Nobody knows anything

[Leo Gura]

Don't overlook that you don't know who might know.

It's not so simple.

[UnbornTao]

10 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

Both are made by you. Your brain creates your perception of an apple through a cloud of trillions of processes a few nanoseconds after the light reflected by the apple enters your retina. The thought of the apple is the same, only it occurs several hours, days, or even years after the information enters your system.

The thought of it doesn't just occur on its own (which is the impression I got from reading your paragraph), you generate it. You can change it, or stop doing it altogether. You can even change your relationship to the apple by shifting your thinking about it. Yet, these are extraneous or supplementary activities added to something perceived as objectively existing. This is the distinction to notice, which is already operative in our lives.

10 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

If someone throws a rock at you, you move aside because your system perceives it as potential harm. If someone insults you, you react because your system perceives it as potential harm. After millions of years of evolution, it has become clear that your position in the group affects your survival, just like the rocks thrown at you.

How does harm come to exist? Not in perception itself, but in how you, and not some fixed system, interpret and react. The malleable nature of this process suggests a deeper layer of perception that remains untouched by subjective distortion, which is the realm of objects as they are.

Consider this: Have you ever taken offense at something someone said, only to later realize you misunderstood? In such moments the harm vanishes instantly. This reveals that the relationship between perception and reaction isn't as rigid or fixed as you made it out to be above. Interpreting something plays a big role in how we experience things. For example, the act of perceiving an object hurtling toward you only delivers raw sensory data and so doesn't inherently carry meaning or intent. The "harm" arises from how you process that input. This difference is what we're trying to clarify for ourselves. I'm not trying to imply that this matter is as easy or simplistic as simply "having different thoughts." 

There's a reason this is experienced as solid and fixed. It might function like the kernel of an operating system.

[AerisVahnEphelia]

You don't "know" the stream of consciousness is coming to you, that is god, that is the known.
The known can also be nothing, in fact it's quite nothing.
 

You're infering god reality, but also god delusion, god like to know and to not know.
the groundless ground is the real ground.

[Terell Kirby]

9 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Don't overlook that you don't know who might know.

It's not so simple.

True

[Yimpa]

9 hours ago, Mellowmarsh said:

Would this conscious knowing be immortal in the sense it knows it cannot not exist? 

 

[Breakingthewall]

4 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

The thought of it doesn't just occur on its own (which is the impression I got from reading your paragraph), you generate it. You can change it, or stop doing it altogether. You can even change your relationship to the apple by shifting your thinking about it. Yet, these are extraneous or supplementary activities added to something perceived as objectively existing. This is the distinction to notice, which is already operative in our lives.

When you say that you generate the mental image, while the sensory image is generated by the brain, we're entering into a subtle distinction. The sensory image is generated automatically, rigidly, and predetermined. It belongs to the animal mechanism, completely tied to genetics with no room for maneuver. But it's still you, the system that you are.

The mental image is also generated by the brain, but it can be modulated by a center that directs, decides, and analyzes: the self, which is also a structure created by the brain.

The difference is that this self/mind is not rigidly tied to genetics. It is based on it but evolves freely. It does exactly the same thing that life does with respect to the universe. It depends on its laws, but creates its own laws, self-preserves, and evolves. The mind is another phase of reality that operates on the genetic basis without being bound to it. It's the third phase of the reality that we know. Universe, life, mind. Life is part of the universe but is separated of the universe. Mind is part of life but it's separated of life. Separated in the sense of independent, self legislated, operationally autonomous, self preserved. all are the reality, but in different phases. 

So, when spirituality considers the mind as maya and the sensory to be direct truth, what it is doing is attempting an impossible regression out of nostalgia for the pre-apple Eden, when what they have is the ultimate model of hyper-complex structure, of unimaginable possibilities, which reality, in its inevitable expansion, aka infinite intelligence, has given birth. 

Who gets enlightened is not the monkey, is the mind. The mind is form and as a form is limited, but can open itself to the unlimited. Can perceive its unlimited nature from a wide, but still limited structure.

Edited 1 hour ago by Breakingthewall