tsuki

@Grateful Dead Come on man, @Breakingthewall is here just to be a contrarian, he hasn't read or watched much of Ralston's communications and is speaking from ignorance.

There may be some confusion about calling things false or true so I'm going to follow up on that. What is true, just is, is as itself and is not altered to be that. When you inspect it, it does not turn out to be something else, if it were something else upon inspection, it would be an illusion. Something is existentially true if it exists because of its necessity, it exists through itself and for itself and for its own sake. Everything else is false. This ties to his idea of existential thinking, which means thinking while suspending all knowledge, expectation and assumption. Thinking from nothing, creating from nothing. This does not imply in any way that whatever is false is bad. He is extremely clear in his communications that good and bad are within the domain of value judgements that serve the purpose of survival/self persistence. He is extremely clear that this is not the pursuit of consciousness and is not contemplation.

You're bringing up the empty mind again and I'm quite sure that I've never heard Ralston speak about the empty mind in any of his youtube content, and it is not mentioned once in the book of not knowing. What he's actually doing is dunking on buddhism (zen included) several times for their propensity to believe dogma and mixing cultural stuff with contemplation. I've seen several times that he's advocating against trying to stop the mind so that it's empty. I'm quite sure he does not take the empty mind as absolute reality (when mind is understood as the experience of having a brain). What he is saying though is that what is true, just is, and is as itself. He opposes it to the things that you are doing. This can be found in the middle of the book of not knowing. This is the distinction between doing and being. He is never opposed to things that don't exist as falsehood, as if it's something you are morally not supposed to do. This is how you create stuff and I've seen him explicitly encourage his students to do so to develop their ability. What he advocates for though is being honest in what you are doing. That is the point of contemplation.

Unless your metaphysics are apophatic, there is always a limited paradigm.

You're just mad he's not supporting your favorite way of expression. Isn't it just identification? Truth needs no defending, it's self apparent, no?

His whole teaching is about getting you to contemplate the matter for yourself. He's not going to tell you anything, ever. That's the point of his reply. Have you ever read or watched anything he created? It should be clear.

What does it matter what Ralston is saying about the nature of love? What good does it do to you? It's just hearsay and belief for you, so why bother?

Maybe it's odd that you exist... because you don't?

@No1Here2c what are you on about?

@ROOBIO Seems to me like you underestimate the value of wanting less. Isn't it easier to survive when you're light on your feet?

Arising of positive and negative emotion is judgement of how a particular story plays out. You can learn to express your emotions honestly and if you do, you can inspect whether or not the story points to something real. If the story turns out to be something constructed, without substance, then you will let go of it and emotion will stop arising. It's like hitting your head against a wall because you think you have to. Instead of taking a painkiller, you stop hitting yourself when you see this is something you're choosing to do.

Continuing. The person is not real. This does not mean that the person does not appear. It means that no independently existing person can ever be found. The person is a maintained appearance. And the maintenance happens through belief. Not intellectual agreement, but participation. Taking the person as real. Participating in the stories that continuously recreate it. The person is maintained through: identification, emotional reinforcement, anticipation, social reflection, bodily distinction, narrative continuity, participation in self-stories. There is no separate entity underneath these processes maintaining them. The maintenance itself creates the appearance of the person. The self is not something that has stories. The self is the storytelling. The self is not something that participates. The self is participation itself. Belief is what gives the person apparent reality. The more the stories are taken as real, the more solid and independent the person appears. The less conscious the participation becomes, the more absolute the self feels. This is why the person feels threatened by observation. Observation reveals the movement maintaining the appearance. The more conscious the participation becomes, the less independently real the person appears. This is also why all suffering is ultimately tied to survival. The person survives by maintaining distinction: me and not me, inside and outside, self and world, subject and object. But existence itself only happens relationally. Nothing exists independently. Everything dissolves into relation, process and appearance under sufficient observation. So the person is trying to survive as something fundamentally impossible: an independently existing thing. This is why the separate self is inherently unstable and compulsive. It must continuously recreate itself because it has no independent existence of its own. And this is the great reversal. The person cannot truly survive by strengthening itself. It survives most deeply by disappearing. Not physically. Ontologically. By releasing belief in the self-stories, by no longer taking the maintained appearance as independently real, the apparent separate self starts dissolving. The boundaries weaken. The compulsive distinction between self and totality weakens. And what remains is not annihilation, but reality without separation. This is why so many traditions speak of death. Not because death is glorified, but because the separate self cannot survive realization of its own unreality. The “death” is the collapse of false independent being. And paradoxically, this is true survival. Because what survives is no longer: the isolated character, the maintained appearance, the narrative identity. What remains is the totality itself, which was never separate in the first place. The essence of the person is the same as the essence of the whole: not a thing, not a substance, not an independently existing being, but open, living nothingness. This is why the final realization is not that the person becomes God. It is that the person was never there to begin with.

@Breakingthewall I use emptiness precisely to avoid turning the unlimited into another thing. I even call nothing not-a-thing . At this point, I think that we're not in disagreement, it's a matter of choice of words.

I think part of the difficulty here is that I am not trying to derive metaphysics from abstract reasoning alone, nor am I speaking merely psychologically. I am trying to speak about metaphysics through direct observation of experience itself. The problem is that when something this fundamental is discussed, the mind immediately pulls it into a privileged framework: - psychology, - biology, - physics, - spirituality, - logic, - systems theory, - theology. Then the insight becomes interpreted as being "about" that domain. What I am pointing at is prior to all of them because all of them already appear within experience. This is why I keep returning to observation itself. When something is observed carefully enough, its apparent independent reality starts collapsing. Not because thought destroys it, but because the mind initially presents things as more self-existing and separate than they actually are. A thought appears independently real until inspected. The self appears independently real until inspected. A process appears independently real until inspected. Even "being" appears independently real until inspected. And under sufficient observation, everything dissolves into: - relation, - dependence, - appearance, - distinction, - movement, - context. No final thing can be found anywhere. This is not a logical trick or conceptual game. It is directly observable. That is why I keep insisting on looking rather than merely thinking. And this is also why I use the word "nothingness", even though it is easy to misunderstand. Not because there is no appearance, but because no independently existing thing can be found within appearance. The fact that everything comes apart under observation is not an unfortunate limitation of the mind. It is the revelation itself. Reality is not hiding somewhere behind appearance as a final substance. The impossibility of final ontological closure is precisely its nature. And this does not reduce the aliveness of reality in any way. Quite the opposite. If reality could finally crystallize into some fixed independently existing thing, it would become limited by it. Closed. Exhausted. Finished. But because no final thing can be found, reality remains inexhaustibly alive. Open. Moving. Revealing itself endlessly without ever collapsing into dead substance. Its emptiness is precisely what makes it alive.

I sense that you are unsure of what the ultimate substance of reality is. All I can say is this: keep staring away at it until it disappears. I have a sense that my reply is quite anticlimactic, but I'm all zinged out for today. I appreciate you though, I really enjoyed our back and forth.

@Ziran @Stick @No1Here2c I appreciate you guys, thank you for participating. If that's the case for you, I sympathize. There has to be a lot of confusion. Keep chipping away at it. I've been in therapy for 10 years ever since I had my first enlightenment (fucked me up real good, the depth of it). I don't want to give you an impression that I'm free from stories, but there's very little compulsion left, mostly around food and basic survival.

You are using the conventional understanding of concept "nothing" as an ontological argument. Since you clearly have a very sophisticated view of reality, I'm sure you know better than to treat conventional notions of what something is seriously. What I'm saying when I'm using the word "nothing" is that there is no independent ontological grounding to anything that exists. We agree on the principle, but you disagree with me on semantics. You are saying there is only being and I'm saying that everything that exists is dependent on something else, so is not existing in the strict sense. It is appearance without substance, so in essence, nothing. All being collapses under careful observation, no things can be found. Yet, the totality of it can be dependent upon itself precisely because there's nothing there. It's something like a circular argument, refining itself infinitely. That totality is still nothing, without substance, and it's precisely the point. It may look more like infinity to you and that's okay.

When taken in isolation, anything you experience is existentially false, as is it essentially something else recombined. Still, taken in totality, it is the "unlimited relative change", it is exactly nothing and is existentially true. I am very grateful for this conversation btw, you are wonderful my friend.

Probably, when you are thinking "absence of anything", you are thinking of empty space, or a blank screen. This idea is wrong. You are right in saying that there is "unlimited relative change" but what you are missing is that it is, precisely, nothing.

