Reality is Not What You See

[Reciprocality]

Reality can not be real except in an infinite regression, instead it is up to us to judge if something is owed a pattern beyond the place it is found (what others call objective), this entity being something that one can bring back (or find) throughout time, or simply being beyond any very particular timeframe is what most people actually mean what they speak of whether something is real, though they do not therefore need to understand that this is what they actually mean.

 

Our everyday perceptions often have these characteristics, and are therefore necessarily real in so far as we have them, in the sense that we actually mean it when we consider it possible for something to be real. It is an enormously absurd undertaking to then consider what you yourself are looking for to be gone when you are staring at it.

 

Are the things we see real beyond us seeing them? Yes, that is what it means if you can independent of any particular time affirm its reality again and again, is it real when we see them, yes so far as they belong to the pattern which is independent of them yet applicable to them alone. This does not imply that we should know what this domain is like in which it is beyond us, instead it implies the opposite, our limitations.

What is curious is that the empirical itself is not the real in our perceptions (for then you would need an infinitely vast knowledge of independent representations of such things), instead certain empirical sensations (say a million shades of purple) will a priori class into a given reality so that you can experience it and judge whether that means it is indeed real as you of course should as testament to your sanity.

 

Seeing is a very ambiguous notion, for it speaks both of the empirical magnitudes of color and light, but also of the things we think of as given us in combination with these very colors and lights constituting perceptions, we may have a perception of a whale under our bed but that will not mean it will actually reappear as a pattern under it when we look there again, nor will it mean that what truly constitutes a whale in the scientific terms will reappear if indeed the very general notion of whale did do so.

You may consider everything real, but that does not change the very difference between a pattern and a coincidence, you coinciding with a given perception of a whale does not constitute the pattern of whales, the pattern owed the typical linguistic notion of reality. So my question to you would be from where does the insistence on calling everything real take roots if every substantial difference remains regardless of what you call it?

 

Edit: As to reality being real as infinite regression, it is regressive because it would be an empty computation, it would be like insisting on saying hellohellohellohihihello when all you actually tried to do is greet someone. IT would be a malfunction, an error of or insistence on non-meaning. Something must be real, for otherwise you could never have even questioned it, so then the question is what it is, this which is real can not be behind what is required for you to question it by that very logic, so then it must be our perceptions, the idea that our perceptions must be independent of us AS a physical thing is the place everyone's mind got trapped somehow, the physical is an assumption we bring over into the precise domain which rendered such things as the physical outside it by being (the domain that is) independent of us.

 

Edited June 14, 2022 by Reciprocality

[SQAAD]

@Leo Gura

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

The self-deception is what keeps you from realizing that you are Absolute.

You are ignoring yourself.

I was watching (again) yesterday your 1st Self-Deception video.

At one part you said (i'm paraphrasing):

''The thing that is deceiving you is God, thus it is infinitely more intelligent than you. It is a self-deception so total that there is nothing to compare it against, therefore it feels real""

What do you meant by ''it feels real''? Isn't it the case that it is real? Since everything i see and feel it is the Absolute Truth.

Can you give me an explanation? Thank you for your time 

Edited June 14, 2022 by SQAAD

[VeganAwake]

7 hours ago, The0Self said:

There is no one who could ever leave perfection even for a single moment. All moments are appearances in THIS. (just THIS, DAMMIT! )

The lie is pretty incredible though -- from its perspective, it seems just plain real, in spite of not actually happening.

Yeah man it's totally all-inclusive. 

Real & unreal 

It doesn't really matter whether the experience feels separate or not..... "There is only whatever seems to be happening". 

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, SQAAD said:

@Leo Gura

I was watching (again) yesterday your 1st Self-Deception video.

At one part you said (i'm paraphrasing):

''The thing that is deceiving you is God, thus it is infinitely more intelligent than you. It is a self-deception so total that there is nothing to compare it against, therefore it feels real""

What do you meant by ''it feels real''? Isn't it the case that it is real? Since everything i see and feel it is the Absolute Truth.

