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 22 hours ago by Breakingthewall

[Breakingthewall]

11 hours ago, Mellowmarsh said:

Okay, thanks for your response.

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

Consciousness is not something that can be immortal; it is something that happens. Consciousness is reality being aware of itself. Reality is not consciousness, it's conscious.

What is immortal is reality. Ultimately, it is what you are, and everything else is changing form, including consciousness. Enlightenment is being aware of what you truly are, of the totality. Who is aware is the reality in the form of you, a self that is conscious of it's nature. 

[Terell Kirby]

24 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

Consciousness is not something that can be immortal;

False, Consciousness is all there is- with no beginning and no end, making it Eternal.

Your entire life has been Consciousness manifesting various states, this will be the case beyond your physical death

[Breakingthewall]

35 minutes ago, Terell Kirby said:

False, Consciousness is all there is- with no beginning and no end, making it Eternal.

Your entire life has been Consciousness manifesting various states, this will be the case beyond your physical death

Consciousness is the fact of being conscious right? 

[UnbornTao]

4 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

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.

Okay, thanks for playing. Appreciate it.

Edited 18 hours ago by UnbornTao

[Mellowmarsh]

14 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

Who is aware is the reality in the form of you, a self that is conscious of it's nature. 

This sounds like form is aware of form. Because form for awareness is the only form of reference that is knowable.. it doesn't add up because it's like saying the brain is aware it is a brain, or the body is aware it is a body. This doesn't make sense, to me, anyway.

[Breakingthewall]

10 minutes ago, Mellowmarsh said:

This sounds like form is aware of form. Because form for awareness is the only form of reference that is knowable.. it doesn't add up because it's like saying the brain is aware it is a brain, or the body is aware it is a body. This doesn't make sense, to me, anyway.

The nature of reality is not form; form is its manifestation. Its nature is unlimited being. 

[Mellowmarsh]

4 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

The nature of reality is not form; form is its manifestation. Its nature is unlimited being. 

So how does unlimited being know it's an unlimited being if it has sense of no form known to itself ? 

[Breakingthewall]

1 hour ago, Mellowmarsh said:

So how does unlimited being know it's an unlimited being if it has sense of no form known to itself ? 

Any manifestation of unlimited being is a limited form, since without limits there is no manifestation. Any perception, or consciousness if you prefer, occurs when the limited manifestation splits in two. For example, a living organism that exchanges information with a universe of which it is a part but from which it is separate. This is perception of form from within form, as you said before.

For example, a bacterium receiving information about ionic concentrations or temperatures to exchange information, that is, matter, with the outside, or a bird receiving electromagnetic waves in its retina to generate an image of the outside in its brain that allows it to move and functioning. 

In the human case, reality enters a third phase of dissociation, which is the mental phase. Phase one: the primary, non-dual universe. Phase two: self-preserving life, which establishes its own laws within the primary universe and separates from it. Phase three: the human mind, which, based on biological life, which in turn is based on the primary universe, separates and creates its own framework of laws, symbolism, and logic, freeing itself from the limits of the purely biological.

This mind has access to the direct perception of form upon form, but at the same time, it can open itself to the perception of that which is formless, of its unlimited nature, since it is not subject to absolute limits. Or rather, it is, but it can free itself from them. This liberation is what spiritual work is all about.

When we say that the mind perceives its unlimited nature, it doesn't mean that it perceives it as one perceives sight, sound, pain, or hunger, nor as a mental structure, idea, symbol, or projection. It has to take a further step, and here's the point: to open its angle of perception to the essential, to its own nature.

This is a challenge because, in principle, it is bound by the sensory, and beyond that, by the symbolic. And the symbolic is based on atavistic emotional triggers created by life to optimize group cohesion and evolution. The mind must transcend these phases and open itself to the essential, to what is prior to any form, to its nature, to what reality truly is. This, obviously, cannot be symbolized because it is not at the symbolic level.