Cogito ergo sum

[Someone here]

 I Will try to explain what did Rene Descartes mean by that phrase ....

What can you doubt? Well, you can doubt that an external world exists, that an evil deceiver might be magically making the world seem outside of you, or perhaps you are a brain in a vat, manipulated by computers to gain experience. You can doubt the truths of mathematics. Perhaps an evil deceiver just makes it seem like 2+2=4 when it actually equals 5.

So what is it that you can’t doubt? Well, that you are doubting. In order to doubt, you must be a person doubting. Similarly, when you’re thinking, you can’t really doubt that you are thinking. You can’t be imagining that you are thinking and you can’t be imagining you are doubting.

Therefore, it seems to Descartes, it’s clear that whenever you are thinking, you must exist.

What it is to be you, however, doesn’t have to be what you think. You could be a brain in a vat, and not a human being. But at the very least you are a subject who thinks, at least while you are thinking.

Now note that Descartes’s argument assumes that things we know with complete certainty are those that we cannot doubt.

Also note that this argument at the moment doesn’t guarantee that you exist when you are not thinking. So when you’re sleeping, you might no longer exist.

Furthermore, this is a very present-moment argument. Whenever I am thinking, I know I exist. I do not know that I used to exist and I do not know that I will exist in the future. All of that is subject to doubt.

[Leo Gura]

You must exist to doubt your own existence.

That's what it boils down to.

[Galyna]

3 hours ago, Someone here said:

Therefore, it seems to Descartes, it’s clear that whenever you are thinking, you must exist.

Yes, and that is the nature of the beast! Human psyche is designed this way that “it sabotages itself” into personality. It cannot stand any empty states of the mind, therefore, it is striving to fill in the gaps: with thoughts, emotions. This is how "I" survives. 

[Galyna]

3 hours ago, Someone here said:

I do not know that I used to exist and I do not know that I will exist in the future. All of that is subject to doubt.

You do not need the mind to "know" that something is....

[Someone here]

@Leo Gura @Galyna guys..you misunderstood the post. I'm not talking about thoughts in terms of mind activities. Or the content of any particular thought like the "i" thought. I'm talking about the mere fact that thoughts arise .whether there is a thinker or not .

 Descartes in his work, he goes about destroying the assumptions that most people had in philosophy before him. Many people would say, "ah well I see the sun, or I feel the grass, so therefore it exists". Descartes basically said, "ok, but what if your brain is in a jar, and you are just dreaming all of this?" 

Philosophy is based on axioms. Axioms are self-evident facets of reason that allow you to construct the rest of philosophy on them. Descartes basically argued that all of the axioms that had previously been used were wrong because they were not self-evident. In the same sense that you don't know you are in a dream when you are dreaming, how do you know that anything around you is as it truly is? So he started his philosophy with doubting EVERYTHING. 

At first, he couldn't figure out where to go from there. How are you supposed to know anything if you doubt everything? Eventually, he discovers his first axiom: I think therefore I am. In order for him to doubt everything, HE must exist. He can't assume anything about who or what he really is but he can safely assume that he exists, otherwise, he would not be thinking about the fact that he exists.

[Galyna]

16 minutes ago, Someone here said:

@Leo Gura @Galyna guys..you misunderstood the post. I'm not talking about thoughts in terms of mind activities. Or the content of any particular thought like the "i" thought. I'm talking about the mere fact that thoughts arise .whether there is a thinker or not .

 Descartes in his work, he goes about destroying the assumptions that most people had in philosophy before him. Many people would say, "ah well I see the sun, or I feel the grass, so therefore it exists". Descartes basically said, "ok, but what if your brain is in a jar, and you are just dreaming all of this?" 

Philosophy is based on axioms. Axioms are self-evident facets of reason that allow you to construct the rest of philosophy on them. Descartes basically argued that all of the axioms that had previously been used were wrong because they were not self-evident. In the same sense that you don't know you are in a dream when you are dreaming, how do you know that anything around you is as it truly is? So he started his philosophy with doubting EVERYTHING. 

At first, he couldn't figure out where to go from there. How are you supposed to know anything if you doubt everything? Eventually, he discovers his first axiom: I think therefore I am. In order for him to doubt everything, HE must exist. He can't assume anything about who or what he really is but he can safely assume that he exists, otherwise, he would not be thinking about the fact that he exists.

Any reasoning reinforces the observer and observation phenomenon. Notice it. “I think therefore I am”, means not your physical existence but rather a mental construct of the ego-mind mechanism. I am talking about impersonal awareness. How do you know is the reinforcement of the idea that there should be “I” and a knowledge on top of it. Anything revolves around “I” including your knowledge and all the philosophy is based on this idea. It is a self-perpetuated machine, never ending mind game. There is an access to the Truth without any egoic assumption of the mind. It is pure impersonal Being.

