Why trust our direct experience?

[BjarkeT]

23 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

One day you will realize the most obvious thing ever: experience is Absolute Truth.

How can experience be the absolute truth if life is just a dream?

[Carl-Richard]

22 minutes ago, Farnaby said:

@Meta-Man I see. We'll have to disagree on that one lol

Other people exist relatively speaking. However, we're talking about Absolute Truth, and in that sense, other people are literally You. True non-duality is more shocking than you think.

Edited August 30, 2020 by Carl-Richard

[The Lucid Dreamer]

@Farnaby There are no other people In the forest until you imagine them. 

[Johnny5]

It's way more shocking than that...

[Carl-Richard]

12 minutes ago, BjarkeT said:

How can experience be the absolute truth if life is just a dream?

It's only called a dream because you're dreaming it up in your direct experience.

[Gesundheit]

57 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

That, my friend, is called the relative/absolute fallacy: conflating relative truths with absolute truth. Only Absolute Truth itself is absolutely true, but you can conceptualize and communicate it using language, and then it is being re-contextualized as a relative truth. Only direct experience itself is Absolute Truth, and it can therefore never be directly spoken of, only pointed to.

There are no relative truths. It makes no sense to say that something is relatively true. Anything is either 100% absolutely true, or if less than 100% then it's not absolute and therefore not true.

But I see what you mean. There are two types of truth. Non-mediated (or absolute) truth, and mediated (or relative) truths. The term relative is misleading and not accurate at all.

[Gesundheit]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

The shocker is, not only is there no sound, there is not even a forest unless you are aware of it.

Said the guy who talks to a camera all the time.

[peachboy]

 

 

Quantum Rendering. (It's only there if it's being observed.)

This little video segment explains "frustum culling" as a useful analogy perhaps.  (43:37 - 45:16)

[Carl-Richard]

33 minutes ago, Gesundheit said:

There are no relative truths. It makes no sense to say that something is relatively true. Anything is either 100% absolutely true, or if less than 100% then it's not absolute and therefore not true.

But I see what you mean. There are two types of truth. Non-mediated (or absolute) truth, and mediated (or relative) truths. The term relative is misleading and not accurate at all.

Relative truths are evaluated relative to a presupposed value system (a system of dualities), hence why it's called relative truths. It's very accurate considering how relativity is a core feature of duality (either part of a duality can only exist relative to the other part). All truth statements based on duality are relative, and non-duality (direct experience) is Absolute Truth.

What you can consider "wordly" relationships all boil down to varying degrees and depths of relativity. The more relationships that exist in a given system, the more "relative things" there are. The more perspectives you're able to integrate into your own, the more relativity you have to engage in:

For example, Einstein's theory of relativity doesn't contradict or exclude most of the conclusions of Newtonian mechanics, but he only adds a new layer of relativity (the relativity of time and space), and that unlocks a new territory of inquiry and exploration. Einstein includes Newton in his own perspective, but he also adds something more to the table, and that requires relativity.

Likewise, the ability to distinguish between the absolute and the relative is just an additional layer of relativity (maybe we can call it "meta-relativity").

Therefore, when somebody conflates the absolute and the relative, I tend to invoke "the Absolute-Relative fallacy", and it looks something like this :

Edited August 30, 2020 by Carl-Richard

[Farnaby]

@The Lucid Dreamer hmm. I don't live with my parents. And yet, while I'm at home, they are in their own house. I can visit them, call them. They can live their life when I'm not aware of them and tell me later about what they did during that time I wasn't perceiving them.

They exist and do things even when I'm not aware of it. 

 

[Carl-Richard]

4 minutes ago, Farnaby said:

@The Lucid Dreamer hmm. I don't live with my parents. And yet, while I'm at home, they are in their own house. I can visit them, call them. They can live their life when I'm not aware of them and tell me later about what they did during that time I wasn't perceiving them.

They exist and do things even when I'm not aware of it. 

 

Are you aware that you could only validate that through your own direct experience?

[Javfly33]

58 minutes ago, Johnny5 said:

It's way more shocking than that...

Even more? What you mean?

@Johnny5

[Gesundheit]

@Carl-Richard No. I will say it one more time. There's no such thing as a relative truth. A thing is either 100% true, or not true at all. While countless other things do, truth does not exist in shades or degrees.

To make things simpler, let's say I robbed a bank. The absolute truth would be that I robbed the bank. It's not the same thing to say that you robbed the bank. It makes no sense to say that I am you and you are me, and therefore we robbed ourselves. Now you can get technical however you want about what happened, that I don't exist or cannot be pinpointed or whatever, but that would still not change anything. The fact that the bank was robbed by me and not you would remain true regardless.

[Farnaby]

@Carl-Richard yes, I agree. But it's one thing to say that until I see them, they don't exist in my awareness and a very different thing to say that they don't exist at all and I'm hallucinating them. 

An external world exists even when we're not directly perceiving it. Subjectively it doesn't exist, sure, but you can be sitting in front of your computer while I'm elsewhere and we both exist even if we're not aware of of each other. 

This actually reminds me of little children thinking you can't see them when they put their hands on their face. They think that if they can't see you you can't see them, which is obviously not true. 

Edited August 30, 2020 by Farnaby

[Carl-Richard]

@Farnaby

Rupert Spira addresses this point directly here:

 

[Someone here]

22 minutes ago, Farnaby said:

An external world exists even when we're not directly perceiving it. Subjectively it doesn't exist, sure, but you can be sitting in front of your computer while I'm elsewhere and we both exist even if we're not aware of of each other.

Only proplem is you Can't possibly know that. 

[Gesundheit]

18 minutes ago, Farnaby said:

@Carl-Richard yes, I agree. But it's one thing to say that until I see them, they don't exist in my awareness and a very different thing to say that they don't exist at all and I'm hallucinating them. 

An external world exists even when we're not directly perceiving it. Subjectively it doesn't exist, sure, but you can be sitting in front of your computer while I'm elsewhere and we both exist even if we're not aware of of each other. 

This actually reminds me of little children thinking you can't see them when they put their hands on their face. They think that if they can't see you you can't see them, which is obviously not true. 

It's not that either. Both of these perspectives are not actually true. The truth here is that you're either believing that an external world exists independent of you or you're not. Whether it actually exist or not isn't something that you can prove or disprove by any means. We don't know (i.e. we don't directly experience it), we just assume, and that's fine and enough for me. The external world can only exist as thoughts for the human being. If you'd experience it you'd die.

[Johnny5]

@Javfly33 Someone said people only exist when you're aware of them. But even that's not true.

It's like patterns of light dancing on an invisible surface. Shadows on the wall in plato's cave. Nothing really there, never was. Direct experience or no.

There is no overstating the degree to which none of this exists.

Direct experience is like the lunatic reminiscence of an eternal soul, of what life could have been like if there ever were a universe.

 

Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

-- Diamond Sutra

 

[Javfly33]

1 minute ago, Johnny5 said:

@Javfly33 Someone said people only exist when you're aware of them. But even that's not true.

It's like patterns of light dancing on an invisible surface. Shadows on the wall in plato's cave. Nothing really there, never was. Direct experience or no.

There is no overstating the degree to which none of this exists.

Direct experience is like the lunatic reminiscence of an eternal soul, of what life could have been like if there ever were a universe.

 

Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

-- Diamond Sutra

 

@Johnny5 Still the problem with solipsism seems a hard one to breakthrough. I hope one day i fucking trascend it 

[Gesundheit]

4 hours ago, peachboy said:

Err..

If a tree falls in a forest and there's nothing to observe it then how can it make a sound?

There is no sound without awareness.

Yeah that's called solipsism.