How come absolute consciousness has no opposites?

[arlin]

5 minutes ago, SoonHei said:

How did you like his pointers? He'll give you nothing to hang on to

Is leo talking about what he is talking about but in a different perspective?

 

@Serotoninluv A clear explanation. Now if i am confused about non duality, i will look at a coin ahahah. Thank you.

 

That coin is consciousness you say?

[SoonHei]

@arlin they are all talking about the same thing

different facets of it.

like that blind men touching the elephant and describing how it is... all describing the same giant thing but different parts of it.

 

what he talks about as this being UNKNOWING is same as what others call not-knowing... or living in the now... not knowing what's to come next.

 

if i were to play a music piece for you on a piano. a song you've never heard before. you'd be in a state of unknowing... you would be totally present. not knowing what sound comes next

now take that and apply it to life itself. living spontaneously each moment... and how does one do that? but turning off the subtitles... the commentary..

 

what are the subtitles/commentary.

it is thoughts... ideas...

it is the mind.

 

be a witness onto your life. a witness simply witnesses... and is not involved. like an audience member watching a movie.

[arlin]

5 minutes ago, SoonHei said:

they are all talking about the same thing

different facets of it.

So basically, jim and tony only focus on one facet. 

Leo talks about the love aspect, the intelligent design, etc.

But when i listen to him saying that, i conceptualize it wit my mind. So he is talking about a love that is unknowable to the ego (As long as you are alive). Or an intelligence that is unknowable.

Did i get it?

But because i say to myself: "Why does leo talk about love, or intelligence, or purpose"?  Isn't this just the ego trying to achieve "Something" else to feel whole and complete, so just furthering the misunderstanding that THIS is already whole and complete?

[SoonHei]

13 minutes ago, arlin said:

"Why does leo talk about love, or intelligence, or purpose"?  Isn't this just the ego trying to achieve "Something" else to feel whole and complete,

 

focus on the BOLDED part.

Isn't THAT also the EGO?

 

 

also. it's not that the EGO is not you.

it is very much you. but it is a limited you.

since YOU are everything. you are also the EGO.

 

and you must have heard, the ego cannot get this.

and the ego cannot get that it cannot get this.

so it keeps trying to get it.

and when it gets tired of trying to get it... what was being looked for to be understood is found.

 

ego trying to get it is like someone searching for the dark using a flashlight. the flashlight ON and searching is what is keeping the one looking for darkness from finding it. so when the battery in the flashlight finally dies out... what's being looked for, is found.

[arlin]

@SoonHei  Exellent explanation, thank you!

[Forestluv]

9 minutes ago, arlin said:

 

@Serotoninluv A clear explanation. Now if i am confused about non duality, i will look at a coin ahahah. Thank you.

 

That coin is consciousness you say?

The nonduality is that there is One coin that contains Everything about the coin. Any description of the coin is the coin. We can create all sorts of dualities: For example, one side of the coin is silver, the other side is copper. Yet the silver and copper are the One coin. 

As you suggested, there is a trap of opposites. Imagine a person is conditioned for thirty years to see the coin as either Heads or Tails. They debate throughout there life about Head-ness or Tail-ness. They identify as a "Heads-seer" and want to marry another "Heads-seer". They are raised to believe that anyone who sees the Tails-side as being immoral. They want to raise their children to be good, moral "Head-seers". . .

Now imagine after thirty years of opposition conditioning and identifying as a "Heads-seer" a person get sick and tired of all the inner turmoil and inter-personal conflict. They might do some spiritual work and realize "Omigosh, it's all One coin. I am creating Heads and Tails. There is no Heads and Tails!!". . . This awakening of nonduality is a major step forward, yet the mind will create a whole new duality. The mind will think "There is the One Coin vs. Heads/Tails". This is creating a new duality of nonduality vs. duality. The person may now think "I am a *One-Coin-Seer*, not  Heads-Tails-Seer. There is no Heads-Tails. The Heads-Tail seers are delusional". . . The next stage is the collapse of the dual construct of nonduality vs. duality. . . There is realization that there is the One Coin and Heads-Tails.  . . 

Most emphasis is placed on awakening to the nonduality of One Coin because the vast majority of humans are conditioned to see Heads vs. Tails. The nondual awareness and embodiment of One Coin is a major development. If 99% of the people haven't become aware of the nondual stage, that is where most of the effort should go. . . Few humans have nondual awareness/embodiment, even fewer have reached the collapse of nondual vs. dual. . . And there is another stage after this. . . Yet there is a problem trying to communicate two stages in advance. . . For example, imagine we are with a person that sees Heads vs. Tails and is unaware it is the same coin. For this person we need to point out that Heads and Tails are One Coin. We can't jump two stages ahead and point out that One Coin vs. Heads/Tails is also a duality because the person hasn't yet become aware of One Coin. 

