tsuki

You can't. They are an interconnected phenomenon that influence each other. Here's a link to my journal in which I explore this problem: You may find the first post useful if you like to go into such things by yourself.

@RendHeaven I will answer with a metaphor and hopefully, you will get a feeling about what an ego backlash is. Imagine that you want to learn to play chess, but you are not allowed to talk with your teacher. You sit next to a chessboard and try some moves, but the teacher starts to move your pieces back where they belong and show you where they fit. Now, over time you will explore enough moves with him so that you start to get the general feeling of the game and the rules govern it. Now, the teacher intervenes less and less and you actually stop getting this friction between the two of you and you enjoy the game. Now, imagine that during this orderly game between the two of you, you suddenly get an interesting idea so that you can perhaps establish a new rule by yourself and do something out of the ordinary. Would your teacher let you do that? No, he would put your pieces back where they belong and give you a disappointed look. In this situation you can get angry at your teacher for being dumb, but the fact is, that he simply keeps being a teacher because he thinks that it is his role. Depending on what you may do, your teacher may get very upset with you. Imagine, if instead of trying to put a piece in a invalid location, you threw it at him. Would he even comprehend that it is still a game you are playing, or would he think that you've lost your shit? It doesn't matter what is the rule you're trying to establish in this case. You're being too sudden. The change has to be gradual and only AFTER the teacher is open enough to see that you can swap the roles. This is the ego backlash. The Ego has been your teacher your whole life and you're now trying to take the steering wheel. Ego does not greedily cling to the steering wheel. It simply doesn't understand what is happening if the change is too sudden. It thinks that your life is going off the course and brings it back where it belongs. The real surprise here is the fact that you yourself are the teacher, but that will be apparent only when you become enlightened. Try being more gentle with yourself, so that Ego understands that you're trying to change the rules.

Today I found a wonderful video that is very much related to this journal. PERSPECTIVE WITHIN THE MIND = PARADIGM:

Not exactly. Thought has no agenda. Thought is not an actor that tries to do something against our will. There is also no conditioning involved in thought, as society that would condition the mind with various forms of interaction is a thought. There is no society or other people. Society is a thought about other people. Other people is a thought as well, so these are thoughts about thoughts. Even the notion that you have a mind that has thoughts is a thought. There are very powerful and subtle ways in which thoughts influence the world. So far in this journal I've been describing what happens when one has a single perspective. It gets deeper when a person is able to see two different perspectives at once and see the interaction between them. I will be finally getting to my current state in which I can see three perspectives at once and various interactions between them. As for identification itself: I can see now from my point of view that it has been extremely difficult to accept the notion that something happens within my cognition that I do not do. The idea that thought simply happens and that we lose track when it references itself is a very powerful and very scary one. Fear however is nothing else than thought and I will be exploring that as well. Until then, try to keep the discussion to a minimum please. If you would like, I can start a different thread with comments to avoid dilution of my reasoning. Thank you.

Yes. What I'm getting at is that there is no escape from identification. The only escape is to not know what you identify with. At this point I don't even know what identification is. It is not something that I do. I have nothing to explain identification with.

A moment that thought references another thought is the moment that we miss that a thought is being thought. We identify with that thought, until of course we notice that identification. Then, we say that we shouldn't have identified with it. Missing the fact that another thought is being thought.

When questions such as those are being posed, about the nature of substance in a given perspective, one becomes open to observing reality from different angles. One such idea is about listening carefully to one's thoughts, as in meditation. All the thinking about the world and about oneself is being thought by whom, exactly? In other words: what is the substance of the mind? There is no answer to such a question. Each thought is an expression of an inaccessible fact and becomes a fact the moment it is not being thought. It is being created from thin air and returns back into thin air. There is no pile of thoughts from which thoughts are being drawn. They arrive, one thought at a time, like this text - a word by word. There is no bird's eye view about thoughts from tomorrow. No - all thoughts are here now, even the thoughts about other thoughts. The stream goes like this: Man, I really shouldn't have snapped at that guy yesterday. I thought that he was being too cocky, but now I can see that he was simply scared of me. Is that really a memory of yesterday? Or is it a story that just came up about something that supposedly happened? What reference point do you have to be sure that it actually happened? But tsuki, I can ask other people what happened! Well, isn't that a proof that memory is an idea that only makes sense in relation to other people? That you cannot confirm by yourself whether your past is really true? What is the basis for constructing subjective reality then? What basis do you have to say that, lets say - you shouldn't have been angry yesterday? Is it really always possible to externally tell whether another person is angry or not? Maybe you weren't really angry, but scared? Have you never lied about what you feel so that you trust other people's judgement about what happened in the past? You are simply being bamboozled by your thoughts. They are like a beautiful woman that passes in front of you and you simply cannot look away. She becomes your world, until of course, you get to know her and she becomes ordinary. To be free of the mind is to make the thoughts ordinary enough so that you are actually allowed to look away. There is nobody there that thinks these thoughts. They simply arise, like clouds in the sky.

