Osaid

Yes. This is related to the separate self; the assumption that there was a "you" in the past which saw it many times. Knowledge ties into the past self too. There is knowledge generated from that past self, that you can "know" what you are experiencing because you saw it before or heard someone talk about it before. This knowledge partitions what you are looking at into various parts and dualities, thus limiting your perception of it. That's a way to put it. Existentially, I see it as if "nothing" is generating it. It is appearing out of nothing. Which is to say, there is no thing in your experience which generates it, and thus there is no limit or context to it either. This is essentially how I see the rest of my experience too. Even calling it "imagination" or "thought" takes away from what it truly is, in the exact same way that labelling anything else would. It is just an undefined experience, it can't be put into any kind of explanation. It is not real or unreal, and it is not imagination or non-imagination, it is simply just "nothing", which means it is completely undefined. Any way you try to define it or explain it is itself imagination, catch-22. Aside from that, I practically see thought/imagination as a reaction to your surroundings. If you smell food, you will imagine food. If there is a robber in your house, you will imagine ways to fight the robber. There is not really someone who chooses to have those thoughts, but it is just an intelligent reaction to your environment. You never ask yourself "do I want to imagine something?" before imagining something, because that kind of choosing never occurs as it would create an impossible paradox.

Woah, nice, whatever it is. I think you are tapping into something really big. Time will tell. Thoughts and imagination are always partial. If you imagine reality, it limits it, and that can feel claustrophobic. I talk about that more here: Pay attention to your perception of time and your emotions, interested to know if you notice anything there.

Yes, imagination is thoughts and ideas. Imagination is also limitation. It creates "things" or "objects" and various multiplicities. These multiplicities are equivalent to limitations and boundaries. Limitations are inferences created through imagination. Experience does not have objects. It is always the whole thing. The whole thing does not have any edges or boundaries, that defeats the definition of being whole. To be whole is to be undivided. Something undivided has no limit or boundary. When the mind is quiet, there is experience, but that experience is not anything you can imagine about it. It is undefined. If you point to some part of it and say "that is me" then you have defined yourself through mind and imagination, because you have separated that part of experience through intellect, which creates identity.

If you identify with a part of experience, that is always imaginary. Because experience has no capability to partition itself. You can't experience a part of experience, you can only experience experience, which is the whole thing, not a divided part of it. Only your imagination partitions. You cannot imagine yourself, which means any thing you imagine is not you. Why do you identify with one location and not the other? Why the bias? The bias is mentally projected, it is imagination. Solidity and physicality is unrelated, but you can certainly imagine yourself as that.

Nothing. No thing. Undefined. Pure non-definitiveness. Infinite. Unlimited. You are it already. You just imagine otherwise. When you imagine what you are, you limit what you are.

You can think about the future but you can't experience it. There would be absolutely zero fear about what is going to happen to me, but there would be a desire to avoid it. You can only avoid the future, you can't experience it.

Self is what you imagine or think that you are. It is the entity that is afflicted by past and future since those are also in imagination. Physicality is not self. I have seen people say that they feel like they are located in their head, or that they are looking out of their eyes, or some such things. But these are ultimately just beliefs they have; that they are located inside of the brain somewhere. They are identifying with a specific location in their experience, which creates that "sense of self."

The same way your "self" separates is exactly how all objects separate. You can only perceive separation if you believe you are a separate entity. In your experience, there can be various sensations and feelings, but these sensations and feelings do not make any kind of claim like "I am separate from everything else", that is only what the mind can claim about the sensations and feelings. Blissful identity shifts are possible. They can feel relaxing or empowering depending on what you imagine or assume. The way that works is that it dispels whatever belief you had about yourself prior which was causing you to feel fearful or disempowered.

The same way it is possible for you. But there is no imagined self which is mixed in with my survival. The focus is just on what is physically and experientially experienced, in other words, what isn't imagined. Physical survival is equivalent to life and existence itself. There is no discrepancy. There are biological motivations which exist outside of ego, like physical pain when touching a hot stove for example. There is just no more engaging with past or future. Physical pain occurs in the present, so it is a biological motivator beyond ego. My physical survival is mainly motivated by very primal biological motivations, in which there is a dichotomy of "pleasant" and "unpleasant" sensations. Unpleasant sensations generally motivate you to move away from something, and pleasant sensations generally motivate you to move towards something. Beyond pure physical survival, I am motivated by the various other things that life or existence itself is made out of. You don't need a self to experience physical pain, and you don't need a self to want to do something. The intention to do something is a reaction to a thought that you have, it's not really "you deciding it." You don't decide to have a thought prior to when it appears, so there is never truly a decision made by "you." When you imagine a unicorn, you don't ask yourself prior "Do I want to imagine a unicorn or not?" There is no entity which decides on anything, there is just an intelligent reaction to thought. There is nothing else beyond that. I expand a bit more on this here: I only dream when I am drifting into sleep or waking up. The actual period of sleep is very deep.

Your mind might be creating things, but fundamentally the way you separate what it creates is that you imagine the separation. Separation is perceived as something you abstract through imagination. Your experience has things inside it, but it is ultimately one experience, not two experiences. Your mind abstracts it into separate objects, and thus it multiplies the singular experience into something that is apparently multiple. Otherwise there is no separation, the separation is ultimately created through your imagined abstraction. You have to translate the experience into separate pieces, like "I looked at a tree", but in actuality your experience included much more than just a tree. If you account for the whole experience, it is just one seamless undivided thing which has no separation. If there is separation, that means a part of the experience is not being accounted for, catch-22.