[Someone here]

4 minutes ago, Galyna said:

Any reasoning reinforces the observer and observation phenomenon. Notice it. “I think therefore I am”, means not your physical existence but rather a mental construct of the ego-mind mechanism. I am talking about impersonal awareness. How do you know is the reinforcement of the idea that there should be “I” and a knowledge on top of it. Anything revolves around “I” including your knowledge and all the philosophy is based on this idea. It is a self-perpetuated machine, never ending mind game. There is an access to the Truth without any egoic assumption of the mind. It is pure impersonal 

 

Are you falling into the neo-advaita trap or it seems like it ??  Because this whole emphasis on the illusion of self. The self is an illusion as a separate self .but all that exists (all of reality basically ) is the Self with Capital S. 

I like to distinguish between the false ego self and the true Self. The ego self  is a construction of mind. Even the tree you see is a construction of mind so it is not so far fetched that this elaborate mind construction of a self is nothing more than delusion. It is however very necessary and useful . Without a sense of self you wouldn't know who's shoes to put on in the morning, as Alan Watts puts it lol.

 Descartes' reasoning is that if he is doubting his own existence, then he must exist in order to do the doubting, therefore he exists.

[Galyna]

@Someone here

You have to recognize one important thing: the nature of any question, absolutely any question you will be asking now and in the future, is to form the inquirer and false belief that this inquirer is a self-evident and independent. (philosophy, hahaha)

This is how consciousness creates the illusion of the separation and how it creates the false identity of yours.

 

I am studying the principle now how mind creates this phenomenon and plays games with itself by asking questions and perpetuating the existence of the ego.

 

Every question contains the answer if it is formed in a proper way.

 

However, no problem can be solved from the perspective it was created. You have to go one level up to see the problem and solve it. By staying on the same level and in the same perspective will give you nothing, but just the waste of time and energy.  

[Galyna]

35 minutes ago, Someone here said:

Descartes' reasoning is that if he is doubting his own existence, then he must exist in order to do the doubting, therefore he exists.

You don’t know exactly what meaning he puts behind these words. Does he exist as an ego-mind or wholeness, a capture of Reality that observes itself. 

It is useful to be aware of the "ladder of abstraction". I will write about it soon. 

Edited July 21, 2022 by Galyna

[Someone here]

@Galyna

Do you deny your own ever-presence?  Do you deny your own existence?  Who is typing these words and thinks in highly abstract concepts like what you are doing here ?

One conclusion Descartes argued for is that beings cannot rationally deny their own existence. We may question the reality of almost anything as potentially being figments of our imagination. However, to be able to ask the question "do I exist?", logically you must indeed exist. You might be wrong about the nature of your existence, but the existence itself is a logical prerequisite of self-analyzing thought. I can say that Descartes is not real, or that you are not real, but I think, therefore I must exist

The question that leads to this kind of philosophy is some variant of the brain-in-a-jar problem. How do you know that anything is real?  You have to appreciate the depth of this problem. Are you actually sitting on a chair, or are you being deceived? Are you just a brain in a jar, being fed electrical impulses that make you  think all these things are real? Basically, are you Neo in the first part of The Matrix?

Descartes figured out that at the very least, here's what I know: I am a being that can think. Maybe I am just a brain in a jar, maybe nobody else exists in the whole world, maybe the cake is a lie, but I, as a thinking being, do exist. And this self-evident and undeniable. 

[Galyna]

@Someone here I don’t argue the fact that something is. Ofc it IS. But there is a perspective of what you call existence. You can exist as Nothing as well. 
cognition drives you crazy. 
 

Edited July 21, 2022 by Galyna

[Someone here]

2 minutes ago, Galyna said:

@Someone here Sommie, I don’t argue the fact that something is. Ofc it IS. But there is a perspective of what you call existence. You can exist as Nothing as well. 
cognition drives you crazy. 
 

What do you mean by existing as nothing? 

[Galyna]

5 minutes ago, Someone here said:

What do you mean by existing as nothing? 

I wish this could be explained.  
That is why it is so hard to teach about it. 
Read my other post, I wrote about it. 

[Someone here]

@Galyna which post exactly?  Can you link it ? So I can read it and tell you what i think about it. 

[Galyna]

@Someone here Sure, I will find it and post it here after a little while…I need to login from pc not from my phone to find that post. 
 

[Salvijus]

1 hour ago, Someone here said:

What do you mean by existing as nothing? 

