What Are My Eyes For?

[Nahm]

@LastThursday

If there’s an “I” (subject), then it follows that “energy” is an ‘object’ (that there is “energy”), except when the “I” is consciousness (realized). Likewise, there is an “I” before enlightenment, except after seeing (infinity). Also yes, just weird. 

[LastThursday]

2 hours ago, Gesundheit said:

It amuses me how some people can miss the actual question op is asking. The question is what's form for? People answer that form is formlessness. Okay, but the question is still there. Form is something that can be perceived as either distinct, or indistinct from formlessness. The question is about the perception of the distinct form, not the indistinct. Can anyone answer that? Or do you not know but just like to participate?

Quite.

I picked the question because materialism has a very clear answer (the eyes do the seeing). Whereas in subjective idealism it doesn't: eyes are simply phenomena within consciousness and seemingly have no use, since they are not the primary means of experience (consciousness itself is). So how can a subset of experience (eyes/eyelids), be affecting a super-set of experience (seeing)?

Bringing in "form" is akin to bringing in objects from materialism - so I find it unsatisfactory as an answer. After all "form" is still within consciousness (a subset) and hence not primary.

Anyway. I have no clear answer. But I thought it was a fun question nonetheless. Maybe it is just God's way of tricking itself?

Edited November 6, 2020 by LastThursday

[Zigzag Idiot]

10 hours ago, LastThursday said:

That is of course swapping one sub-modality for another. I need to become reacquainted with my friend Don Juan, he was a blast.

I suppose the deeper point is that the six senses are not separate, they are simply distinctions in the flow of experience. The Assemblage point is the "distinction engine" of experience. Shift that, and the whole of experience shifts with it. I suppose taking psychadelics and other practices such as meditation shift the Assemblage point - maybe even permanently.

I guess eyes and ears and skin etc, are only associated with the sub-modalities of experience simply because of their greater correlation. So, what I mean is, I associate my eyes with seeing, because their behaviour is correlated more closely with the "seeing" part of experience, same with ears and so on. But as I've had drilled into me: correlation is not causation. Maybe in your case the feeling and seeing parts of experience have become intermingled (you have lost the distinction over time).

 

 

@LastThursday In trying to describe my felt experience, the Castaneda quote below seems to apply in that it's maybe between what's felt as a part of my perception and the abstract,,, causing me to become confused and tongue tied. ?

"Words are tremendously powerful and important and are the magical property of whoever has them. Sorcerers have a rule of thumb: they say that the deeper the assemblage point moves, the greater the feeling that one has knowledge and no words to explain it. Sometimes the assemblage point of average persons can move without a known cause and without their being aware of it, except that they become tongue-tied, confused, and evasive."

10 hours ago, LastThursday said:

I need to become reacquainted with my friend Don Juan, he was a blast.

 I'm leaving this link you might enjoy. This guy has extracted Don Juan's Teaching out of the narrative of Castaneda's books. Don't really care for his MP3 recordings but the text he provides is fun to read.

https://www.prismagems.com/castaneda/djintro.html

[Fadl]

On 3/11/2020 at 10:36 AM, LastThursday said:

What role does the idea of "my eyes" have on my subjective experience? What are they for? Why are they correlated with vision?

What a sophisticated question!!! just close your eyes and try to live like that for 30 minutes and you will know the answer. 

[peachboy]

3 hours ago, LastThursday said:

Maybe it is just God's way of tricking itself?

If infinite consciousness has the potential for all permutations of experience, it might just be a seemingly random experimental variable that becomes ultimately attractive due to its discovered ability to maintain ignorance for longer.

Not necessarily a direct conspiracy. Rather, an initial quirk of state that keeps the state stable, and therefore becomes attractive to God.

And then there are other subtle variables, such as the romantic dimension of finding pleasure in someone else's eyes.

Such finer melodies are the delicacies of our neverending story.

[Carl-Richard]

You have to distinguish between sensation and experience. Normally, you do require functioning sensory apparatuses to have a particular sensation (sight, smell, touch etc.), but the experience of this sensation is not bound by anything. Infact, the sensory apparatuses along with the sensations they produce only happen "within" experience. If you want to be really careful, it seems like sensory apparatuses do cause sensations in certain situations (that is most of the time), but they don't cause experience. Sensations come and go, but experience always is.

Edited November 7, 2020 by Carl-Richard

[Gesundheit]

5 hours ago, LastThursday said:

Quite.