[SoonHei]

@arlin the seeking is what is in the way.

but this doesn't mean to stop seeking prematurely.

the fish in the water can never find the water if it's looking for it.
but if it hears this and stops searching for it... that's not finding the water, that would be giving up... the search will stop once it realizes that the water was always here and now and everywhere... once it knows what water is... "water" is a concept it has heard but doesn't know what it is. 

so the search will end once you also know what's being looked for.

meanwhile concepts/ideas aren't bad. they act as pointers... and that's why the work is very important, meditation, practices etc

 

watch out for the ego stopping the search  

keep going! until you arrive - and then you will see you never left.

 

Edited October 30, 2019 by SoonHei

[arlin]

17 minutes ago, Serotoninluv said:

Few humans have nondual awareness/embodiment, even fewer have reached the collapse of nondual vs. dual.

Yeah, non dual vs dual was another thing i was confused about... Thank you for making me see clearly how the mind works. I now understand it's impossible to understand it in a conceptual level because this creates another duality, in a duality of a duality etc...

However, the truth will always be that there is one coin. No matter how you put it, right?

So if everything in existence is contained within my awareness: Coin= Awareness

So in trying to conceptually understand it my mind creates another duality. That is Awareness vs No awareness

But that takes place within awareness! So this is the point i was missing!

Did i get it?

Then the question comes: If you say non duality is something i can not understand, how come you can explain it to me and i can understand it?

But that creates a duality of understanding vs. Non understanding

 

And that takes place within... Awareness!

 

Did i get it?

[arlin]

@SoonHei

Yeah complete  paradoxes here. Fucking with my mind.

Of course i will continue searching. This is what the me does. It is seeking itself, cannot do anything else  

Can't escape it.

Edited October 30, 2019 by arlin

[Forestluv]

@arlin You are asking great questions. . . 

4 hours ago, arlin said:

I now understand it's impossible to understand it in a conceptual level because this creates another duality, in a duality of a duality etc...

A concept is dual in the sense that one concept is not another concept. A concept is nondual in the sense that every thing is inter-connected into Everything. 

4 hours ago, arlin said:

However, the truth will always be that there is one coin. No matter how you put it, right?

Truth contains no opposites and all opposites. The Truth is zero, one, two, three, four. . . into infinity. Nothing = Everything.

Tell me one thing that isn't Everything. . . 

4 hours ago, arlin said:

So if everything in existence is contained within my awareness: Coin= Awareness

So in trying to conceptually understand it my mind creates another duality. That is Awareness vs No awareness

In addition to the Awareness vs No Awareness duality, there are various other dualities in your statement: conceptual vs non-conceptual, understanding vs non-understanding, my vs. not-my, creation vs non-creation. Every word/idea is dualistic because it has an opposite. And there are an infinite number of inter-connections within the duality. For example, what is Awareness vs. No Awareness? What is awareness? Is there 100% Awareness? Can there be different degrees of Awareness? Can someone be partially aware? Are there different forms of awareness? . . . There is nothing wrong with such dualities and questions. Yet they will eventually collapse into Nothing and Everything. Just like all sandcastles collapse back into the beach. 

4 hours ago, arlin said:

But that takes place within awareness! So this is the point i was missing!

Within the construct you are creating, yes it does take place in awareness. That is a nice insight. 

4 hours ago, arlin said:

Did i get it?

From one perspective, yes - it has been gotten. From another perspective, there is no "it" to get, since there is no "not it" to contrast "it" with. 

4 hours ago, arlin said:

Then the question comes: If you say non duality is something i can not understand, how come you can explain it to me and i can understand it?

The construct of nonduality can be explained and understood. Yet Everything is not understood. For understanding, we need to create some "thing" to be understood. For example, no one understands what glafdin is. To understand this, the mind would need to create a construct of what "glafdin" is. If there is no construct of glafdin, there is nothing to be understood. 

The intellect and conceptualization is limited. The intellect/conceptualization is within something. If there is intellectual/conceptual understanding, there must be non-intellectual/non-conceptualization understanding. Here, direct experience is King. So all the words appearing here are partial "pointers". 

For example: the collapse of the duality of dual vs. nondual raises another duality: the duality of the collapse of duality between dual and nondual vs. the non-collapse of duality between dual and nondual. . . . The collapse of this duality introduces another duality: The duality of the collapse of the duality between the duality of dual vs. nondual vs. the non-collapse of the duality between the duality of dual. The collapse of this duality introduces another duality. . . This continues on infinitely into Nothing = Everything. This highlights the limits of intellect/concepts.  

[Bluff]

In order to have difference there would have to be two things where there is only one

[arlin]

@Serotoninluv  your answers are absolutely fantastic.

As always, i have to read it through a bunch of times.

Thank you soo much!!!

