Consilience

@winterknight Thank you

Right. Those ARE just more “contents” within conscious awareness. Who is chasing exactly? What exactly are your ideas about materialism, or who you think you are? Do you know? Here’s the thing: All your ideas about materialism, all of your meaning about the world, all of your intellectualizations and learning, all of your social status and interactions with other people are meaningless contents within conscious. Let that sink in. Like REALLY sink in. Before any meaning can be given to an experience, the experience must first be experienced. But have you reflected on what meaing actually is? “Meaning” is itself just more contents within consciousness, and just as meaningless as the experiences themselves because meaning is literally another experience within your unified direct experience. Does that make sense? Furthermore, all of your ideas about self or the sense of a seperate self are still more meaningless contents within consciousness. All of your direct experience exists before “you” superimposed the ideas of a seperate self who is chasing and wanting deeper awareness. Seriously explore your direct experience dawg: what do you see? If you look closesly, and in all 6 senses (taste, touch, sight, smell, hearing, mind), you’ll notice an unified field of phenomena popping in and out of consciousness. You’ll also notice that within each point of this field, there are an infinte number of ways to divide, distinguish, objectify, or create information about. In fact, all objects within consciousness, are really just an arbitrary grouping of distinctions within the infinite field of distinctions already present, but again, none of it is seperate from the whole of conscious experience. Aka objects dont actually exist. All of your ideas, meaning, sense of self, materialism, or anything having to do with your mind, is fundamentally based on a false premise that objects exist as seperate entities in and of themselves, but as we just explored, no objects truly exist. So now we ask: who is chasing, who is wanting? What IS chasing, what IS wanting? ... Empty contents within consciousness that have arbitrarily been seperated from the whole of direct experience, objectified mental ideas, which themselves are based fundamentally on a false notion, an illusion we might say. And here’s the thing, what Im talking about is an oversimplified fraction of all there is to say on this topic of non-dual spirituality. My advice? Keep contemplating, keep meditating and dont stop until you’ve unraveled all of this for yourself. Id also recommend exploring Peter Ralston’s work. His books are extremely helpful for spirituality.

What is intuition from the perspective of enlightenment?

I posted this in another thread but I think it would be helpful here too. Read this article and something may click for ya~ https://deconstructingyourself.com/escaping-observer-trap.html

I wouldnt underestimate a spiritual significance of environment, such as a shrine. Think of it this way: what’s more conducive for meditation/contemplation, a warzone or a garden? My point with that example showing that while in the absolute sense no location, or shrine, would be necessary, environment most certainly can play a role if we are not yet awakened. On the otherhand, you dont want to form a subconscious attachment to anyone location or routine, which consistently meditating at 1 location such as a shrine may lead to.

https://deconstructingyourself.com/escaping-observer-trap.html This is a really good article.

Ive dealt with this yeah. Im an introvert but am working as a personal trainer so Im literally in contact with people all day long every day haha. What’s interesting is at first it was exhausting, but it eventually got to be no big deal. Two things really helped me: 1) I had it in my mind that I was going to learn how to be more effective at my job and adapt. So you need to really cement the possibility for your ability to adapt and change how the job affects you. Genuinely opening up this possibility for growth gives way for eventual transformation. 2) I stopped labeling myself as an introvert and worked towards transforming that identity. Introversion, at the end of the day, is a concept about ourselves and the more you study the self, the more you see how relative and arbitrary characteristics are. So introversion is just a concept or a story the self tells itself. So practically speaking, try to deeply contemplate why you’re clinging to your introversion, find those limiting beliefs and assumptions, find out why these specific social interactions drain you, and then if you have the courage, let them go. This sounds simple on paper but I promise both 1) and 2) take real work to figure out, but, at least in my experience, it can be done.

How does meditation admit existence of objects?

Beautiful pt. 2 - Thank you for sharing

Understand the hard problem of consciousness, which is a philosophical topic. Next, become directly conscious of the fact that reality has and always necessarily will be perceived as contents of consciousness. Any ideas or thoughts about objects or physicality is itself more contents within consciousness

That would be very expensive if everyone flew

Id be down for Seattle!

1) It’s perfectly fine to enjoy your practice. I feel like sustaining 3 hours per day is plenty of difficulty for now. The biggest thing is dont get lost in the bliss. Are you trying to feel good or are you trying to observe what’s true? 2) I would dedicate a specific time during your meditation to be examining emotions, and another segment towards surrendering and letting go. It sounds like you’re over thinking this one a bit. 3) This is a great question. From my experience, it depends. Ive found that quality is more important than quantity for meditation. So maximizing quality is key here. However, Ive also found there to be a non-linear increase in efficacy as the mediation practice lengthens such that I suspect 1 super solid 12 hour session would yield greater growth than 12 1 hour sessions. But! This doesnt take into account time and also like... there’s no way id be able to sustain a 12 hour session at this moment, so the 12 1 hour would actually be more helpful given the quality principle. Hope this helps.