Can you give me an explanation? Thank you for your time 

Raw experience is real and absolute, but all the conceptual overlays you add to that, and how you make sense of it, like with science, is a deception.

[Scholar]

19 hours ago, SQAAD said:

I am watching this video right now. Donald Hoffman makes the argument that reality is hidden somewhere because of evolution. That what we see is not the fundamental truth. And he has some good points too. 

Is he lost too much on the appearance of things and his scientific explanations? What is your opinion on his claims? 

His arguments remind me of Leo's videos about Self-Deception.

He is also a fan of the Consciousness model. But he goes contrary to Leo's teaching that perception is truth.

 

 

It's pretty simple what he is missing. His idea of "Reality is not what you see.", is itself something that he sees, which ironically is what he does not see in this context.

He says, it's all just a fiction, but of course, the idea that it's all just fiction must be, according to his own logic, be part of the fiction. His idea about reality undermines itself, because it undermines the very idea of ideas about reality.

How can you have an idea about reality, if all ideas are a hallucination? What then is even reality, what even is a hallucination, as these two things itself are defined as part of the hallucination. It doesn't seem to me like you can escape this problem.

 

Leo is correct here, it is a basic form of self-deception. All perception is hallucination, yet his little ego conveniently ignores one part of that hallucination, and that calls that fundamental. In the end, it's as absurd as saying "All colors are actually red!". This is why self-awareness is essential for the process of understanding Truth, because the self is all you have, if you do understand and look at the self, you do not even see what understanding is. You don't see what is happening when your mind says "All colors are red!", and that's how your mind can generate these completely absurd understandings, which anyone who has self-awareness will immediately be able to point out.

 

The most important thing you can learn from this is, that you are approaching this from the wrong angle. If you didn't immediately recognize the problem I just pointed out, you lack self-awareness. No understanding in the world can help you, if you do not see understanding for what it actually is. You are like a blind person talking about colors.

Edited June 14, 2022 by Scholar

[Leo Gura]

The core problem is that he wants to unravel the nature of experience/reality/consciousness and yet he is trying to do it using a scientific process without realizing that science is a finite, biased, mental construction, so you cannot grasp Infinity with science. But since he considers himself a "scientist" who is doing "real science" and he wants to be taken seriously by other "real scientists" he is unwittingly beholden to the system. His loyalty is to the human construction of science, not Truth. If his loyalty was to Truth he would deconstruct science. But he doesn't dare to take that radical leap. He doesn't see that such a radical step is necessary. He thinks he can get away without it. But he can't.

What he's missing is Infinity, and what he's missing is a deconstruction of science which I do in my 3 parts series Deconstructing The Myth Of Science. His epistemology is not self-aware enough to allow him to understand the ultimate the nature of reality. He has not jailbroken his own mind.

This is the reason why I did my deconstruction of science series. If you don't deconstruct science you will never awaken and you will never understand what reality or consciousness is.

But you see the problem here? As soon as a scientist deconstructs science he will no longer be taken seriously by other scientists and public intellectuals. And so in this way science maintains its stranglehold of ignorance on the populace.

And he also takes seriously the idea of other consciousnesses, which is duality and dream. Once he deconstructs that he will not even have anyone left to teach.

[ZzzleepingBear]

I think Donald Hoffman has a refreshing angle to what he try to convey. From what I have understood of his theory, is that reality is a non disruptive  mind rendering process, rhater than a fixed reality that remains when we don't pay attention to it.

This suggest that what we call reality is a relationship of participation between what we look at, and our mental and emotional engagement with what we see. Just as we can read fiction and play fictional characters for hours on end, and get lost in the imagnary world despite it's funamental illusory perceptivness.

To dismiss everything he says just because he may identify as a scientist is imo to "throw out the baby with the bathwater."

