UnbornTao

Someone walked into a bar.... wait -- Was there ever someone to begin with? - Taoist saying.

Keep it up! Withdrawal symptoms can be intense (I’m not a smoker), but as you said, they’re manageable. Just push through this phase of struggle and focus on the long-term benefits. Good luck.

Forgot adding concept: An abstract and general idea; an abstraction. Understanding retained in the mind, from experience, reasoning and imagination; a generalization or abstraction (mental impression), of a particular set of instances or occurrences (specific, though different, recorded manifestations of the concept). an idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct. a directly conceived or intuited object of thought. -- And one more; phenomenon: From Late Latin phaenomenon (“appearance”), from Ancient Greek φαινόμενον (phainómenon, “thing appearing to view”), neuter present middle participle of φαίνω (phaínō, “I show”). A thing or being, event or process, perceptible through senses; or a fact or occurrence thereof. A knowable thing or event (eg by inference, especially in science) Appearance; a perceptible aspect of something that is mutable.

I was joking.

Inside-of-body experience.

@Paradoxed I'm not one of those that subscribe to the practice of breathing. Do something better with your time.

Might be too broad. What is it specifically?

Is it? Again, don't overlook the matter.

Too flowery. What makes something important? How do value and worth get to exist?

Well, we could say that importance exists in your relationship with something; whatever that “something” is comes prior to any form of value, use, or meaning. "What use or import does that have for me?" So perhaps importance is an activity we actively generate--it arises from relating what’s perceived to our needs and self-agenda. Somewhere in that process, “importance” gets created--perhaps. The contrast I presented above offers a good foundation for questioning this. For a fly, dog shit is certainly more "important" than a piece of glass--or whatever material the phone is made of. This might give us a hint as to where to look. I'd challenge the notion that thoughts come to you or that they aren’t chosen by you. It might turn out that you, in fact, fabricate them. Test it out: you can think about a pink elephant right now, and then switch to a cat, in the same way that you can stop thinking about them. Hey, keep looking into it and see if you can discover something. I will, too.

@Keryo Koffa Hi there. What do you mean?

Good question. As an exercise, we could, for example, pick a simple object we consider important--even just slightly--such as a water bottle or something similar, and compare it to something that might not even register in one's awareness, like a piece of dog shit on the street. Let's use that contrast to notice the associations that arise for us in relation to each item: Why is one object valuable to me and not the other? Where can "importance" be found?

@Reciprocality Stop trying to show off and contemplate already.

@Reciprocality Experience. What is it?

@Reciprocality Not describe it but inquire into it--you are being too intellectual. Experience, experience, experience. Your experience happening now. Try to clarify what that is for you, first. Then ask what so-called experience is, and try to see different mind activities such as interpretation, meaning-making, association, memory, versus what is actually happening regardless of its relationship to you. I think this can point us in a good direction.

Hey, leave God alone! It seems to me that experience always happens now, so this relates to what you said regarding experience being outside of time. What now is may not be a point in time. So, we could say that experience already is outside of time. What is it?

That sounds incredibly abstract. How do you see experience?

How you approach something determines the range of outcomes you can achieve. Who are you being? How are you relating to the situation? Instead of seeing the event as a fixed reality, consider how your relationship to what’s occurring shapes the event in the first place.

Start with who you are.

One could say that taking a position is a "doing", as in thinking a certain way and placing attention on this or that. But I get your point.

That’s more consistent with the original definition of "to handle skillfully." Every thought you have is a manipulation. Emotions, for example, are self-manipulations--they are internally generated activities meant to produce an effect (in this case, motivating you to act in alignment with your own agenda). I wouldn't include being in that, but perhaps "selfing", existing as a person.

@Aaron p So what did you write?

Already use "--" often.

@Natasha Tori Maru Sounds good, thank you.

Perhaps, but also be open that it might not be entirely how you think it is.