I read the version by Ursula Le Guinn. It is not a scientific translation, but a compilation of them with the intent of capturing the poetic beauty of the original. Ursula Le Guinn is a renown author of many bestsellers. You can find this version in PDF on the web.

@Freakrik You're curious of afterlife, but have you explored the beforelife? What was it like in the beforelife?

From the point of view of the mind, facts are singularity. What are facts made of? Facts are made of words and structure between them. What are words made of? Letters? No, words have meaning which is a relation to other words. A car is in a relation to a seat, and a driver, and a steering wheel. It has similarity to a road, traffic and global warming. But what is a relation and structure? Relation is a connection. Structure is a net of connections. What is a connection, hmm? In order to understand words, you need to understand words. Why a car brings us to global warming? What is the reason for that? Are thoughts waves within the invisible space of facts? What's that? Just more thoughts and more facts. Fragmentation that breeds fragmentation. Facts are being stirred, and the stirring is what is observed.

From the point of view of the world, matter is a singularity. Is reality composed of atoms? What are atoms composed of? Are atoms composed of hadrons? What are hadrons composed of? Are they composed of quarks? What are quarks made of? hmm? Is it that we don't know or we can't measure? At which point material substance cannot be subdivided? At the Planck's length? Now, now - Planck's length is derived from quantum mechanics that says that matter is a wave within an unobservable field. At which point a particle stops being a particle and starts being a wave? Always? Never? Is it both? This escape from the standard model into quantum mechanics is an invisible tunnel through singularity. From the point of view of the standard model, a quark is a singularity. From the point of view of quantum mechanics, a wave is a singularity. Singularity = Singularity.

Various perspectives have seemingly different singularities. Singularity has no properties and is indescribable, as it is an intrusion from outside of perspective. One can only describe singularity from within the inhabited perspective by changing it. Change never arrives at what is being changed.

@K VIL Me neither . It doesn't mean that I'm trolling you though.

@Joseph Maynor @Faceless Knowing has various meanings. Don't get too hung up on ambiguity. From the perspective of Existential Truth (in Joseph's philosophy), all words have no meaning and are hardpoints that attach models to experience. Models being structure between words that give possibility for experience to be tangible.

Substance of the fully inhabitated perspective is what constitutes a singularity. Singularity has no properties and defies reason. Singularity is open and yet, inaccessible. Singularity can be expressed by change, but never observed in itself, because it doesn't exist. Singularity is a paradox. An artifact of the perspective that is being inhabited.

Any perspective can be inhabited fully. This habitation will produce artifacts which may prompt one to disregard, or worship other perspectives. Full inhabitation of a single perspective is apparent, when the substance and change of this particular perspective is used to explain the other perspectives. The inhabited perspective is regarded as reality, which accounts for all phenomena. From the perspective of the world, feelings are muscle movements and thoughts are neurons firing. From the perspective of the mind, action is will and feelings are intentions. From the perspective of the body, action is movement and thoughts are perception. The substance of other perspectives than the one inhabited are deemed unreal and the home substance is deemed as tangible. It is very difficult for the perspective of the world to deal with facts and health and those are expressed as states of matter. For the perspective of the mind, it is difficult to deal with matter and health and those are expressed as facts. For the perspective of the body, it is difficult to deal with matter and facts and those are expressed as health (of self, others, organizations). The deemed substance of reality (matter for world, facts for mind, health for body), however is never questioned and results in puzzlement when inquired. Self-inquiry of fully inhabited perspective leads to further fragmentation of substance into various categories.