Donald Hoffmans theory is pretty much the same as Tom Cambells theory. Good stuff, just don't make a religion out of it I'd say.

[Christoph Werner]

I just listened to the podcast also. To me it seems like he's on the right track. He was talking about a theory of everything is impossible, consciousness as being fundamental, and other things you ( Leo ) are talking about. He also talked about practising meditation 3 hours a day since 20 years and studying spiritual traditiones, getting glimpses of no thought and a deep sense of love.

 @Leo Gura  I think he would be very open to your ideas and worldview if you would ever talk to him.

[Leo Gura]

7 minutes ago, Christoph Werner said:

I think he would be very open to your ideas and worldview if you would ever talk to him.

I don't need to talk to him. All my ideas are public.

I am not going to waste my time trying to get a scientist to realize that science is a dream. Such people are not serious truth-seekers.

[Purple Man]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

The core problem is that he wants to unravel the nature of experience/reality/consciousness and yet he is trying to do it using a scientific process without realizing that science is a finite, biased, mental construction,

When trying to go metaphysical, Science has always made the mistake of extracting one finite "object" from the whole plethora of existing "things", and then conceding it a different status than the rest, so it can keep, in a quite naive suspension of desbelief, and by adorning that chosen finite object with the (lack of) qualities of the infinite. the illusion of finding the ultimate in the finite. 

The absurd claim of positivist science that brains generate the Consciousness within which they appear is the best example, one that, by the way, Hoffman does not make.

[Carl-Richard]

You'll miss the point if you only use fuzzy terms like "reality" and "seeing". He and his team has proven mathematically that evolution through natural selection makes it so that biological organisms only perceive their environment as far as it benefits their survival. This is just a rehashing of the idea that the world of sensations/perceptions is illusion/Maya, and that God/reality is transcendent and not limited to it (but that it's also both transcendent and immanent). It's perfectly compatible with non-dual mysticism.

[RMQualtrough]

25 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

You'll miss the point if you only use fuzzy terms like "reality" and "seeing". He and his team has proven mathematically that evolution through natural selection makes it so that biological organisms only perceive their environment as far as it benefits their survival. This is just a rehashing of the idea that the world of sensations/perceptions is illusion/Maya, and that God/reality is transcendent and not limited to it (but that it's also both transcendent and immanent). It's perfectly compatible with non-dual mysticism.

It should be provable with basic logic... There's actually a really good book which does this. It's called "Refuting the External World" by Goran Buckland.

The premise of the book is that this guy is talking to a naive realist friend called "Walt".

 

Quote

"Our experience must inescapably be molded according to the nature of our apparatus for experiencing, which is the source of that experience, and must therefore ultimately determine the form, shape and characteristics of the perceptions that comes out of it," is how I put it. "In other words," I plow on, "the sky is blue—not wet, hard or noisy—solely because our apparatus for experiencing makes it so!" He’s silent, grinding it out in his head. Common sense tells us that our experience conforms to what’s out there; that we’re seeing an accurate representation of the real world; that objects exist more or less as we perceive them. This talk about our sensorial apparatus being responsible for the form of our experience? Crazy! But how could it be otherwise? If we were to assume that our apprehension of things was unmediated, that is to say, that we were seeing them just as they are, we would have to concede that the actual world is really made out of the colors that we see and the sounds that we hear and the sensations that we feel.

Our experience must inescapably take the forms determined by the nature of the apparatus through which it appears, with the result that the forms of objects as they appear to us are necessarily different from those of the objects themselves. That is, an object in itself cannot possibly have the form assumed by its corresponding appearance in experience, since that form is nothing but the ways in which our apparatus for experiencing renders that object apparent. And so, we can be sure that objects as they are in themselves are exactly not as they appear to us.

By this point it's about a quarter in? So he has already differentiated qualia from what scientists believe is out there etc IIRC.

