UnbornTao

It's the one I use for my commonplace book, so I agree.

Thanks, Google!

Excerpt From Ending Unnecessary Suffering Peter Ralston

The forbidden fruit may represent the ability to represent what isn't in our minds - to conceptualize. This ability grants us both immense power and deep suffering at the same time: it separates us from the world, allows us to misrepresent reality, to feel isolated and empty, to create whole imaginary worlds to live in, and so on. Interestingly, the origin of the story itself is based on the very activity it forbids.

Done!

@Breakingthewall Not to come off as a jerk again, but you need to do some serious work on assumptions. Entertain the possibility that the truth of the matter is actually unknown - especially regarding 'the absolute.' It is neither potential, openness, nor an absence or a filling. It is whatever it is and remains up for grabs. We can leave it at that - or "mu." By the way, I'd like to acknowledge that we might be facing some language barriers here. Openness as a principle is relative. Consider that for something to be open, the context of space has to be presupposed. It's true that an open mental state is invaluable for learning and contemplation, but it also needs to be paired with 'rootedness' - having your experience grounded in reality and accurate distinctions. Otherwise, you become off-balance, and that openness turns into mere pretension. Without being grounded, your ability to recognize your own dishonesty and ignorance gets diminished. It can also be useful to consider the act of communicating and how it differs from spouting beliefs or conclusions. Communication is about conveying your experience as it is so that another can grasp it for themselves. The keyword here being 'experience.' What exactly that is hasn't been fully grasped by us yet, but the term gives us a direction to look nonetheless. We can keep exploring meaning now.

I'm not entirely clear on what you're trying to say. I guess it depends on what you mean by consciousness, but in that segment, I was talking about perception. I'd rather not speculate on these topics, though.

@Princess Arabia @AION Links to YT videos are allowed.

What insight? Get a lobotomy and see. Without a body, experience can't occur, can it? It's a matter of biological mechanics. We don't say that a dead person has the capacity to experience. If, as you said, experience is all you have, what allows for that? Do you think you're just a mind floating around in empty space? Without a brain, obviously you wouldn't be able to be writing here. Granted, you seem to be holding perception more metaphorically when you qualify it as absolute. In any case, is it? Can perception occur without a body? If not, then, in the conventional sense, it can't be absolute - because it is a process (a biological one, it seems to me.) We can claim and believe anything; our actual experience is another matter. It's a bit like believing that "anger is illusory and we're all one" - and then cursing at other drivers in traffic the next moment. That's the discrepancy I'm pointing out. Whether it's true or not isn't realized by virtue of simply believing in assertions we've come across. Again - just trying to ground this consideration a bit. Makes the work harder but keeps it real. disclaimer: do not get a lobotomy

Regardless of what you take niceness to be or mean, not being nice doesn't necessarily imply being the opposite! That's a jump we often make.

That's great. It doesn't necessarily imbues one with insight into what a thing is, though. That depends on what the practice is based on and what its goals are. I'm sure your fantasies would be promptly set aside if a bus were coming your way and the only option was to step aside. Again, look beyond hearsay - at your experience as it is actually lived. The mention of 'self' was in response to your introducing a perceiver. Then again, we're tackling what perception is.

@Sugarcoat très bien!

@Breakingthewall I understand the difficulty of articulating these things, and I get your frustration - but that frustration is more about you than about me. Have you even bothered to understand - and properly answer - some of the questions I asked you above? If you're as open as you claim to be, consider that you might be wrong in your stance on some fundamental things. Being open doesn't mean "everything is possible," nor does it mean "I can say whatever I want and that makes it true." It isn't merely a fantasy, an intellectual artifice, a social posturing, or a character trait. You need to be grounded and reconsider your stance on principles such as listening and openness - that is, if you care about being honest. You can go over the questions and try to respond to them. Or keep babbling away. Once you decide how to respond to this, we can switch back to the topic of meaning.

But what's your experience of the matter, though? Ah, this is the trick. I know we like and even cherish our spiritual beliefs - but they aren't true. When all is said and done, what do you have relative to these things? This is where I'm trying to push the conversation. Don't assume that just because I'm saying 'perception occurs', there has to be a self doing the perceiving. The occurrence of perception is hard to deny, isn't it? And it couldn't occur without a body - just as a computer needs hardware to exist. This is a kind of 'law' of objective reality. For some reason I thought you were the one who started the thread.

That is a peculiar use of 'perception.' Would you be able to perceive or experience something without your body? Could you see without eyes? What if you were told that you can perceive something prior to what you're calling interpretation and experience? We start to find different activities within what was previously - and vaguely - held as 'perception.' Would you say your dislike for a particular object is the same as perceiving the object - or the use it has to you as being the same as your sensory encounter with it?

You said that by perception you didn't just specifically mean a mental interpretation. I was making a distinction between the two in case you were assuming they're the same thing. If we were to define perception as the biological process of encountering data through the senses, where would you place it in 'the field of consciousness'? What do you mean by that? Is that what you're taking to be perception?

Nice.

Interpretation isn't perception.