anaj

The key to using obsidian effectively is to always make sure that you have at least one link to your note from another note. This way you can always find your note by browsing around similar notes that touches the same topics or themes. In practice this means that you write your insight into a new note, and then you link to that note from another note. If you don't have another note to link from, you create a new note whose only purpose is to link to notes that share a topic or a theme. So, if you have an insight about some aspect of consciousness you write that in a new note and then you create another not that's called "Consciousness - Map of contents". And in this map of contents note you put a link to your insight note. At the top of the Map of contents note you put a link to your "Home" note, which is like the master note that contains links to all your "map of contents"-notes. This "Home" note is your starting point to just browse around. From this note all the other notes in your entire repository is reachable through clicking links. I learned about these "Map of contents"-notes from a guy on youtube, search for "Linking your thinking" Good luck!

This is such a good quote from you. You should put it on the front page of your web site.

While it might be true that you’re smarter and cooler than everybody else, it's not true that you are to be credited for that. Your intelligence and your skills are gifts that you have received with the job of making the most out of them. Being humble is about realizing that you didn’t do shit to deserve what you’ve got, and if you did, then that drive that made you do it too was a gift. With great power comes great responsibility.

My conception of time comes from me projecting my internal “temporal ordering” of “events” onto reality, making it seem as one thing happens after another. Certain mnemonic images in my mind arises in a “temporal” order, forming a internal “timeline” (which also necessarily involves a spatial component, another illusory concept). This whole thing is entirely constructed in my mind, and its seeming temporal character is merely a mode of thinking. My mind then project this construct outwards. Having had breakfast this morning is not something that “happened”. The word “happened” involves this projection again. The temporal juxtaposition of events before my inner eye is not a testament to the order in which events happened. That “events” seem to happen in an order at all is just more mind construction. There are no events. Just mnemonic images in my mind. What is reality trule “like” then? It’s not “like” anything – this habit of conceiving reality as being in one way or another, is itself another mode of thinking. I’m then situating reality in an objective context – but objectivity as such is just another mode of thinking, another mode of conceiving.

I have four kids. Of course it’s exhausting and takes up a lot of time. But here’s the thing. All of this work that we’re doing is about increasing our capacity for Love. But having capacity is not enough. Unless that Love is somehow put into manifest form the capacity is just unactualized potential. Of course, we could put the love out in the world through our life purpose - and that could reach a lot of people and the ripple effect from that could be profound, but there’s another way in which we can manifest Love in the world. And that is by building little Love spreading machines. Programmed correctly, they would put much Love into the world but they would also upon reaching maturity hopefully replicate themselves, thereby generating exponential love growth. So, unless you’ve already got your life purpose at hand there’s a ready made one and that’s to start a family and instantiate the Love in the world through them.

In case anybody is interested, my book is free on Amazon kindle for the next few days. https://www.amazon.com/Refuting-External-World-Goran-Backlund-ebook/dp/B00NOXW8QE

You could only say that life lacks inherent meaning if you affirm the existence of an objective reality. With no objective reality from which meaning is absent, any meaning you derive from life is necessarily veridical. It's like the color blue. You could only say that blue isn't inherently existing if you think of objective reality as the real reality. If you instead recognize experience as the real reality (and objective reality as the imaginary one) blue's metaphysical status thereby becomes real and "inherent". So it is with meaning.

Yes, people appear as part of the nondual manifold, just like inanimate objects, such as bowls of fruit. You'd think the interaction with people now becomes strange when their form and expression is recognized to be an intimate part of yourself, but it really doesn't. Things move along as they always have and the story line continues to unfold, although the energetic involvement now infuses the entire field rather than directed at a particular character in the center of it. For example, I have 4 young kids. When I am with them--whether we're fighting about bed time, or playing around, or whatnot--ultimately, at the feeling/sensing level, I feel that I animate the entire interaction. Not in that I dictate what is happening, but that I'm the animating principle behind it all. But it's not in a narcissistic way, it's rather that the boundary between self and not-self is not there anymore so you're nothing in particular, or rather there's no you to be nothing or something -- but that amounts to the exact same thing as everything in total. No boundary to fragment the whole into parts amounts to the parts being nothing but the whole.