Each substance from perspective of its own domain is inexpressible in its own terms. There is no possibility to observe facts within the mind, matter within the world and health within the body. Change within a domain is an expression of the substance: Thoughts express facts. Actions express matter. Feelings express health. The self-chatter of the mind is a constant processing of the facts. It expresses the facts and relates them to other facts. We know our facts because we think them. Observation and measurement are actions upon matter. We observe the world by bouncing matter off other matter. The result of this bouncing (interaction) is a movement of matter: let's say - a tip of a gauge, an electron within a neuron. Assessment of health is done through feeling. We feel various degrees of suffering and pleasure, both mentally and physically. When we feel cold, we know to find shelter. When we're hungry, we're attracted to food. When we cut ourselves in a finger, we grab it to prevent bleeding. When we feel infatuation, we'll do anything to be close to the other person.

Each perspective has its own, distinct substance that is being changed: Substance of the world is matter Substance of the mind is facts Substance of the body is health Names of the respective substances are arbitrary, but are pointers to something that is static. Substance of each respective perspective is something that is accumulated and changed. In each perspective, a change is constantly occurring with respect to its own substance. The substance of each of these perspective is changed back into itself. Category theory calls this kind of transformation identity, but this name is reserved within this framework to avoid confusion. The names of transformations within their respective domains are following: Transformation within the mind that changes facts into other facts is called thought Transformation within the world that changes matter into different matter is called action Transformation within the body that changes health back to itself is called feeling.

Reality has three perspectives that occur simultaneously: The mind The body The world Each of these perspectives can be conceptualized as a dimension. Sort of like a dimension on a three-dimensional Cartesian space. These perspectives contain various phenomena, and are disjoint: None of the phenomena occurring in the world, occur in the mind. None of the phenomena occurring in the mind, occur in the body. None of the phenomena occurring in the body, occur in the world.

@How to be wise It's okay. Do you mind explaining why do you assert that?

@Hotaka As I go again and again through your posts here, I notice that it is very difficult to read them. I missed a lot of depth in your posts in my responses from yesterday. Sorry about that. I would appreciate if you broke your responses up into paragraphs in the future. Other than that, your words resonate with me a lot. Would you mind sharing your own experience?

So, there's been this feeling of spaciousness behind my eyes, 'inside', while I meditate. At first, it was difficult to attain and after some practice, it came easily. Now it manifests itself on its own. At first, I was describing it as 'pressure', or 'tension', but I really like to call it spaciousness. It's a feeling that bears similarity to inhaling deeply. With 'lungs'/'chest' however it has limited capacity and there is a point after no more 'air' comes in. Spaciousness in forehead during meditation is more like constant, never-ending inhalation/expansion. There are actually two 'places' in which it manifests - both inside of my head, 'behind' my eyes. It first appeared somewhere directly over my eyes, centered. Now it 'sits' on top of my head, or on the back of my head. There was a point when I could move it from one place to the other and it felt as if it was going through a small pipe, or a straw. It is not focused, like touch for example, but more blurred. Radiating over the whole inside of my head. Like spaciousness of breath is blurred over lungs. As I'm writing this post I came to realization that I can extend the area over which I can feel it, but to some degree. I was wondering if it's possible to extend it over the whole 'inside' of my body and I was able to do it to some degree, but felt resistance. I know that all of this sounds weird, but do you had any experience with this kind of phenomenon? Does this description fit into any framework of growth that you know and I can work with?

Emptying your mind can lead to reconnection with the world through physical body, like @Quanty suggests. Going through transition of perspective can be pretty traumatic though, so I'm not sure how that would interact with the depressed mind.

Bliss/joy/peace are one experience for me. From one point of view, it is calmness/stillness. The emotional pond is still, without anger/fear/guilt/shame, etc. From another point of view, the peace is blissful. It is a feeling of being completely dead inside, like nothing would ever move me. It is a pleasant feeling! I do feel emotions, but because the pond is mostly still, I can easily identify and direct them. They are not negative, but neutral. This redirection from, lets say, anger to negative thoughts is conditioned into movement that reinterprets the experience into something more positive. There is a tension during aggravating moments, but this tension is internally resolved through equalization in thoughts. Feelings are being let go, automatically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy