Mason Riggle

again.. no difference. These are the exact same realization.

Goal # 1.. get some goals. In all seriousness though, I think it's a good idea to have several goals.. short term goals, and long term goals. Long term goals can be more general and less well defined 'I would like to be debt free by age 30', where short term goals can be very specific.. 'I would like to get up earlier and meditate daily'. It's also a good idea to have goals that seem impossible, keeping in mind you don't have to reach every goal to get benefits from the journey, and some goals that are easy and realistic. It can be a big boost to see small goals accomplished, so by setting some easy goals and hitting those targets, you gain confidence and feel good about achieving your goals.

@Inliytened1 I'm still not sure what you're getting at. Those double negatives are killing me. I'm speaking directly to the point about 'real' vs 'not real', and suggesting they are no different. That's all. I have no idea what you're talking about.

I'm not sure what you mean. This is very vague. What is up for offer?

@Inliytened1 there is literally no difference between something 'objectively being materially real' and something 'subjectively seeming materially real'. Does this forum exist somewhere outside of THIS pure direct experience? It does not matter. If there is a difference, I have yet to have anyone point it out. The profound realization, is that even when God is pretending it's not God.. that's still God... so whether God realizes it is itself or not.. both are God being God.

@Wilhelm44 pretty much God (the Oneness) likes to pretend (dream, imagine, create) that it is separate from itself (Manyness) so it can know (experience, be) itself. Everything/Nothing is Infinite (unlimited).. it's without form.. it's indescribable.. so it imposes imaginary limits (duality- this vs that) on itself so it can 'seem like' (here we are pretending, imagining, creating) Something.

@Wilhelm44 depends on how you define 'God'. If a puppet is pulling it's own strings, who's doing what? Are the strings moving the puppet or is the puppet moving the strings? "Am I doing all of this, or is all of this doing me?" The illusion is that there is separation between 'the doer' and 'what's being done'. It's all you. It's all God. This is why, when religious people are asked to provide 'proof of God's existence' they gesture around broadly.. look around.. here it is.

@Breakingthewall do you think there's an 'absolute goal'?

@Wilhelm44 yep. Everything is happening (being), and no one's 'doing it'.

@AtheisticNonduality exactly right.

Alans words echo your own- 'but you can begin to feel you own existence as absolutely fundamental.' @Breakingthewall maybe it's just too obvious to see. The forest hiding among the trees. I defer back to Mr. Watts. “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” - Alan Watts

Mason's Razor - Any attempt to interfere with what is occurring, is just more 'what is occurring'.

@Breakingthewall Some are better than others, but if the map 'gets you there', it was the 'right map'.

@Breakingthewall it's all metaphor, of course. 'fun' and 'bored' are just human concepts like 'deliberate' and 'passionate'. Alan is giving us a map.. the map is not the territory.

Yoda was close.. "Be. There is no do." - Me Consider, what are you 'doing' right now? Well, you're 'being yourself' aren't you? and you're not 'trying' to 'do it'. Notice that any attempt to 'change what is occurring (trying to manifest) is something that is already 'occurring'.. what manifested 'the attempt'? Where did that come from? Do we have to 'attempt' to 'try' before we can try? How do we 'try to make an attempt' without trying to do that? Does this mean we have to try to try to try? How, by trying to? Notice that a tree 'manifests' apples without ever trying to. How? Simple. By just 'being a tree'. The 'tree' never has to try to do what it's already doing, which is 'being a tree'. If the tree 'tried to grow oranges instead of apples'.. that would still be exactly what the tree is doing, which is still 'being how it is being'. 'Trying to grow oranges' would be something the tree is doing 'without trying to', or rather, the tree is always just 'being itself', and not really 'doing' anything else.

@Wilhelm44 you're in charge of nothing. There is no freedom, in the sense that 'in any moment, reality could 'be' other than how it is being'. The freedom comes in the form of a realization that there nothing to to.. no doing.. only 'being'. Consider the following scenario.. A man wakes up in the morning, gets ready for his day, and on his way out the door he spills his coffee, causing him to go back inside, change his shirt, and leave the house 5 minutes later than originally planned. On his way to work, he is in a fatal car accident that he might have avoided had he left home at the usual time. We might ask ourselves, 'what was the 'cause' of the accident?' (who was in charge?) The spilled coffee? The man waking up? The carelessness of the other driver? The decision to change his shirt? We can recognize that all of these things 'caused' the accident.. it's 'the playing out of the entire Universe' that causes 'how the Universe is playing out'.

@Breakingthewall The Dream of LIfe- Alan Watts "If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death, (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself - not as a stranger in the world - not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived by fluke - but you can begin to feel you own existence as absolutely fundamental. I am not trying to sell you on this idea, in the sense of converting you to it. I want you to play with it. I want you to think of it's possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream for 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would naturally, as you begin on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you can concieve. And after several nights of seventy five years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well that was pretty great”. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream that’s not under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be. And you would do that and would come out of that and you would say "Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it"? Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further-in and further-out gambles to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living a life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren’t God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not God in a political kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic, whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending that you are not."

@billiesimon consider, if you were dreaming, and suddenly realised you were dreaming, would the characters in your dream realise it too? They will if you dream it so. If you fully awaken, where are the dream characters to realise anything??

@billiesimon the illusion is 'separation'. It's not that 'you' don't exist.. it's that there's no 'you' separate from that which is not you.

'They' are the mask. If you full drop your mask, there is no them.. it's all you.

@Ecocotton Solipsism is true, because it's just the idea that I can't know whether or not there is anything other my own perspective. Solipsism doesn't care if there are other perspectives or not.. it's all about what can be known. The Solipsist says, 'there's 1 thing I know for sure, and that is 'whatever my experience is', but I might be totally confused about what exactly that experience is. From my perspective, my perspective is the only one I can know for sure to exist. Solipsism does not say, 'I know my perspective is the only one that exists.' I could be dreaming Leo, and everything he says, and my family, and every experience I can remember.. I can't know, but it also doesn't seem to matter. It 'seems' like there are others, and that seems to be 'as real as it's ever gonna get'.

"Do not warship false idols" = "The Map is not The Territory" It's a metaphor. It means don't confuse 'concepts of God' with 'God'. Don't look at a map of the road and think it's the actual road.

Dreams are weird man, idk.. I once dreamt that my wife was murdered, and remember thinking in my dream, 'My god noooo! this must be a dream!', yet I didn't wake up until a bit later, after I had tried to track down the murderers in an angry rage.. I woke up out of breath and sweating. It was so real, even telling myself within the dream that I was dreaming didn't 'wake me up'.. I have long vivid dreams often, sometimes I journal them, but this one was, as you said, 'completely disproportionate to what i thought was possible to experience even in a dream'.. full range of emotion, smells, sounds, textures, conversations. Sometimes ya just gotta go WTF?

@Anirban657 you have to pay for the Life Purpose Course, but based on the quality of his other content, I bet it's worth every penny.

Your fear or 'anxiety' about what to do is driven by neurotic 'thoughts of the future'. Similarly, people who experience depression are nerotically focusing on 'thoughts of the past'.. by training yourself to keep your awareness in the present moment (mindfulness meditation), rather than focusing on thoughts of the future (or thoughts of the past), your fears will subside. Now, it's still important to think about the future. I might recommend Leo's life purpose course.. or looking into 'the Law of Attraction'.. which basically involves really figuring out what you want, because it seems (you can verify it for yourself, I can't prove it to you) that when you know what you want, the Universe conspires to make it happen.