anaj

The argument is that It's not a state because it's the mode by which states are manifesting. It's a difference in the way in which states are taken in within consciousness.

It’s gotta be 10 important things that you don’t know you want. https://youtu.be/iwE4NhPv8aQ No other video, here or elsewhere, manages to so concretely map out the fundamental values. Don’t know what to contemplate? That list should act as the starting point. Draw out those ten things and then start making arrows and sub items and begin to work towards a complete hierarchical map, laying out the groundwork for how to reach those 10 goals.

Let’s think about this from a technical perspective. The only way we’re going to have a runaway intelligence effect is if the AI has the capability to improve itself. But these large language models will not be able to improve themselves, since they are limited by the aggregate of human knowledge - and they have to go in and tweak the weights of the neural net if they are to improve. But that can’t be done, because first of all, since they’re trained on a data set of human output, so they’re bound by human knowledge, so they can’t be made to predict outcomes from adjustments of the composition of a large complex neural net - and secondly, even if you would randomly start to adjust the weights, you’d have to run that new version of the LLM in some kind of simulation sandbox (otherwise you’d just saw off the branch you’re sitting on ) and evaluate against some fitness criteria. But the only fitness criteria for intelligence is survival in an given environment, and thus you’d have to simulate the real world in the simulation sandbox so that the mutated instances of the language models would have a comparable environment to survive in. The environment in the sandbox would necessarily have to emulate ours because otherwise the “improvements” to the weights could never constitute anything we would consider intelligence, or could make impactful changes in our world. And here’s why i’m not worried about AI, at least not yet: Constructing a sandbox environment that simulates our physical world is as difficult as constructing the intelligence by hand. The degree to which we can simulate our real world inside a sandbox is the degree to which you can in principle have an intelligence rapidly evolve in it. But we’re rate limited in building a physical simulation. That’s not something we can let the computers do for us. You would have to hand build it. That’s why we can’t have a runaway intelligence effect.

The key to using obsidian effectively is to always make sure that you have at least one link to your note from another note. This way you can always find your note by browsing around similar notes that touches the same topics or themes. In practice this means that you write your insight into a new note, and then you link to that note from another note. If you don't have another note to link from, you create a new note whose only purpose is to link to notes that share a topic or a theme. So, if you have an insight about some aspect of consciousness you write that in a new note and then you create another not that's called "Consciousness - Map of contents". And in this map of contents note you put a link to your insight note. At the top of the Map of contents note you put a link to your "Home" note, which is like the master note that contains links to all your "map of contents"-notes. This "Home" note is your starting point to just browse around. From this note all the other notes in your entire repository is reachable through clicking links. I learned about these "Map of contents"-notes from a guy on youtube, search for "Linking your thinking" Good luck!

This is such a good quote from you. You should put it on the front page of your web site.

While it might be true that you’re smarter and cooler than everybody else, it's not true that you are to be credited for that. Your intelligence and your skills are gifts that you have received with the job of making the most out of them. Being humble is about realizing that you didn’t do shit to deserve what you’ve got, and if you did, then that drive that made you do it too was a gift. With great power comes great responsibility.

My conception of time comes from me projecting my internal “temporal ordering” of “events” onto reality, making it seem as one thing happens after another. Certain mnemonic images in my mind arises in a “temporal” order, forming a internal “timeline” (which also necessarily involves a spatial component, another illusory concept). This whole thing is entirely constructed in my mind, and its seeming temporal character is merely a mode of thinking. My mind then project this construct outwards. Having had breakfast this morning is not something that “happened”. The word “happened” involves this projection again. The temporal juxtaposition of events before my inner eye is not a testament to the order in which events happened. That “events” seem to happen in an order at all is just more mind construction. There are no events. Just mnemonic images in my mind. What is reality trule “like” then? It’s not “like” anything – this habit of conceiving reality as being in one way or another, is itself another mode of thinking. I’m then situating reality in an objective context – but objectivity as such is just another mode of thinking, another mode of conceiving.