If something is made, manipulated, undergoes a process, change, then it is not being, it is becoming something. If something has no existence of its own, then it is existentially false. It's existence is conditioned, it is predicated upon something else. It is relative. Everything that exists is like this. Nothingness is the nature of existence. It cannot exist. It is not a container of reality, as the container of reality would have to exist to contain it. Still, reality is not contained, as where would the containment go? Containment of reality has to be un-real. Not sure if I communicate this clearly. While it is true that we can represent nothingness conceptually, nothingness is not a concept. It is not (at all). There is a realization to be had, where nothing is called not-a-thing, a category different from things that can be experienced. Most traditions call it the absolute for this reason.

Sup guys, you argue about everything and you hang me here to dry?

There is another step to this. Things do not exist the way they appear to. Everything you can point to is activity pretending to be a thing. A self is activity. A thought is activity. Fear is activity. Personality is activity. A relationship is activity. A nation is activity. Even the body is activity. They look stable only because the process is continuous. A flame looks like an object but it is burning. A whirlpool looks like a thing but it is flowing. The self looks permanent but it is being continuously recreated every moment through mental activity. This is why the mind is exhausting. The mind is doing. Constantly: - maintaining, - comparing, - remembering, - anticipating, - defending, - justifying, - correcting, - becoming. The self is not something that exists. The self is something that is being done. And this is why it feels unstable under observation. Because when the activity weakens, the thing weakens with it. People usually think they are afraid of losing something they have. In reality, they are afraid that the activity maintaining the character will fail. They are afraid of dissolution. This is why silence feels so strange. Without constant mental movement, the character starts disappearing. The mind immediately starts doing again: - thinking, - fantasizing, - worrying, - remembering, - planning. Anything to keep the structure going. And this is where the deepest confusion happens. People think that "being" means existing as a thing. But all things are unstable. All things are temporary. All things require maintenance. In that sense, all things are existentially false. They appear self-existing but they are not. They are processes. Meanwhile nothingness, emptiness, the not-a-thing all things appear within, does not need maintenance. It does not continue itself. It does not defend itself. It does not become. It does not resist dissolution. Because dissolution itself happens within it. This is why "nothing" cannot disappear. It is not a thing among things. It is the openness all things happen within. Mind is movement away from this. Mind is doing. Mind is becoming. Awareness itself is already still before the mind starts moving. This is why no achievement finally satisfies the self. The self is made out of continuation. It survives by moving toward the next thing. The moment one story finishes, another one starts immediately. The self is a machine that turns being into becoming. Most people are never at rest because they are continuously recreating themselves through mental activity. They think this activity is what they are. But you can observe it directly. Sit still and watch. The mind starts doing.

The greatest secret of the mind lies in the fact that you are doing it. All of the stories are made up in some way or another. All of the stories you participate in (emote) have been believed by non other than you yourself. And the biggest secret of it all is that the person you think you are is a character in a story. It has exactly as much appearance of reality as you grant it by believing the stories. Belief is a form action, like grasping an object with your hand. Grasping and letting go can be trained. When you believe a story you make it true, you behave as if it is the truth, you act in accordance with this story. The compulsion (the must) of this grasping is emotion. Experience the emotion and in doing so, you experience the grasping, the compulsion. The emotion "makes you" behave in accordance with what you believe. In truth, you want to feel what you feel so that the story progresses towards its conclusion. You want to experience all emotion you have, so that all stories you believe in keep playing out the way they are "supposed to". Even the "negative" emotions such as fear, anger, sadness and depression, all of them is what you want to do, so that the story keeps being true, because you believe it. "Positive" emotions are rare because they do not serve the purpose of progressing the story. Some of them, such as hope or wonder can appear so that stories can keep on going. The biggest reason you need others is to give "objective", "external" validation to what you believe. You can only exist in groups that have similar values, pursue similar goals, take part in similar stories. You say that someone "gets you" when they feel the same things you feel when you tell them the story of your life. This is the same as saying that they believe the same thing you believe in, that your stories converge. If someone contradicts your experience, when they offer a perspective that makes you feel different from what your initial reaction was, you feel hostile because you value your stories. When someone says something that contradicts your story ("you're stupid") you feel hurt. You may respond in the like so that they are also hurt, by messing with their story, by presenting evidence that their story is incorrect/invalid. Sometimes, when there is a painful event, someone makes a comment that makes the event seem unreal, silly, you laugh. You call it humor and pay people to relieve you of your burdens this way.

Reality is not created. If it is created, then it is mind stuff and the mechanism by which it comes to pass is belief.