I picked the question because materialism has a very clear answer (the eyes do the seeing). Whereas in subjective idealism it doesn't: eyes are simply phenomena within consciousness and seemingly have no use, since they are not the primary means of experience (consciousness itself is). So how can a subset of experience (eyes/eyelids), be affecting a super-set of experience (seeing)?

Bringing in "form" is akin to bringing in objects from materialism - so I find it unsatisfactory as an answer. After all "form" is still within consciousness (a subset) and hence not primary.

Anyway. I have no clear answer. But I thought it was a fun question nonetheless. Maybe it is just God's way of tricking itself?

Exactly. I don't like it when we attach the term "truth" to either materialism or idealism or anything else. I believe all models exist because they serve certain purposes, but that's their limit. They're just tools for deeper manipulation. Then people start attaching to one model against all others, and they call their model absolute truth and primary, and all other models BS and secondary. Idk at this point it just seems underdeveloped and unsophisticated to me.

Edited November 7, 2020 by Gesundheit

[Reciprocality]

1 hour ago, Gesundheit said:

Exactly. I don't like it when we attach the term "truth" to either materialism or idealism or anything else. I believe all models exist because they serve certain purposes, but that's their limit. They're just tools for deeper manipulation. Then people start attaching to one model against all others, and they call their model absolute truth and primary, and all other models BS and secondary. Idk at this point it just seems underdeveloped and unsophisticated to me.

And then again, so are you doing concluding on the subject matter at all. It can not be otherwise.

This is a postmodern fallacy of expectations, YOU are the one expecting something rigid, definable, understandable, categorical, stratificational for knowledge to BE at all, its only that truth adheres not to your rules. This is postmodernism being the ultimate materialism, dualism, empericism, epistemological realism, by a simple fallacy of expectation. 

The yellow postmodernist will understand that he can not conclude a positive due to those negatives, some of the french philosophers understood this, and would never have claimed any set abstractions (in its relation to any other set) to be "neccesary" or "neccesarily not", only "not neccesarily".

There is ofcourse a second layer to it, in which the "not neccesarily" itself is questioned as "not neccesarily", giving place for epistemological absurdism. Which can function as premises for ethical absurdism, and make one nihilistic. 

[Gesundheit]

@Reciprocality I am not very experienced in philosophical terminology. Can you explain what you said in simpler terms?

[tsuki]

8 hours ago, LastThursday said:

11 hours ago, Gesundheit said:

It amuses me how some people can miss the actual question op is asking. The question is what's form for? People answer that form is formlessness. Okay, but the question is still there. Form is something that can be perceived as either distinct, or indistinct from formlessness. The question is about the perception of the distinct form, not the indistinct. Can anyone answer that? Or do you not know but just like to participate?

Quite.

I picked the question because materialism has a very clear answer (the eyes do the seeing). Whereas in subjective idealism it doesn't: eyes are simply phenomena within consciousness and seemingly have no use, since they are not the primary means of experience (consciousness itself is). So how can a subset of experience (eyes/eyelids), be affecting a super-set of experience (seeing)?

Bringing in "form" is akin to bringing in objects from materialism - so I find it unsatisfactory as an answer. After all "form" is still within consciousness (a subset) and hence not primary.

Anyway. I have no clear answer. But I thought it was a fun question nonetheless. Maybe it is just God's way of tricking itself?

@Gesundheit @LastThursday Are we discussing philosophy (idealism vs materialism), or reality? Because it is not that formlessness is more primary than form (as per idealism), or that form is more primary than formlessness. Formlessness is form and form is formlessness. The fact that there is a conscious individual with the finite mind does not exclude the existence of God that imagines all form along with the person. The person is not conscious of the way in which various dimensions of his experience of a single object are coherent. He is also not conscious of the way in which the experience of a the same object it is coherent for other people so that consensus can be established. But this coherence is form. It is neither materialist, nor idealist. It is idealist only in the sense that reality is mind, but it is not the individual mind!

As for the question of the purpose of form, why is it so puzzling that eyes can give rise to sight? The body is a contraction of consciousness, so are eyes, and so is sight. Sight is telescopic, based on distinctions. Is it so weird that if you were to lose your eyes, or your body, you would actually see more, beyond the possibility of recognition? Because what is the loss of sight? It is definitely not seeing black. But what is the experience of true colorlessness, other than everything, infinity? To experience form, is to experience coherence and locality. To have form means to be finite. Yet, formlessness is infinite in its possibility of differentiation, that there is really no end to it. 

No complete philosophy can be made out of it, as philosophy is finite.

