tsuki

I will now tell you everything I know, definitely, through self-observation and participation in the unfolding of the mind. If it seems difficult, it only seems so because it is usually unnamed, too obvious to notice so it is not discussed. Try to see it in yourself as you read this. The most basic unit of the mind is a story. It has a past, present and a future. The present moment is always infinitely small in it, unnoticeable, fleeting and valueless. The most important feature of the story is that it wants to be played out, it needs to reach its conclusion. All stories have a charge, innate motion which is a compulsion from its origin to its conclusion. They grab us and take us places, we participate. The experience of participating in a story is called emotion. We can always make the story explicit with language by experiencing the emotion. When the story is expressed, we can inspect it more clearly. In inspecting the story, we make it into an object of the mind that we can manipulate. In doing so, the underlying emotions change. We can completely decouple stories from emotions, which is to say that we stop participating in them, by not believing them. The more we believe a story, the less it is an object of the mind, the less we can manipulate it, the more real it appears and more emotions arise. We build stories ever since we were born as a person and a lot of stories have not been expressed and are still believed/participated in. There are no emotions apart from participation in a story. Identity is the character of the story. You only have an identity because you do not realize your true nature. This "hole", or "gap" needs to be filled. It will never be filled with the mind because what you are is more basic than the mind. Thinking "I" is like having a pen and a piece of paper and trying to draw paper.

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.

Here’s a treat for you, my imaginary friends: Look at something. Whatever. Now close your eyes and recreate the same view with your imagination. Now realize that the former is as real as the latter. It’s the same indirect thing, that’s why it can overlap. You are not inside of your head which is inside of the world. The world with your head is inside of you.

The ability to represent something is called knowing, but understanding is the ability to do it.

Psychosis is when you lose the ability to distinguish between truth and belief.

What you call „mind” is just the unintended consequences of what you are doing. That includes all use of imagination (voice, image) as well as grasping things and making them real (that, of course, includes yourself). Feelings can only exist because you believe what you think, and you project that onto time, or onto the world. Pro tip: all imagination about the future is extrapolation from knowledge, which is essentially, past. You can never know what will, or even can, happen. You can only be present.

It’s funny how if being could ever be something other than it is, it would be nonbeing.

I’m guessing that plumbers know shit pretty well

The whole bird/mastery thread is silly because it tried to discuss understanding without the possibility to create knowledge (as in case of animals). Understanding is only in relation to something you know/representation.

By watching a video, a representation of the action, you understand the video because you created concepts, representations, of what had been done. Thus you may say that you know how to change the battery. Understanding is demonstrated by changing the battery, by aligning reality with the concepts you have, so that what you have in front of you corresponds with the knowledge you have. As for the existence of understanding apart from demonstration, it is just conviction, nothing else.

Which birds are the masters of flight?

Lol I’m a master poster because I just did it. Hahahaha

Shit I gotta lose some weight! Hahahaha The happy music is killing me! Hahahaha

Hahahaha

Yes @Leo Gura, I know you know God and understand consciousness.

I felt an urge to check in after a long absence and seeing you here, still chipping away at it, makes me feel all warm. Hi my dear friend!