UnbornTao

@Anton Rogachevski As long as we are moving in the direction of 'authentic experience,' we’re making progress.

@Anton Rogachevski GPT:

Cool. May have some sexual undertones, on the other hand, haha.

Where can that be found? This are the people you generally can trust had something real going on with them - probably some sort of awakening.

But where is the fucker? There's a story of a renowned Chan (Zen) monk who taught for many years, giving lectures all over China. After having done that for a time, at some point, upon attaining enlightenment, he burned all of his previous teachings, considering them worthless. It's an interesting perspective. I did some research - my story is a largely fictional interpretation. It might have been based on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangyan_Zhixian --- Burn my sutras ✅ Watch for tiles hitting the ground ⬜

Thank you for the doubt!

@Vali2003 No problem.

That's part of the trick, isn't it? Until we've had several enlightenments, it's just an educated guess, a possibility. Don't we all already assume we know what enlightenment is? Getting clear on what's actual and what's conceptual is a theme that keeps coming back to bite us. The mind lies a lot. Thank you, I often appreciate our discussions. This is challenging - even the Zen guys fall into the trap of "admiring the Buddha when you meet him on the road." In other words, they still confuse customs, teachings, traditions, and assumptions with actual breakthroughs and insights. How can we use thinking in a way that stays within the ballpark of genuine discovery? How do we create a useful and effective perspective or framework for this ontological work? Your work might already be moving in that direction. Instead of becoming just another belief system, it has to become increasingly real.

The article has merit and is certainly an intelligent take. I also appreciate its underlying pointer toward authentic experiences and the direction it proposes. Still, it's challenging to provide feedback right now, as I'm focused on more grounded inquiries - picture a Zen monk destroying every belief he holds. For what it's worth, I still think we tend to believe we are our minds, and that we can think our way to what's true.

That it is a dynamic that must be continuously balanced, rather than a static trait that stops being a consideration once learned and adopted. Like tightrope walking, standing on your own two feet is not necessarily easy.

@ExploringReality @Natasha Tori Maru It's easy to confuse language with the symbols, medium, or concepts being used. At the risk of oversimplifying, communication (and everything else that language allows for) is analogous to a painting, while language is the canvas. You can leave the canvas empty, but it must exist in order to be left empty. Leaving it empty might be akin to non-verbal or non-symbolic communication. The canvas is the context. If something cannot represent something else, it is not language, and no transmission can take place. Not even the notion of getting something across would occur to you. Otherwise, a thing would simply be that particular thing, and it wouldn't signify anything else. A sound is made; a drawing is made - and they exist as themselves. Uttering "chair" would be that sound: chair. Or: silla, chaise, 椅子, Stuhl. Just imagine how those would sound in your mind. It is hard not to operate from language - you still read chair and immediately associated the term with your image of a chair. This principle applies to all forms of communication. Notice that even if you don't know what those symbols mean, you still know that they signify something, that something is being conveyed - this is the distinction of language being operative. Not only that - without language, what would be left of what we now call "thinking"? It would be radically different, likely more immediate and objective - like a biological function akin to the body burping. The influence of language isn't limited to symbols; it creates whole worlds. Helen Keller created the context of language when she learned to associate the touch of water on her hand with the word "water" spelled into her palm by her teacher. This was based on feeling physical sensations. Intent is conceptual in nature, yet pre-linguistic - it is an impulse based on want and co-arises with action. With this I want to suggest that not all forms of concept are linguistic.

Glad to hear that. It's true, balancing that dynamic can also feel uncomfortably open-ended.

Hire a high-quality personal psychotherapist.

@Vali2003 Thanks for the advice. She requested a 3-month account pause to focus on other things.

@Natasha Tori Maru True dat.

There could also be a third possibility: standing on your own two feet by owning your experience, being sensitive to your own state and that of others, and connecting with them - without the motivation coming from emotional lack. Maybe. For sure.

Jesus Christ.

If I lie, I die. Anyhow, you got stuck in your own reactions to what was said. How about contemplating what contemplation is?

How could communication exist without the context of language (the possibility of some "thing" to refer to or represent something else that is not that thing)? The former is a function of the latter. Language deserves its own thread. Well, I'd leave absolute considerations out of the picture, given that context seems to be relative and language is an invention. Without process, there's no need for those things.

@Breakingthewall Have you read and attempted to listen to any of my other replies?

@Breakingthewall Who would have thought you'd rack up so many warning points already? You like to chat and project a lot, and you're not really willing to listen to anything beyond yourself. You can keep being stubborn as a mule, or you can listen for once. At the very least, be intellectually interested in getting the basics of the theory right (not as a belief, by the way.) What does agreeing or disagreeing accomplish? Nothing. The same points outlined above, and in my other replies, still apply. The main issue here is that the truth regarding the self is clearly unknown. And yet, that fact isn't recognized for what it is! Hence the need for contemplation. Try it out - give it a real try.

That's what I'm claiming can't occur without language! The possibilities of "something being gotten across by another" and "listening to another's internal state" wouldn't exist without such context. "Language" isn't found in the drawings, the concepts, or the sounds being made. Yes, that's basically what communication is - getting your experience across to another. The medium used, for example writing or speaking, is a tool aimed at conveying that experience. As said, there would be no notion of transferring your internal state to another, nor of listening to another's experience as we know it. So how could communication exist in such case? You'd hear the sounds being made by another sentient being, but they would be mere utterances - meaningless vocal vibrations not directed at you as something to grasp, make sense of, or decipher. It's hard to tell what feeling would be like without language, since language constitutes so much - perhaps even the majority - of our conceptual abilities. In fact, feeling itself may be conceptually based, though that's a different topic. Whether all concept and thought depend on language, I'm not entirely clear. As for less conventional forms of communication, a Zen-like silent transmission may be possible - or so the stories go. It's hard to know what's being conveyed in the rare cases said to happen. Perhaps 'enlightenment' could be transmitted, as it were, yet 'transmission' is still a form of communication, which is still subject to this context. What we call transmission might actually be an opening in the receiver, which he or she then uses to make a breakthrough themselves. Think of the Buddha and his cousin Ananda - again, extremely rare occurrences. I also suspect that people sometimes confuse things: for instance, "getting high" in the presence of a master and believing that awakening is being handed to them. But the absolute doesn't play by any rules, so I don't know. I haven't researched communication in other animals, but I speculate that some species - like birds - might possess a kind of primal language, if they do in fact communicate with one another. It's this context that generates 'symbol' and the transferring of information as a option in the first place - the space that allows something, like a chirp, to represent something different from the sound of the chirp itself.

@Breakingthewall Go back to contemplating what the self is.

"Ground" (background, foreground) is synonymous with - or points to - space, even if the space of context doesn't appear to be physical or objective. Within that space, the possibility for something to show up is created. The invention of language as a context instantly brought with it the possibility of Spanish, German, allegory, writing, misunderstanding, symbolism, etymology, rhetoric, influence, culture, manipulation, thinking, and so on. Is context conceptual in nature? It may sound abstract, but try to notice context in your daily life, and how it influences your thinking, feeling, and perspective. Your self is a context. It is the "space" where your experience is made sense of. Shift into a context of living life from self-expansion. This is a beneficial shift, one that naturally focuses the mind on this topic.