Probably. I'm talking about enlightenment. What you're talking about is what I call an "awakening", or a glimpse into enlightenment. There are no levels of consciousness. Your previous beliefs about reality were recognized as false because the psychedelic experience contradicted your beliefs, and you perceive this as an uptick in consciousness, but it is just a removal of belief or identity. If something is expanding, then it is finite. It is ego. It is not absolute. For something to expand, it must be separate from what it expands into. You experienced the collapse of your false beliefs about reality, you perceive that as an "expansion." You can stop imagining, yes. What is left over from that is "nothing", yes. That much is not ego. From this you conclude that "you are constructing a dream", but that is just a metaphysical identity which itself is made of imagination. You aren't constructing anything through imagination. That itself is imagination. Imagination never leaves the medium of imagination. You can't conclude anything from imagination, you can only realize it is imaginary.

No, but it loses the distinctions you imagine about it. You could say it loses all of its "borders." I can still perceive things that are far away, which I think constitutes 3D perception.

Nothing changes physically, it is more like a recontextualization. You don't gain or lose anything, but your mind simply stops limiting reality through its projections. It is subtractive in nature, because it is a removal of a false identity. It is a deceptively simple shift in perception, but the implications of it go very deeply. There is no contradiction between your current state and infinite love, you are just imagining otherwise. The infinite love you experienced was probably similar in nature to what I am talking about, but it only occurred during a very specific psychedelic experience, which probably involved a very heavy body load and all sorts of grandiose metaphysical thoughts I assume. It is a mistake to conflate the symptoms of that experience as if it is inherent to infinite love. Any fear involved, if it is not about some kind of immediate physical threat, is ego. Fear is simply a desire to avoid something. If the thing you are avoiding is in past or future, that is ego, because only the ego is afflicted by past and future. Yes, I have a body. Yes, I sleep. But experientially, there is no "I" experiencing any of that, I only say "I" for the sake of communication.

You can permanently dissolve the ego through self-inquiry. Once you truly realize why there cannot be a "self" which exists inside of experience, the ego immediately and permanently dissolves itself. You can't think about yourself ever again, because you realize you could never do that in the first place. It is a binary recognition that you cannot imagine yourself. There are many ways to go about doing self-inquiry, but it is useful to question your experience of past and future, and the "you" that experiences the past and future. The main point of self-inquiry is to question the entity you call "yourself" until you realize why it cannot exist. Once you realize that, you never engage with it again. It's like realizing that Santa Claus doesn't exist, there is no point in imagining Santa Claus afterwards.

Yes, my imagination is actually much more rich and fantastical now because I don't constrain it with my identity. I don't assume things about it and how it relates to me. I just don't practically use it to imagine myself anymore. I think this ability to imagine without constraint is what makes you "feel like a kid again." It's exactly like that Spongebob episode with the box lol. Previously, imagination is mostly seen as a tool for survival, but right now it's like this magical ethereal thing that just generates perceptions out of nothing. It's like playing a video game in my head. I still use it for survival, but I don't use it to make existential assumptions. When you use imagination to make existential assumptions, it shrinks and limits reality, and it also shrinks your ability to imagine things, because your imagination itself is part of existential reality too.

Right. It's because your imagination wasn't as caught up in your identity. You have less memories about yourself as a kid, because you didn't live as long and so you experienced "less time." Identity accumulates over time if you have an ego, because the ego exists in time. It's like looking at a tree and thinking "I've seen thousands of trees in my lifetime" VS. "wow, a tree." As a kid, you didn't have as many ideas about "how the world is." It was basically endless exploration and learning, but now as an adult you "know everything."

No. The ego is as functional as Santa Claus.

"non-dual way of thinking" is a hilarious oxymoron You can like art made by someone you don't like, in the same way that you can like pizza made by someone you don't like. If you don't want to eat pizza made by them because it gives them money which they are using to support themselves to buy weapons or harm other people, then you make that decision. There is no moral code to follow here other than just following what actually exists consequentially; there is just looking at what your actions produce and then deciding what you want to do based on that.

The ego mind desperately looking for an identity to latch on to, bewildered by the new metaphysics of its experience.

How blissful is believing that you are Jesus?

What is there to handle? Does it matter how your mind describes reality? Why do you micromanage that? What is the point? It is just mind. It comes and goes like the wind. It says nothing and returns to nothing. Reality can't be thought. Physicality can't be thought. Taste can't be thought. Sight can't be thought. Why would you want any of it to be thought? Why would you want your experience to become a thought? Why think about it?

Rephrased: What is beyond the absolute? Leo would say, many more degrees of consciousness. Any enlightened person would say, nothing.

Enlightenment = everything/experience/existence Humans have the capability to imagine that they are not "everything/experience/existence." They have the capability to imagine themselves as something they are not, this is what an identity is. This imagination/identity itself is also part of "everything/experience/existence" by necessity. Being an "enlightened person" is realizing "oh im not the thing inside my imagination." But also, at the same time, your imagination did not change anything metaphysically, it is the very thing enlightenment is "made up of." "Unenlightenment" is a human invention through imagination. It is specifically the human capacity to entangle your identity inside of your imagination. When someone untangles themselves from their imagination, you point to them and say "that person is enlightened!" because they are now acting in accordance with what they actually are, not what they imagine that they are. Hope that made some sense.

Same, good chat.

We're going in circles. You do you.