I have four kids. Of course it’s exhausting and takes up a lot of time. But here’s the thing. All of this work that we’re doing is about increasing our capacity for Love. But having capacity is not enough. Unless that Love is somehow put into manifest form the capacity is just unactualized potential. Of course, we could put the love out in the world through our life purpose - and that could reach a lot of people and the ripple effect from that could be profound, but there’s another way in which we can manifest Love in the world. And that is by building little Love spreading machines. Programmed correctly, they would put much Love into the world but they would also upon reaching maturity hopefully replicate themselves, thereby generating exponential love growth. So, unless you’ve already got your life purpose at hand there’s a ready made one and that’s to start a family and instantiate the Love in the world through them.

In case anybody is interested, my book is free on Amazon kindle for the next few days. https://www.amazon.com/Refuting-External-World-Goran-Backlund-ebook/dp/B00NOXW8QE

You could only say that life lacks inherent meaning if you affirm the existence of an objective reality. With no objective reality from which meaning is absent, any meaning you derive from life is necessarily veridical. It's like the color blue. You could only say that blue isn't inherently existing if you think of objective reality as the real reality. If you instead recognize experience as the real reality (and objective reality as the imaginary one) blue's metaphysical status thereby becomes real and "inherent". So it is with meaning.

Yes, people appear as part of the nondual manifold, just like inanimate objects, such as bowls of fruit. You'd think the interaction with people now becomes strange when their form and expression is recognized to be an intimate part of yourself, but it really doesn't. Things move along as they always have and the story line continues to unfold, although the energetic involvement now infuses the entire field rather than directed at a particular character in the center of it. For example, I have 4 young kids. When I am with them--whether we're fighting about bed time, or playing around, or whatnot--ultimately, at the feeling/sensing level, I feel that I animate the entire interaction. Not in that I dictate what is happening, but that I'm the animating principle behind it all. But it's not in a narcissistic way, it's rather that the boundary between self and not-self is not there anymore so you're nothing in particular, or rather there's no you to be nothing or something -- but that amounts to the exact same thing as everything in total. No boundary to fragment the whole into parts amounts to the parts being nothing but the whole.

Absolutely!

I'd say that the actual moment of enlightenment always arrives as a sudden realization. I can't see how you would slowly slide into it. But even though the moment consists of a sudden shift, in general you'd have to build up to it, by investigating your direct experience, and your underlying conceptual framework with which you interpret it.

Think about what is implied within your question: that there's separate pockets of experience, one mine and one yours. That kind of thinking; namely that in terms of objectivity; is dismantled in the book I wrote (which I'm happy you like In other words, it's possible to realize that there's no particular objective way in which reality is, because objectivity as such isn't real, but merely a way of thinking; and thinking is to reality what sheet music is to the actual sounds that make up the music. That is, in no way do the symbols on the paper even begin to resemble the actual notes in the song as they appear in audible form. Of course, in the case of sheet music there's a kind of mapping, but in the case of reality and thinking there isn't even a mapping between concepts and objective reality as such, because there is no objective reality to which the concepts could refer. Unless concepts reference something in direct experience, they are ultimately empty and meaningless. Like in your example of "my experience" and "your experience". If you think about it, "mine" and "yours" isn't something that's given in experience, but is a reference to a kind of spatial situation within a larger objective frame of reference. This is true whether one is a non-materialist and thinks in terms of free floating separate streams of experience, or if one thinks of different located subjects in physical space, each having their own respective inner movie being played out in their own separate consciousness. In other words, using concepts such as "mine" and "yours" must necessarily invoke thinking in terms of objectivity and can thereby be demonstrated to be non-viable, logically speaking, as I do in the book.