Existing as a non physical thing maybe. Like pure awareness for example. A dimension that has no physical attributes but still exists. Almost like space.

If we removed all the physical elements in the existence would space still exist? 

Edited July 21, 2022 by Salvijus

[Razard86]

This entire thread is mainly two people who believe the same thing constantly misinterpreting each other and debating each other off of that confusion....Notice this...

[Galyna]

@Razard86 ? well you are welcome to start a thread: “ I am enlightened, ask me any questions…”  

Notice how superiority is arising ?

Edited July 21, 2022 by Galyna

[Galyna]

@Someone here Here: 

Nothingness is NOT a Void, my biggest realization - Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God - Actualized.org Forum 

 

Why do you think that nothingness is just a void, or a pure black space with nothing in there? This is how a human being imagines “nothing”. This is not the case. Notice, it’s still something. You are not a human being; this is your “understanding” starts. I will use the language here just to explain the concept. However, you cannot fathom it by the means of language.

When the "observer takes a back seat in consciousness", and just observes the reality, the self of sense drowns in void, disappears. Try not to put labels and describe what you see. Language is not needed. What you will discover soon is that the stencil, or what you call individualized personality, will cease to exist. When there is no self, there is no one to register the reality. That’s a key moment. There is no cognition and description of what you see, smell, or hear. You do not need to close your eyes to think yourself out of reality, you actually do not even need to meditate for this. All you need to do is to stop naming the objects and phenomena you see, stop creating the meaning of the experience. When this happens, experience is still there without the description, but at the same time it is not there either. So, we cannot call it “experience”. However, when there is no observer, you cannot register the reality. Drop the observer that your mind creates to lurk you into so-called Enlightenment! This is a trick it plays with itself to never let "you" go.

This is how the illusion (maya) of the solid world has been creating “you” for a long time. It’s been creating “you” through the stencil of the perceiver and the perception. By returning back into the seat of consciousness, when you drop all the notions, language, descriptions, you are disappearing. You do not need to close your eyes for this to happen, because even with the eyes closed, you mind still separates and divides between inner and outer, thoughts and void, cognition, feelings, and emotions. “You” are still there!  Don’t stop your thought process, no need even for that, let it be there. You do not know yet the true meaning behind the objects that you see. You really do not know who you are, everything that you know comes from language (reasoning, prior knowledge, and beliefs). What if you do not have language, are you still your body or the holistic experience? Are you still separating and dividing between “mine” and “not mine”? No, when you drop the language and knowledge, all you’ll be left with is a holistic experience, One, picture that contains everything, and your body is just another object on that canvas. You are not in your body. By slowly putting your attention back on awareness, by dropping even that!!! you begin to experience nothingness. Who said that nothing is empty? Actually, nothingness can contain all the elements of perceptions: sound and color, tactile senses. This is how illusion has been created, illusion that there is something there, when in fact there is not. You are walking on the bridge between dualities without realizing that wholeness is couched within nothingness, and nothingness contains and gives birth to everything. How? By giving the experience some description. It is very simple, by reasoning…

It does not mean that everything appears into Being from void, it’s already there: nothing and everything, non-dual infinite potential. What it means that by changing the perception, you can realize, but only post factum, that everything is nothing. It only appears as colors, sounds, senses, but everything is nothing in its core, and vice versa. When you drop the stencil of the perceiver and start having the experience of Being/Totality, without any cognition and linguistic recognitions. Who is there to acknowledge the factuality? Nobody right, nobody could say there is a tree, because “you” as the perceiver is NOT there. What is there then? It cannot be communicated, that is the trick…

Does it mean that the light was off, and everything zoomed in into the black dot? No. We do not need to switch the light off for existence to become nothing. All you need to do is to “think your way out” of existence as a human being - mind. When there is no you, there is no world. Because “world” is just the linguistic description of your mind. There is no such thing as world, it is all mental construct for you to see the plausible reality. Once you break the meaning of everything, and drop all the notions, reality as you know, will cease to exist because you will take your illusory self out of the equation. Death is not real; this is literally how you die. Time only exists as a descriptive mechanism to make sense of the continuum from moment to moment, or a motion. Again, when you do not describe the motion, you do not have time. Contraction and dilation of time only happen in your mind.

Hope the reader will understand my point.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Edited July 21, 2022 by Galyna

[Razard86]

22 minutes ago, Galyna said:

@Razard86 ? well you are welcome to start a thread: “ I am enlightened, ask me any questions…”  

Notice how superiority is arising ?

Pure projection, to notice something is to be it. So there lies the rub. So...yeah you are the one projecting superiority and because I pointed it out I'm projecting it too. You can't run from this one.