For 2) Definitely checkout Peter Ralston's work. He has been one of the most helpful resources I've found for understanding the self structure and emotions from an enlightenment perspective. As for 1), I think Leo is making the distinction between self identity being relative and then all intellectual perspectives being relative, which is distinct from self knowledge. That's a good question though.

Yo. An insight I had during meditation today that I felt like sharing - Distinction is infinite. Observe this within direct experience. No matter where we observe, no matter how finely we constrict our concentration, or how broadly we let our awareness expand, the depth and types of distinction continue to manifest and manifest ad infinitum. Conscious experience is infinitely divisible from the macro and micro, no matter what perceptual sense, more and more distinctions may be drawn. Become conscious of this right now. Separation is division amongst an infinite field of distinction. Whenever separation manifests, it does so by dividing a set of distinctions from another set of dictions. Observe this within direct experience. For example, self and other is a division within an infinite field of distinctions. Separation may be formed around any myriad of distinctions, because remember, distinction is infinite in all directions of experience. Separation is free to take advantage of this phenomena in an equally infinite number of ways. However, relative to the totality of direct experience, there is no such thing as separation, there is only direct experience. There IS ONLY direct experience. Verify this right now please. Furthermore, please directly experience how direct experience cannot be separate from itself, because... it is itself. If we classify a set of distinctions as separate from another set of distinctions, this DOES NOT allow for separation from the total field of direct experience, because remember: there is only direct experience. In this light, separation does not exist as direct experience, it exists as a metta distinction amongst an infinite field of distinctions, but nevertheless always apart of the whole of direct conscious experience. Separation is only a conceptualization of direct experience; separation is a conceptual web around direct experience classifying and dividing an infinite pool of distinctions into a metta distinction, but there is no such thing as separation of direct experience as a whole, despite how it may be divided. Anyways... Now I'm looking at my dog and realizing he is literally just as "me" as the egoic self is... Lol.

Yes! It is all one movement, propigating self survial. Tbh Im not aware of this 24/7 but especially when meditating it becomes very obvious.

It’s not a thought story. It’s an observation of direct experience. Even if god awareness is the 1 aspect of direct experience which is permanent, it is still not separate from that which is aware. It is all just.... itself. That’s my obseration at least. When I look out into the world, or when Im at home meditating, there is no separation, just flucuations of impermanent phenomena and the awareness that observes it all. But all of it is happening as a whole. When concentration slices through and registers distinction, we can form thought stories like “a separate self.” But when you actually observe direct experience in its totality, there is nothing separate. It is all just itself. This requires no thinking to observe as far as I can see.

And the kicker is that none of this that you describe is separate from itself. It’s all happening simultaneously, in each moment as a collective untit of consciousness. Nothing that’s actual is ever separate from itself.

This is a really interesting question that Im honestly unsure of.

Right. Im trying to let this observation fully sink in.

Ideologies can require very nuanced thinking though, even if ultimately false

Orange. Taking logic and rationality to its fullest extent requires a subtle and nuanced mind, at least that was my experience back when I was caught up in stage orange. You cant excel at subjects like philosophy, math, engineering without being able to think incredibly logically, even before systems thinking comes into play, but often times these subjects have very subtle/nuanced details utilizing various forms of logic and or rationality.

This is a really good insight. Hating on the ego is actually just another layer of self identity; our goal is to transcend and discover the nature of ego, not become egotisitical about hating on the ego. Ego hate is actually a very counter intuitive egoci trap people can easily fall into imo - great insight d00d

Really great explanation.

Even from a perspective of self, what is a preference? It’s a variation of desire right? So what is a desire? Desire is a clinging to a thought or idea about the future. So what is clinging? More thoughts? So thoughts generating clinging-thoughts generating positive feelings which were what the preference consisted of. Preferences seem to be generated out of the concept that a certain future x may be achieved by certain actions y. But the underlying nature of a preference is that we confuse the outcome “x” as being positive or negatice, but if you look at any outcome of the future, it’s neither good or bad, so the underlying structure of a preference is based on... more thoughts which themselves don’t exist in the outside world. Maybe none of what Im saying makes sense or resonates. Either way I think contemplating the nature of preference is the next step, not whether or not there is no self. Preferences clearly exist in some form, so unraveling their nature can be done from the perspective of a self or no self.