As I understand it, the word emptiness is used differently across different schools of thought. In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhyamaka, it's used more like a tool of deconstruction, where things are realized to be empty of inherent existence because they exist dependently; and the analysis of things existing dependently goes "all the way" down, eventually deconstructing everything, leaving nothing at all in the end. In other words, supposedly, you begin at your current assumptions of reality and bit by bit you deconstruct things by realizing their dependent nature until you realize that there's nothing there. I actually never found these teachings very compelling, because I think that they play into materialism (even though they claim that in the end materialism itself is done away with). In zen, as I understand it, the word emptiness usually refers to the fact that one's true nature lacks any definable characteristics. Yes, and another good word that I remember rupert spira once used was "modulation". I like that. Exactly. As I interpret it, "Emptiness is form" refers to the fact that form and substance is really inseparable. Form and substance is really just a subtle duality; the form cannot exist apart from the substance and the substance cannot exist apart from the form. The notes cannot exist apart from the music and the music cannot exist apart from the notes. But both music and notes are really just nonexisting as independent things, as they are defined in terms of each other. It's just an artificial conceptual boundary that creates them in the first place. Yes. No, because the depthly aspect is given directly in experience. It's the difference between looking with one eye or two eyes. One way of looking gives a flat report, the other a depthly one. The "depthly" sense is not inferred, but given. The perceptual shift was sudden. But the recontextualizing of my experience began long before the shift, and continued afterwards. But there was definitely a single moment where the shift occurred. And yes, I think the frenzy was necessary. I can't see how I ever could end up where I am without the seeking, but of course, I've read accounts where it happened spontaneously ( Like eckhart tolle ) Yes. Yes, that's how I did it.

Yes, but honestly, I'm still figuring it out, so I can't say much about it at this point.

Integrating insights can take quite a while, in my experience. For instance, way back, many years ago I had the realization that we, as human beings, did not possess free will; that the whole notion was, when you actually unpack it and trace down all its meanings, really inconceivable. And a natural and logical consequence was that it didn't really make sense, psychologically, to blame people for stupid stuff they did. Yet, I found it quite difficult to align my emotional reactions with this new way of viewing the world, despite the fact that I had really grokked the insight about free will. But over the years the old ways kind of wore off, and nowadays I mostly am fine with people acting the way they do. I might respond adequately, but deep down I don't blame people for acting like people. So it takes time for insight to seep through. It's the same with all this reality stuff. You don't just have an insight and then everything falls into place. It takes many years, before the understanding has permeated your way of being to the point where it feels aligned.

Of course!

Yes, after awakening a kind of reversal took place. Before, I viewed consciousness as merely a perspective upon reality, situated at a specific location within a larger frame of reference called absolute space. Even if I could philosophically conclude otherwise, I couldn't help but see things this way. Afterwards, space was seen, not to be a larger frame within which manifestation takes place, but rather the way in which the manifestation is extended as it's being rendered apparent, namely in terms of width, breadth and height. And therefore, the manifestation itself is located nowhere at all. An interesting side note is that before the shift, as I was walking/moving forward, the sense was that I was a camera/perspective moving within a static world, whereas afterwards, the sense was that it was the world that was moving 'towards' the. now, non-center, if that makes sense.

Yes. Before the shift, the sense is that you as a subject is like a _camera_, having a point of view, or a perspective, upon an already pre-existing set of objects, whether these are your hands or some 'external' object such as a bowl of fruit, and that those have independent existence apart from you, such that they would be there whether you see them or not. But after the shift, there's no longer any sense of perceiving seperate 'objects', already pre-existing - it's rather that the only thing there is, is your own being, and what were once 'objects' is now recognized to be mere impressions of oneself. Like if you have a blanket and it looks like there's something under it making an impression that you can see, but when you lift the blanket there's nothing there. Yes, the sense of I expands, or rather, infuses the entire field of experience. Because at that point you'd no longer see it as a room, within which you are situated, but the room and the kitchen table and the bowl would just be seen as the way in which you're knowing your self - You're literally seeing kitchen tably, fruitbowly and roomly. So no, you're not a piece of fruit then, rather, the bowl of fruit ceases to be a bowl and becomes an aspect of yourself. No, it's not disorienting. I'd say that my functioning in the world on the level of moving around is largely the same, but for the falling away of intentions, as I describe here, but otherwise, simply moving around in the world is mostly the same, it's just that the 'world' is seen differently: Where do my hands go? It's a little like asking, where does the notes in the song go once they've subsided. That would only make sense if the notes are seen as separate things that could be either in or out of the song. But of course, the notes ARE the song, and have no existance apart from it. No, three-dimensionally is the way in which I manifest. It's not an 'illusion', as an 'illusion' implies a situation where subjective experience misrepresents objective reality. But there's no objective reality, so there's nothing to misrepresent. The appearance is the reality. Actually, there's still some identification with the character, although a lot has fallen away over the years ( 8 years since my shift ). Yes, when you shift, your identity shifts as you see clearly that you're _not_ the character; that the character is simply a custome; and you recognize your true nature as the field in which it appears. But, there's still some kind of energetic, emotional involvement in the dreamstate, that I sometimes completely check out of. And that's how I know that there's still involvment in the character, because sometimes I will disconnect from the dreamstate, completely severing that emotional attachment and just look at how the whole thing runs by itself. But then the connection is re-established and my energetic involvement resumes. I can feel though, that over the years this involvement gradually subsides, and I kind of see that the non-involvment is where the whole thing is heading, although I can't know for sure. It's a little scary because I like the involvement. So, at least in my case, the ego didn't magically vanish just because I had an awakening. I know they talk about this, that they had 'downloads' from the universe and stuff like that. I don't know about them, But I did not have anything like that. All my 'knowledge' about these things have been derived from purely philosophical reasoning. I did not gain any intellectual insight from my shift; it was just a new mode of perceiving, moment to moment. I gained insight into my true nature, yes, because I now perceive my true being moment to moment, so that's a kind of insight I suppose. But there was not any download of knowledge like some people claim.