[Nahm]

@arlin

It might be helpful to look at this like duality is not in the mind, but in the body. In the sense, there is one body, and it knows it is one, and it feels the dualities within it and is always naturally allowing them out. This can help with attention on feeling, rather than thinking, and allowing rather than ‘figuring it out’, connecting with intuition. What the body is organically releasing, the mind can tend to ‘hold onto’, using “i have to understand it” as a way to not really see it, not allowing the release. You might see it like the duality in the body only wants to have attention from you, it just wants to be seen. Once it is, it parts ways very naturally. Seeing that duality is in the body, positions the mind to simply observe & witness the departing, rather than analyzing it - which is a ‘holding’ on to it (with the attention).

This also begins to reframe the biggest picture of relating to life, realizing the body is always in a state of naturally healing. (That there is a source of that healing). Meditation could be seen as simply setting aside time for this natural purification, without any need to ‘face anything’. Just being with the universe so to speak, and the creating & loving order of it.

Also, it can be really helpful to write a perspective down, and write the opposite perspective next to it. Then label them by writing how each perspective feels, using one word. Getting it ‘out of the head’ and in front of the eyes can make it much easier to see that there is some truth in each perspective, but there is one clearly preferred in terms of how it feels to you. All dualities to be released are unique to you, and your feelings.  

[Forestluv]

1 hour ago, arlin said:

@Serotoninluv  

As always, i have to read it through a bunch of times.

Writing the last paragraph of all the layers fried my brain. . . My mind then collapsed into nothingness. Lol. 

[arlin]

@Serotoninluv

Ahahahahaha

8 hours ago, Nahm said:

@arlin

It might be helpful to look at this like duality is not in the mind, but in the body. In the sense, there is one body, and it knows it is one, and it feels the dualities within it and is always naturally allowing them out. This can help with attention on feeling, rather than thinking, and allowing rather than ‘figuring it out’, connecting with intuition. What the body is organically releasing, the mind can tend to ‘hold onto’, using “i have to understand it” as a way to not really see it, not allowing the release. You might see it like the duality in the body only wants to have attention from you, it just wants to be seen. Once it is, it parts ways very naturally. Seeing that duality is in the body, positions the mind to simply observe & witness the departing, rather than analyzing it - which is a ‘holding’ on to it (with the attention).

This also begins to reframe the biggest picture of relating to life, realizing the body is always in a state of naturally healing. (That there is a source of that healing). Meditation could be seen as simply setting aside time for this natural purification, without any need to ‘face anything’. Just being with the universe so to speak, and the creating & loving order of it.

Also, it can be really helpful to write a perspective down, and write the opposite perspective next to it. Then label them by writing how each perspective feels, using one word. Getting it ‘out of the head’ and in front of the eyes can make it much easier to see that there is some truth in each perspective, but there is one clearly preferred in terms of how it feels to you. All dualities to be released are unique to you, and your feelings.  

Yeah, nice suggestion. I will definetly try to write it down!

You are right about the mind trying to hold on. In fact i agree that working with the body is definetly key to healing.

[arlin]

13 hours ago, Serotoninluv said:

13 hours ago, Serotoninluv said:

Within the construct you are creating, yes it does take place in awareness. That is a nice insight. 

 

So in this case, saying that i got it would be to say that duality is true. 

But we must communicate this way otherwise we can t understand each other. That's why i had to create that construct. 

13 hours ago, Serotoninluv said:

From another perspective, there is no "it" to get, since there is no "not it" to contrast "it" with. 

This can be realized through direct experience. As you said, it is king. (Enlightenment?) 

 

13 hours ago, Serotoninluv said:

The construct of nonduality can be explained and understood.

However it is still a construct. And a construct must be dual. So we can go on around from here on in circles, or we can stop and say: "Well, it ultimately must collapse in nothing=everything."

 

13 hours ago, Serotoninluv said:

If there is intellectual/conceptual understanding, there must be non-intellectual/non-conceptualization understanding.

This is something abvious i have not thought about in this terms, even if it's abvious ahahah

 

14 hours ago, Serotoninluv said:

This highlights the limits of intellect/concepts. 

So i can have a very different "understanding" of reality, and talk about it the same way that you do, buy we actually mean different things. 

That s why i can t understand, no matter how much we seem to talk about it or even to agree about it. 

[Forestluv]

5 hours ago, arlin said:

So in this case, saying that i got it would be to say that duality is true. 

All words, language, concepts, images, things are dualistic. If there is a "thing", then there must be something that "thing" is not. Any "thing" separated from One Everything is dualistic.  If there is a "thing", there is a "not thing". If we say there is a thing called a chicken, then there must be non-chickens for contrast. If we say there is a thing called blue, there must be non-blue for contrast. If we say there is nonduality, there is duality for contrast.

