There Is No "True Nature" Of Reality

[Hyperion]

One of the most widely misunderstood terms in all of spirituality is the Buddhist notion of "shunyata", which is commonly translated as or at least closely associated with words like emptiness, voidness, groundlessness, nothingness and no-self (which is also known as "anatta"). It is often (mis)interpreted as a kind of nihilistic denial of any inherent substance or meaning of reality; but once you become directly conscious of what it actually points to, you realize that it simply means the following:

There is no particular way that reality is.

Shunyata points to the fact that there is no such thing as a specific definable ultimate truth that can be fully cognized, conceptualized and communicated through language; it therefore implies that all definitions (aka. conceptual limitations) of reality are nothing but relative perspectives which are partially true at best and downright delusional at worst. Simply put: Whatever you say about reality isn't it - and also it is, but so is the opposite of whatever you are saying. (Of course, the irony here is that the statement "all perspectives are relative" is itself a relative perspective; this is why Nagarjuna, the famous founder of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy, pointed out that "even emptiness itself is empty" and therefore cannot be absolutized.)

So while shunyata should not be mistaken for an affirmation of existential nihilism (which erroneously tries to attach absolute meaning and validity to the relative concept of meaninglessness), it certainly refutes the notion of a concrete ground or essence of reality that you somehow safely "land on" upon enlightenment. Assuming the existence of such a specific definable essence is in fact a rather clear-cut logical fallacy, since it assumes the existence of something which is both absolute and definable. The simple fact of the matter is that the absolute (= undefinable) essence or nature of reality cannot be different from (all of) reality itself, as should be obvious to anyone who is capable of and genuinely open to coherent (meta)logical reasoning.

(Note: When you say that Being is the essence of reality, then that is NOT a definition. Being does not and cannot have an opposite since it is all that there is, meaning that it must include and transcend all possible opposites such as form/formlessness, time/timelessness, oneness/multiplicity, nothing/everything etc. Being is therefore synonymous with the totality of reality. Again, this is not so much an arbitrary opinion as it is a patently self-evident and tautological assessment based on very simple and obvious logic, and I would sincerely invite anyone who somehow feels compelled to argue against it to question their own underlying motives for doing so.)

Of course, the inherently attachment-based ego mind doesn't like to hear any of this. It craves and demands ideological safety, reliability and stability, or in other words: a solid, unshakeable ground that it can build a strong and rigid identity on and thereby keep itself stuck in the treacherous comfort of delusion. And so it will compulsively attack, deflect, distort and/or deny anything that threatens to pull out the rug from under its feet and try at all cost to maintain its dogmatic conviction that "reality is XYZ" and definitely not "not XYZ". You will almost certainly see this play itself out in the replies to this post; there will be plenty of people trying to convince me as well as themselves that I am (absolutely) wrong and they are (absolutely) right and argue until they are blue in the face for the validity of relative positions such as "I am a person", "I am not a person", "I am God", "I am not God", "I exist", "I don't exist", "there is a doer", "there is no doer", "all is one", "all is not one", "there are other minds", "there are no other minds", "reality is physical", "reality is a dream", "reality is logical", "reality is not logical" or whatever other perspectives/beliefs they have built their identity on.

Now, am I saying that I myself am totally free of this kind of argumentative pigheadedness? No, of course not. I assure you that I can be just as gleefully opinionated as the next guy; denying any such tendencies on my part would be just another dogmatic assertion and expression of deep egoic delusion. Besides, as long as reality is being observed and experienced from a certain first-person perspective, there is never going to be a 100% complete absence of attachment to that perspective, however faint and imperceptible it may be. But once this perspective is clearly "seen through" and recognized for what it actually is, there is now an opening where the gradual transcendence of all rigid ego identity becomes possible; where all relative perspectives are perceived as different sides of the same all-encompassing coin; where energetic contractions begin to soften, expand and dissolve, and where you start to taste the indescribable boundless bliss and freedom of tapping into and merging with the ineffable Divine, which is All That Is.

But of course, that's just my perspective. 😘

[Hyperion]

For an even deeper exploration of the dichotomy between relative truth vs. absolute truth, check out this video:

And in case you're curious and interested in hearing more about Nagarjuna's (anti-)philosophy, this video right here does a beautiful job of breaking it down in an easily digestable way:

 

 

[Yimpa]

4 hours ago, Hyperion said:

You will almost certainly see this play itself out in the replies to this post; there will be plenty of people trying to convince me as well as themselves that I am (absolutely) wrong and they are (absolutely) right and argue until they are blue in the face for the validity of relative positions such as "I am a person", "I am not a person", "I am God", "I am not God", "I exist", "I don't exist", "there is a doer", "there is no doer", "all is one", "all is not one", "there are other minds", "there are no other minds", "reality is physical", "reality is a dream", "reality is logical", "reality is not logical" or whatever other perspectives/beliefs they have built their identity on.

