what is an 'unlimited framework'? What exactly are you trying to convey with all that rhetoric? Just admit you really don't know what you're talking about and engage in the questioning - the sky won't fall. Being a charlatan is not consistent with the spirit of this work. At the very least, try to be honest and clear - and actually open, for that matter. You say meaning is objective on the one hand, and on the other, you say it is given, as well as a result of infinite cause-and-effect relationships, whatever that means. Could it be that it isn't clear at all - hence the existence of this thread? Be open to this possibility.

The important (hey, meaning) question to you, you mean! What meaning do we have to meaning? It'd be a shame if we were meaningless in the eyes of meaning. How rude. The outcome or "answer" would be an insight. So, you'd become conscious of what it is and this would probably change how you relate to it. The realization wouldn't detract from it or negate it either. It'd just be a recognition of what's true about meaning.

Sounds reasonable, albeit a bit simplistic. By this, I'm mainly referring to the comparison between what is versus what you want to see - calling this latter one meaning. "Subjective stories" might be more aligned with what meaning is, but it still doesn't quite capture it, in my view. A story sounds detached and fantastical, and we can easily recognize it as wishful thinking, while meaning is more primal, as if. Is meaning an interpretation? Does interpretation provide us with the meaning of something, or is meaning-making a separate activity built upon interpretation? What adds "charge" to an interpretation - what makes it good, useless, unworthy, worthwhile, significant? Are these good questions? We're moving in a good direction, though!

Okay, thanks. To play devil's advocate: everything is absolute. So, me saying that isn't very useful here. It might be the case that no one is actually doing the perceiving, yet you said that there is something occurring that we call 'perception' - and that sounds like a factual claim. Now, the former doesn't necessarily negate the latter, does it? Try to perceive these scribbles on a screen as objectively as possible - it's difficult to do. My point is that what we call 'perceiving something' tends to be interpreting or experiencing it, not merely encountering it through the senses.