Yet all words, language, concepts, images, things are also nondualistic. All things are One Everything. It all IS. There is no thing that is not Everything. Everything is every thing. So all words, language, concepts, images are Everything, just like a bird chirp, sunset, knee pain, confusion, selfish thoughts, tuna sandwiches, ESP, lucid dreaming, NDEs, psychedelic experiences, astral projection, budhhism, hinduism, perception, theory are also Everything.  

5 hours ago, arlin said:

But we must communicate this way otherwise we can t understand each other. That's why i had to create that construct. 

All communication is dual in the sense that what is communicated is not what is non-communicated. And all communication is also nondual in the sense that all communication is Everything. We don't step outside of Everything, point and say "That stuff over there is Everything".

Creating constructs is one form of communication. This generally involves the intellect. Yet there are other ways of communication. Most human communication is nonverbal - yet we are not aware of it. It is mostly subconscious communication. Most communication is nonverbal: tone of voice, facial expressions, body language etc. As well, there are other modes of communication via energetics, empathy, intuition, a smile. . . I've done eye gazing with sessions in which we gaze in each others eyes for 5-10min. and let all thoughts dissolve. It is amazing what can be communicated and learned about another person. Yet it's not something that is figured out. After the session, you can't really say "Wow, let's make sense of what happened". I suppose you could, yet this would be a recontextualization.

5 hours ago, arlin said:

This can be realized through direct experience. As you said, it is king. (Enlightenment?) 

Yes, much can be realized through direct experience. Thinking and conceptualizing is a small part of what is available. Imagine going 20min. without a single thought. Will there still be happenings? Of course. There are happenings of Now. And a whole new world opens up. It's amazing  what can be learned and understood without a single thought. 

I generally don't like using the term "enlightenment". It can be helpful as motivation for spiritual practice, personal development and communication. Yet there is a tendency for people to create an "enlightenment story". The self gets immersed in this enlightenment story, creates an imaginary thing called "enlightenment" and starts viewing things/people as being enlightened or unenlightened. I find this to be a distraction, yet others like it. 

6 hours ago, arlin said:

However it is still a construct. And a construct must be dual. So we can go on around from here on in circles, or we can stop and say: "Well, it ultimately must collapse in nothing=everything."

Yes. All theory, concepts, constructs etc are eventually circular and deconstruct to Nothing = Everything. Yet constructs have practical value to the person/human. Yet this realization is liberating because it dissolves attachment/identification to constructs. Like a sandcastle. Once one realizes the sandcastle they are building will eventually be deconstructed to the beach, this can allow letting go of attachment/identification to the sandcastle. This can be scary, it can be liberating. 

6 hours ago, arlin said:

So i can have a very different "understanding" of reality, and talk about it the same way that you do, buy we actually mean different things. 

That s why i can t understand, no matter how much we seem to talk about it or even to agree about it. 

This is what makes human connection so special. Imagine a "knowing" that can't be explained through words and concepts. We can try, yet it is difficult. Yet when there is a shared knowing of the ineffible, it's really meaningful. And it's not just sharing theoretical models (although that can be fun too). . . Yesterday, a student was trying to communicate her experiences with anxiety and panic disorder. She quickly stopped, sighed and said "It's really hard to explain, no one understands". I told her I also had experience with anxiety/panic and said "for me, it's kinda like XYZ". Her eyes opened wide and she replied "Yea, that's sorta like it. It's also kinda like ABC". Then my eyes got wide opened as I said "Yea, that's another good way to say it". The energetics between us totally changed. We weren't trying to intellectually build a construct of what anxiety/panic is. Rather, we both had direct experience with anxiety/panic and were trying our best to communicate it through words. Yet most of it wasn't through words. It was also the way we looked at each other and the energetics between us. We fumbled around with words trying to point to it, yet the understanding had nothing to do with the construct. The understanding wasn't a thought construct of what anxiety/panic it - the understanding was the knowing of the direct experience. And there was a "knowing" present. We each knew that each other knew. At the end, I don't her "You are the first person I've shared this with that *gets it*. She smiled and replied "Me too". . . This is a different mode of beingness and it is really special in terms of human connection. 

[SoonHei]

9 minutes ago, Serotoninluv said:

Rather, we both had direct experience with anxiety/panic and were trying our best to communicate it through words. Yet most of it wasn't through words. It was also the way we looked at each other and the energetics between us. We fumbled around with words trying to point to it, yet the understanding had nothing to do with the construct. The understanding wasn't a thought construct of what anxiety/panic it - the understanding was the knowing of the direct experience. And there was a "knowing" present. We each knew that each other knew.

 nice

[arlin]

@Serotoninluv yeah nice story, thank you for sharing! 

[VeganAwake]

The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite. This Course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:

     Nothing real can be threatened.
     Nothing unreal exists.

Herein lies the peace of God.”- A Course In Miracles