Edited June 14, 2022 by RMQualtrough

[UnbornTao]

Perception is indirect. Is that what the title is referring to? Senses themselves are inventions -- biological ones.

Science can't discover what reality is because it is a human invention and its function is investigating and testing objective facts (relative domain).

The only way is through direct consciousness. A dogmatic scientist, being unwilling to deconstruct science, won't discover what's true because truth isn't confined to any human activity, the way science is.

[gettoefl]

consciousness is, how much of reality you see

for example if you're functioning as an ego namely ego consciousness when you use your eyes, they are only showing part of what is there

it shows you what you need to survive ... your mind evolved over eons to do precisely this ... you don't need to see the rest so just forget about it no disrespect to the present website

once you get up to the next level which is cosmic consciousness also known as oneness, you see it different

Edited June 14, 2022 by gettoefl

[The0Self]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

I don't need to talk to him. All my ideas are public.

I am not going to waste my time trying to get a scientist to realize that science is a dream. Such people are not serious truth-seekers.

From what I've seen from him... Yeah, he's a scientist, but he's implied many times that science might not have the ability to arrive at truth. I would agree though that he hasn't been a serious truth-seeker, considering he's meditated and "sought truth" for 20 years and apparently isn't awake. He could be now though (a serious truth-seeker). From the moment one becomes a serious truth-seeker, it's only a matter of time -- a couple years at most --  to awaken.

Edited June 14, 2022 by The0Self

[Carl-Richard]

5 hours ago, RMQualtrough said:

It should be provable with basic logic...

Every little helps.

[Gesundheit2]

7 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

The core problem is that he wants to unravel the nature of experience/reality/consciousness

Maybe the core problem it that he doesn't really want to unravel the nature of experience/reality/consciousness.

Half-ass = no ass.

[amanen]

Absolute Truth is completely direct and has nothing to do with evolution.

Your mind is full of conceptual interpretations of Absolute Truth, and these extra layers are extra baggage that keep you from seeing the truth.

There are no colors, there are no objects, there are no other people, there is no brain, you do not see because you have eyes, you never are a complete body at the same time (because your direct experience never contains your full 'body'), and so on. If you believe even in one of those things, you have too much conceptual baggage. And that is just a few examples.

Stick completely to your direct experience if you want truth.

[Razard86]

On 6/13/2022 at 9:18 PM, The0Self said:

Well... Having read this, it is clear that you have either misunderstood my words, or responded to the wrong person. No big deal.

(You are preaching to the choir, so to speak.)

Of course it's a pointer. I even stated as much. The wall that "I am aware of" isn't real -- that does not mean that on the same level there isn't a wall period. There just aren't any boundaries or separation. Nor is there an agent who moves through time -- that's illusory; an appearance which can stop appearing by virtue of never having been (simply the nature of the false).

Of course it's real, obviously. It's just not true. Regarding everything of which you are aware as unreal or not-me or 'not what I'm looking for' is simply a technique (really a special technique that doubles as a pointer) to short-circuit the contracted/bound energy and open up boundless consciousness -- which is where direct insight can occur. That's it. Very simple. Yeah, there are people here who seem to attempt to tell others the truth about the nature of truth, but clearly that's a fool's errand and actually impossible anyway. I can just tell them how to enter territory where the direct insight is, but I can't actually show it to them or make them see it. It's entirely beyond belief or understanding anyway.

The body will never transcend the body, obviously -- You're speaking as if you're under the impression that many people here are under the impression that the body can indeed transcend the body. But the body is not what I am.

But even prior to awakening, one can cultivate so much samadhi, bodily pain is amazingly not an issue. In fact, if you can be with any sensation in the body with no problem, you're invincible. Because even emotional pain is actually just the mind's interpretation (via hiding) of sensations in the body -- not seeing that is one of the primary blocks to awakening.

In other words, there is no illusion.

 

My bad so I am preaching to the choir. Then let us sing in unison.

Edited June 22, 2022 by Razard86