True Story

[Echoes]

Leo's blog entry got me thinking.

Imagine the following dialogue at the doctors office:

Doctor: "I'm sorry to tell you this, but we found this advanced tumor in your brain. It's growing in a dangerously fast rate. You might not have that long to live anymore...."

Patient: "Cool story bro, you should definitely write that down!

Doctor: "I understand this must be shocking for you, but we will do everything we can..."

Patient: "No, you don't understand. You are literally just hallucinating a story inside of this infinite hallucination machine. It has no grounding in reality whatsoever."

 

I understand that no story is true. Because it consists of just noises made out of thin air. The noise "cancer" is not the actual unknown unspeakable phenomenon. The noise "Cancer" is supposed to be a symbol for the phenomenon. 

As Korzybski said "Whatever we may say will not be the objective level, which remains fundamentally un-speakable. Thus, we can sit on the object called 'a chair', but we cannot sit on the noise we made or the name we applied to that object."

Now, with "objects" like a tumor, chair, pencil, etc. it is relatively easy. It's really just colour/light (But of course, not "colour"/"light" ) and it is not isolated. There are no isolated "objects". The isolated object is just created with language. "This colour-form combination is a tree!" "Really dude? Isn't it just also colour-form like, well, everything?"

But what about stories like "Outside of my experience" or "death" or "soul" or "planet earth"?

Do they symbolize anything? The noise "soul" might be just a noise, and not even a symbol, because what is there in actual experience that this  noise is supposed to symbolize? The same goes for God. Or Nothingness. Or time.

the languages cannot succeed at building a model of "reality" faster than experience occurs. What we think we observe is limited to what we can translate to each other via the slower than "reality" tool of our languages.

What about "outside of my current experience" or "Objective Universe"? Might those terms symbolize something that might be a "reality"? At my current stage of contemplation I think it is forever unknown. There might be "outside of my current experience" There might be "Objective Universe". Those terms could be abstractions of something unknowable. There might be nothing seperate from consciousness, but there might aswell be. It's an open question, even if it sounds like nonduality has "figured it out" and is the final answer to consciousness. It can seem like "nonduality teachers" really know something and are the final consciousness authorities.. you gotta be fucking kidding me, lol. atleast I was believing this nonsense... It's just a desparate attempt to escape the obvious reality of slowly aging to death, paradoxically through story-telling of stopping the story-telling.

So what value do stories offer us? It is neither good to ignore nor to believe in any story. But they seem to give us a valuable map for the territory (Even if you think about it, there is no map, but only territory, the map is also territory.. you know what I mean)

I'm especially interested in what you guys think about concepts like "outside of my experience" "other minds" "Physical universe". Are they abstractions/symbols for something that is in one form or another a reality? Like the word "Cancer"? Or are they just noises, not words/symbols standing for nothing at all?

 

 

 

 

Edited November 24, 2017 by Echoes

[Nahm]

Ultimately, self imposed limitations. 

[Echoes]

@Nahm Every word is limiting the infinite potential/now by trying to frame it or attributing it some sort of quality. "this is like this or that" But it's just open potential and not that. Language seems to collapse at this point.

But would you say "I write a text with my keyboard right now" is a self imposed limitation? In the sense that, the alphabet-noise output is doing what it's supposed to do:  trying to communicate the abstraction of what appears to  be happening.

[Nahm]

@Echoes ya for sure. I am limiting myself to create the experience of a human in a universe and a keyboard and the illusion of motion and the action of typing. None of it is real. If it were, I wouldn’t be free. 

[elias]

28 minutes ago, Echoes said:

I'm especially interested in what you guys think about concepts like "outside of my experience" "other minds" "Physical universe". Are they abstractions/symbols for something that is in one form or another a reality? Like the word "Cancer"? Or are they just noises, not words/symbols standing for nothing at all?

outside of my experience I don´t know. I just assume, and this can influence my direct experience. So my assuming can become my experience through thoughts and and resulting in feelings.

but there have to be other realitys,- because people telling me all the time that they experience shit. they even have different realitys even if we experience the same moment

[Nahm]

@elias you can’t experience reality, you are reality. 

[Echoes]

@Nahm @Nahm You know, I had "those moments" where I realized actual Now or absolute reality. Where everything is spontaniously happening, and a playful silence underlying everything, and now distinction between observer and observed. Where reality has this weirdly slow pace of happening, and everything is here now. (really, EVERYTHING is here now). I saw it sober and on LSD, but it's all just memory story now. The physical universe comes back and it is very convincing. Especially the absurd relativity of it all. Being a monkey on a rock, living among monkeys in a city with stuff like coca cola, television... animals like butterflys existing. Bathrooms existing. Dusty corners of rooms existing. Dead spiders under a bucket existing. The relativity is almost grotesque. One view is that it's all infinity and of course it includes this relativity. In whatever "state of metaphysics" one is in, is believed to be absolute and real. Right now the physical universe seems to be a real possibility to me. Whereas a few months ago I thought otherwise. It goes back and forth, but I don't know anything for sure. The state you are describing is the final dive into what society would call "insanity", but that itself is arbitrary parameter