Absolutely!

I'd say that the actual moment of enlightenment always arrives as a sudden realization. I can't see how you would slowly slide into it. But even though the moment consists of a sudden shift, in general you'd have to build up to it, by investigating your direct experience, and your underlying conceptual framework with which you interpret it.

Think about what is implied within your question: that there's separate pockets of experience, one mine and one yours. That kind of thinking; namely that in terms of objectivity; is dismantled in the book I wrote (which I'm happy you like In other words, it's possible to realize that there's no particular objective way in which reality is, because objectivity as such isn't real, but merely a way of thinking; and thinking is to reality what sheet music is to the actual sounds that make up the music. That is, in no way do the symbols on the paper even begin to resemble the actual notes in the song as they appear in audible form. Of course, in the case of sheet music there's a kind of mapping, but in the case of reality and thinking there isn't even a mapping between concepts and objective reality as such, because there is no objective reality to which the concepts could refer. Unless concepts reference something in direct experience, they are ultimately empty and meaningless. Like in your example of "my experience" and "your experience". If you think about it, "mine" and "yours" isn't something that's given in experience, but is a reference to a kind of spatial situation within a larger objective frame of reference. This is true whether one is a non-materialist and thinks in terms of free floating separate streams of experience, or if one thinks of different located subjects in physical space, each having their own respective inner movie being played out in their own separate consciousness. In other words, using concepts such as "mine" and "yours" must necessarily invoke thinking in terms of objectivity and can thereby be demonstrated to be non-viable, logically speaking, as I do in the book.

As I understand it, the word emptiness is used differently across different schools of thought. In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhyamaka, it's used more like a tool of deconstruction, where things are realized to be empty of inherent existence because they exist dependently; and the analysis of things existing dependently goes "all the way" down, eventually deconstructing everything, leaving nothing at all in the end. In other words, supposedly, you begin at your current assumptions of reality and bit by bit you deconstruct things by realizing their dependent nature until you realize that there's nothing there. I actually never found these teachings very compelling, because I think that they play into materialism (even though they claim that in the end materialism itself is done away with). In zen, as I understand it, the word emptiness usually refers to the fact that one's true nature lacks any definable characteristics. Yes, and another good word that I remember rupert spira once used was "modulation". I like that. Exactly. As I interpret it, "Emptiness is form" refers to the fact that form and substance is really inseparable. Form and substance is really just a subtle duality; the form cannot exist apart from the substance and the substance cannot exist apart from the form. The notes cannot exist apart from the music and the music cannot exist apart from the notes. But both music and notes are really just nonexisting as independent things, as they are defined in terms of each other. It's just an artificial conceptual boundary that creates them in the first place. Yes. No, because the depthly aspect is given directly in experience. It's the difference between looking with one eye or two eyes. One way of looking gives a flat report, the other a depthly one. The "depthly" sense is not inferred, but given. The perceptual shift was sudden. But the recontextualizing of my experience began long before the shift, and continued afterwards. But there was definitely a single moment where the shift occurred. And yes, I think the frenzy was necessary. I can't see how I ever could end up where I am without the seeking, but of course, I've read accounts where it happened spontaneously ( Like eckhart tolle ) Yes. Yes, that's how I did it.

Yes, but honestly, I'm still figuring it out, so I can't say much about it at this point.

Integrating insights can take quite a while, in my experience. For instance, way back, many years ago I had the realization that we, as human beings, did not possess free will; that the whole notion was, when you actually unpack it and trace down all its meanings, really inconceivable. And a natural and logical consequence was that it didn't really make sense, psychologically, to blame people for stupid stuff they did. Yet, I found it quite difficult to align my emotional reactions with this new way of viewing the world, despite the fact that I had really grokked the insight about free will. But over the years the old ways kind of wore off, and nowadays I mostly am fine with people acting the way they do. I might respond adequately, but deep down I don't blame people for acting like people. So it takes time for insight to seep through. It's the same with all this reality stuff. You don't just have an insight and then everything falls into place. It takes many years, before the understanding has permeated your way of being to the point where it feels aligned.

Of course!