You are playing with yourself.

[Oppositionless]

It's consciousness . Or emptiness. Whatever this right now is. Western people call it consciousness because of Descartes, people without a western ego might just call it being .

Edited 4 hours ago by Oppositionless

[Yimpa]

10 minutes ago, Oppositionless said:

Descartes

I have no idea who that is

[Leo Gura]

Infinity is the true nature.

[VeganAwake]

Empty and full 

It doesn't attempt to make logical sense

Reality isn't concerned with human made concepts like "true nature" or "truth"

It's exactly what it is without any drama or hesitation 

[oOo]

The universe does not have a plan for you. Your choices do, where determinism is consequences answering them, the freedom to choose perspective from absolute, and absolute or perspective in either, then living with the cause and effect. Banging my head against brick predicts brain damage more reliably than asserting Absolute Truth outside whatever my available experience has shaped into belief, that said, it is vital to differentiate perspective from absolutes, and that navigation is not done between them but along the path towards truth, and making peace with the closest truth.

Survival is vital to spirituality, it refuses this luxury of using perspective and the absolute as mere circus juggling balls by people that are still spiritually naive. Venom forces a decision, poisonous or not? Life and death will mark the essay, failure correlated with the inability to read the closest truth. Its larger truth may include producing antivenom elsewhere; right now, its truth is what it does to the body. Reality decides before philosophers finish adjusting Brahman’s name tag.

Calling everything Brahman because the blind cannot agree on colour is blindness promoted to being a fucking air traffic controller making life and death decisions for jet pilots and million dollar aircraft. Naming the unseen does not become seeing as an air traffic controller when you're held accountable for inaccuracies, you get fired and heck, you may even get court martialed depending on your sanity surrounding the proclamation. Sanskrit then, cannot repair the optic nerve of an officer caught in a spiritual bubble to justify either the relinquishment of his duties or performing his duties outside of responsible protocol. Maybe reality is Infinity, Being, consciousness, emptiness, everything, nothing. Fine. These are logical placeholders for what experience suggests. The irony however, is that people retreat from reality into concepts supposedly explaining reality, escaping the practical demand of the venomous snakes and the chaotic aeronautic movements of life around them that demand their action, their judgement on truth or falsehood, accurate or inaccurate, good or bad, right or wrong, marking the line in the sand regardless as to how grey it seems from a more zoomed out view.

Mature spirituality can hold Infinity in one hand and identify the bloody snake with the other, it accepts evolution as well through the snake skin rather than gripping too strongly to either the present form of the snake or the contextual identification of the snakes venom as poisonous.

I am literally at an airport right now preparing for my flight, if it didn't have a name for airport "Brahman", if I didn't know which flight "Brahman", if I knew the first two but didn't know which terminal "Brahman", if I didn't know the first four and I was wondering about how to get where I wanted to go, oh I know, "Brahman". If I... Well, I've learned my ABC's, how to spell with mathematics, and how to count through spatial navigation, and I might not know ultimate truth outside that which I have experienced, but I know based on those experiences that I can continue to refine my heart, mind, body and spirit to align me deeper, wider, narrower and more fully to its cause.

It is the devotion to the truth, more than the answers we should treat as testable/tested hypotheses, that we should concern ourselves with, categorising the truth with proportionality which requires both absolutes and perspectives. 

To me, I think you're in the same boat of people getting a biochemical buzz from spirituality more than seeking genuine healthy closure from one life milestone to the next. They use all that they have learned from the education system for better and for worse, an education designed to teach them about life not necessarily how to properly think about it with a strong ontological and epistemological foundation, to still fail at realising that life still has an answer, and that perspective is not only just one of those answers, its a puzzle piece you use to complete the final one, honing the absolute along the way and thereafter. It's kind of like being born into a roulette table and that's all that exists, "Life just spins, every number is just a perspective with equal weight as every other number"; it becomes absurd, and its because people don't see they're just spinning the wheel of their own confusion rather than seeing the game creator properly underneath, which starts with looking at themselves more accurately. 

"Brahman" can matter when I'm dead, because I'll be returning to "Brahman" won't I? Heh!  But right here and now, 'survival' as I brought up in a brief recent post is just as spiritual as anything else. Onwards and upwards is often the signal of that survival as well, not "Brahman", because it is our developmental signature as a nervous system, and thus, because I am a spirit inside a physical form that demands mastery in order to unleash that spirit within us in command of that nervous system, fully. 

Sincerely though, best wishes. But then, that wouldn't be the true essence of "Brahman", maybe go and donate a kidney then, or a limb as kidneys aren't a massive deals these days.

I will say instead as a middle-ground then as follows, as there's more "Brahmic" neutrality to it.

Kind regards to All, One, and For All. 

 

Edited 2 hours ago by oOo

[Joseph Maynor]

When someone tells me there is no, I think to myself there is yes.