An Insight About The Nature Of Delusion

[Leo Gura]

I just had the following insight after a few hours of meditation:

Let's say you are having a terrible nightmare. An alien is chasing you and you are desperately trying to get away from it. Then I appear in the middle of the chase and say, "Wait a minute now... This is just a nightmare. It's not real." And you reply back, "But if none of this is real, then you're not real either and your very words are not real! Ha! What hogwash! Look at how you contradict yourself!" And you keep running from the alien as though your life depended on it.

This is what rational people do when their rationalism is challenged. And so they stay stuck forever.

Just a random musing that I felt increased my understanding of man's condition. The mind is so sneaky!

[Leo Gura]

@mkieblesz Awareness is prior to and independent of rationality. In fact rationality actively impede awareness because -- like I alluded to in the dream analogy above -- rationality is the content of the dream. Rational people get lost in the content of their thoughts.

For example, to say that something is contradictory and therefore false is to be lost in the contents of thought. It assumes that we should take thoughts seriously in the first place. Which of course is the mother of all bad assumptions.

I'm not saying rationality is bad per se. It's certainly better than irrationality. But there is something above rationality, which is a-rationality. Reality, as it turns out, is arational.

I want to write a whole book on this topic because I've thought about it A LOT.

[Guest]

I think its about the mind being tricky, and that one rational conclusion is not always the correct one. You need to look deeper to see the truth.. good post!

[goodguy]

The rabbit hole goes deep..

[Emerald]

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

I just had the following insight after a few hours of meditation:

Let's say you are having a terrible nightmare. An alien is chasing you and you are desperately trying to get away from it. Then I appear in the middle of the chase and say, "Wait a minute now... This is just a nightmare. It's not real." And you reply back, "But if none of this is real, then you're not real either and your very words are not real! Ha! What hogwash! Look at how you contradict yourself!" And you keep running from the alien as though your life depended on it.

This is what rational people do when their rationalism is challenged. And so they stay stuck forever.

Just a random musing that I felt increased my understanding of man's condition. The mind is so sneaky!

It's interesting how many blindspots there are in the average mode of consciousness. One of the main insights that I had when I had my experiences was that I was constantly deceiving myself to protect my ego from uncomfortable truths. Even knowing this now in an abstract way and having a clear memory of this insight, I still make the same mistake on an almost hourly basis. The only difference is that I'm a bit more aware of it. I consider it progress, but a very modest amount of progress. I still continue to struggle against my reality even though I realize that it is an illusion. My ego just won't let things go and tries to control the situation to amplify its own existence. So, in this scenario, I am both the person running away from the alien and the person telling myself that it isn't real. When I was a child, I remember having a dream once that me and all my family members were taking a fitness test. My mom woke me up for school and I told her that I could get up yet because 'Dad hadn't taken his P.E. test.' The mind is such a tricky thing.  

[jjer94]

@Emerald @ The Diamond Net

Quote

I still continue to struggle against my reality even though I realize that it is an illusion.

If you continue to struggle, then you don't see it as an illusion; you only tell yourself it is. 

See the illusion for what it is, and its power on you will disappear completely.

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

This is what rational people do when their rationalism is challenged.

Just what we see when people become defensive for any reason.   They are stuck in their belief and any assault on their belief, point of view or otherwise "comfort zone", they become highly defensive.   Common reactions include loud outbursts of protest, claims of assault on their indignity and sometimes vicious reactionary attacks on the "character" of the one from whom came the challenging statement.

joy

 

Edited February 10, 2016 by walt

[theinevitableandi]

@Leo Gura

"Everything you are saying are just stories , stories upon stories .. what makes your story more TRUE than mine? Your thoughts are also concepts blah blah blah .. if the truth cannot be communicated why are you speaking " blah blah blah blah ...  

i hear this all the time when they want me to shut up  

 

 

[Spider Jerusalem]

9 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

@mkieblesz Awareness is prior to and independent of rationality. In fact rationality actively impede awareness because -- like I alluded to in the dream analogy above -- rationality is the content of the dream. Rational people get lost in the content of their thoughts.

If we take this to its logical conclusion, it seems that awareness is prior to and independent of all phenomenon (rationality being just another phenomenon). So all models of the universe, all models of human behavior, all thought patterns, the god particle etc. are all phenomenon "arising" within awareness. If I recall correctly, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow uses the idea of "contents of consciousness" which seems to indicate that awareness is some sort of special "invisible" container that "contains" all phenomenon. So the container is some sort of permanent featureless feature that is prior to everything. I find it helpful to think of awareness as having a pointer to all the contents within it, but the contents don't have a back pointer. This may also explain the problem of "identification" as we tend to identify with the contents and not the container (assuming we can even even identify with the container)

Edited February 10, 2016 by Spider Jerusalem
Added note on identification

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Spider Jerusalem said:

If we take this to its logical conclusion, it seems that awareness is prior to and independent of all phenomenon (rationality being just another phenomenon). So all models of the universe, all models of human behavior, all thought patterns, the god particle etc. are all phenomenon "arising" within awareness. If I recall correctly, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow uses the idea of "contents of consciousness" which seems to indicate that awareness is some sort of special "invisible" container that "contains" all phenomenon. So the container is some sort of permanent featureless feature that is prior to everything. I find it helpful to think of awareness as having a pointer to all the contents within it, but the contents don't have a back pointer. This may also explain the problem of "identification" as we tend to identify with the contents and not the container (assuming we can even even identify with the container)

Something like that.

[Leo Gura]

8 hours ago, mkieblesz said:

Thank you for answer. But I still don't see you covered this simple argument - I don't see there is any reason why we would create new word while I see clearly that rationality could cover everything. You just couldn't break me here

Getting lost in the content of the thoughts while knowing this for a fact (recognizing it) is rational. So if we would take any debate example, if you would tell the person that he/she is not recognizing that the only thing there is, is (consciousness is from your point of view and probably the same from his/her) then proceeding without response on this objection would be irrational hence any arationality/post-rationality concept is completely useless.

The only way to win the fight is to fight on the battleground the person recognizes because the person needs to see it for himself/herself.

I'm saying this because language is very important. People tend to change meaning of words in order to get them on their side or create new ones to avoid the battle. But I think it's a fallacy and battle for rationality could be easily won without clunking vocabulary. Yes/No is better that no/depends/yes or something like that.

There's nothing irrational about saying that reality is arational. Rational people simply don't like to hear it.

Rationality CAN'T cover everything. If it could, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

The rational person has to come to a point where he sees the limits and self-defeating nature of rationality. Unfortunately this rarely happens because for the rationalist, rationality is God. The ultimate false assumption at the center of his knowledge graph. Rationality has no contact whatsoever with direct empirical data. It's a purely conceptual conclusion.

[Ajax]

@Leo Gura Does that mean that person wants to be chased by the alien or can't escape the idea of being chased by the alien? It seems to me that the only way out is to deeply consider that there is no alien at all... However, the alien very clearly appears to exist  to the rational person and it would be irrational to think otherwise. Therefore there seems to be a need to develop a method of deconstructing reality to know the difference.... 

Am I on the right track on my train of thought?

[shantaram]

ha, great insight!  would you consider it rational to rationalise something for the sole purpose of being right even if it means maintaining delusion and limiting yourself from seeing another perspective?