Hello, If anyone is wondering, Andrew pm:ed me and asked beforehand if he could ask me questions, and I agreed, so that's how this whole thing got set up. Well, what is certain is that a shift in perception has occurred. The question is whether that shift is the same that the masters reference when they talk about enlightenment. Of course, you can never fully know, all you can do is compare the facets of this new way of taking things in with what they describe in the literature, and decide whether it matches. In my case, I think it does, but I can't know 100%, of course. But on the other hand, it doesn't matter. What's important isn't that your experience matches up to some standard, but that you're liberated from identification; meaning that you no longer perceive yourself as a self, but you drop identification altogether. And that can only happen when you perceive yourself as nothing in particular, which is exactly the sense you get from the shift; that you're everything in total, which amounts to the same thing as being nothing in particular. How obvious it is? Well, the obvious thing is that I no longer perceive through a 'witness'/subject. After the shift, the field of experiencing is taking itself in without a perceiver perceiving it. When the subject of experience, which is what I, prior to the shift, had identified as, collapsed, the sense of me shifted to encompass the entire field (this is what one refers to when one says that you become one with everything). Now, when I say the field is taking itself in, that doesn't say very much. But what is obvious is that everything is tangibly made out of perceiving as such. Is that you look around you and it's not that the objects are made out of consciousness, but more like that there are no objects, only indentations and ripples in the fabric of myself. And I don't mean myself as as a perceiver of perception (because that is the very subject/witness that vanished in the moment of the shift) but 'myself' as the substance out of which every perception is formed.

Is it happening in an objective sense? No, in the final analysis, there's no objective reality whatsoever. Subjectively? Well, if there's nothing objective, then, logically, there can't be something subjective, as they are defined in terms of each other. Yet something is going on! Mystery!

@Johnny5 You're mistaken. There's no consciousness apart from phenomena. There's no mirror. It's only when phenomena is regarded and contextualized as such that this idea of a witness/source/cause/mirror is born. When phenomena is clearly seen as nothing but non-dual experienc-ing, consciousness is more seen as the substance, while apperances are its form. This is another subtle duality than can be further deconstructed, in the end leaving nothing but "brahman". But brahman isn't something apart from atman, it's just what remains when atman is broken down and seen clearly.

"Imaginary" just means that those perceptions that seem to represent something objectively real aren't really representing anything external at all, since objective reality is merely fictional. Love however, is subjective to begin with; it doesn't appear to reference something external to us in the first place, so the notion of "imaginary" doesn't really apply.

This question of death hinges on the nature of reality. If reality is material/chemical/biological in nature, then death is obviously plausible. If, on the other hand, reality is just perception, then death would merely amount to dream content. When there's no material substrate that can disintegrate, there's really no death to talk about. Of course one could speculate what would unfold within the perceptual substrate after the death event, but death as it's usually thought of, that is, the shutdown of the material perceptual apparatus is a non starter in a reality with no physical substance.