[Reciprocality]

3 hours ago, Gesundheit said:

@Reciprocality I am not very experienced in philosophical terminology. Can you explain what you said in simpler terms?

I can try, but the chances it will make adequate sense becomes smaller, and the quantity of words multiply.

Of all those things i said, the scenario of negatives as positives are the important one.

 

Lets say person A have faith in god, more specific a faith in some creator which within its creation planted all human and elsewise metaphysical potential.

Person B says that person A is wrong, for person B believes that the universe had no plan, antithetical to person A, and is therefore a disbelief.

Then comes person C along, who do not believe that either is wrong, nor do he believe that either is correct. He believes Person A and B are "uneccesarily" correct, not a disbelief, but a non-belief. 

When you think someones beliefs are too improper you do not only have "non-belief" of their belief, but you have a disbelief. A disbelief is itself a positive, it is A BELIEF of somethings validity, while a "non-belief" is not, and i add: by its definition.

I tried to explain that your disbelief of "meta-narratives" are itself a meta-narrative, if you had only a non-belief of the persons meta narrative you could IMPOSSIBLE conclude that it were improper.

Meta narratives are the all "isms", and those that you specifically refuted.

 

edit: Now i could be challanged on many things i have written here, and if something seems off then i welcome you to "destroy" it. : )

edit2: If you take my words as premises you shortly after will be able to conclude that all interactions, all acts, all concepts are derivative of beliefs, further showing you that metanarratives are everywhere. The yellow postmodern beauty is when those are teared down or when many believes are changed with hypotheticals/openmindedness, so that when somebody comes along and tells you they believe death is a construction you can answer: yes indeed it could be, and indeed it could be that it is not. Not NEEDING it to be either or, as you will see many do.

Edited November 7, 2020 by Reciprocality

[Nahm]

“Sub sets” & “super-sets” known by a knower, unseen by a seer.

[Reciprocality]

12 minutes ago, Nahm said:

“Sub sets” & “super-sets” known by a knower, unseen by a seer.

Quite the interesting subset to take into consideration

[LastThursday]

23 minutes ago, Nahm said:

“Sub sets” & “super-sets” known by a knower, unseen by a seer.

The tail wagging the dog. Or the tail is the dog?

[Nahm]

@LastThursday

I don’t know.

[LastThursday]

3 hours ago, tsuki said:

Are we discussing philosophy (idealism vs materialism), or reality?

I hope I'm not being provocative: is there a difference? Any discussion about reality is a metaphysics a.k.a. philosophy. And we each have our own personal flavour of metaphysics.

4 hours ago, tsuki said:

As for the question of the purpose of form, why is it so puzzling that eyes can give rise to sight?

Strictly that isn't my original question. My original question is why do eyes affect my sight? Or more accurately, why is there a correlation between the two?

It is a given that consciousness itself gives rise to sight (in my metaphysics), but in turn it's not obvious why then eyes should "modulate" what happens to sight - being that eyes are in the experience of sight (and other primary experiences). As I mentioned above, the tail is wagging the dog. Why?

4 hours ago, tsuki said:

Is it so weird that if you were to lose your eyes, or your body, you would actually see more, beyond the possibility of recognition? Because what is the loss of sight? It is definitely not seeing black.

Not really, if sight is primary in the first place. Even if the form of "eyes" are somehow constricting the experience of seeing, that still doesn't answer as to the "why?". What is the strange connection between the form of eyes and sight itself?

[Corpus]

I think the autostereogram is quite handy for considering concept vs distinction and is pretty apt for this thread.

Concept- visualizing a 3D illusion from a 2D image - but be alert to the fact that this concept is "composed of a series" of distinctions.

Distinction- to precede the Concept, look at the following and get it.

If you don't get it then the concept remains a concept; if you do get it then the distinction is "created" in your experience.

 

[LastThursday]

@Corpus cool. And go one step further. What is creating the distinction once you "get it"?

[Corpus]

2 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

@Corpus cool. And go one step further. What is creating the distinction once you "get it"?

I could answer this in several ways- and these too would be distinctions. If I was minded to be "non-dual", "I" could say "Nothing" or "That" or "Consciousness". I could also say the perceptive apparatus which is another distinction. Or I could admit that I don't know. Nevertheless, whichever of the 3 options suggested, consciousness is not separate from any of them. These bloody distinctions are the whole of what is experienced- there is no escape….

[Adamq8]

@tsuki beautiful mate! This is what ive also arrived at after intense contemplation and direct experience!