Looking at a night sky

[Tyler Durden]

I was looking at a night sky and remembered how I used to think that we see stars as they were millions of years ago because it takes so long for their light to travel to Earth. But after realising that time and space are an illusion and that past and distance don't exist, I'm wondering what do we exactly see when we look up?

Edited February 4, 2022 by Tyler Durden

[Dazgwny]

Yourself. Your own mind. A reflective illusion 

[Matthew85]

@Tyler Durden The mind of God. 

[softlyblossoming]

7 hours ago, Tyler Durden said:

I was looking at a night sky and remembered how I used to think that we see stars as they were millions of years ago because it takes so long for their light to travel to Earth. But after realising that time and space are an illusion and that past and distance don't exist, I'm wondering what do we exactly see when we look up?

@Tyler Durden From what I've heard, it's what you see when you look anywhere else or at anything else: an appearance obscuring Non-Duality/Nothing-Everything. I'm not speaking from experience myself, but I've listened to a few non-duality talks and I think I can communicate the gist of a non-dual answer to your question.

The experience you describe never actually happened — and when it did, you were not looking at the night sky, because there was no night sky to look at or you to be looking at it — because there is nothing here to any of this. Every moment is actually the exact same, it never came from a past and is not going into a future, and it isn't even really "happening now." Even the present moment is just another concept held painfully by our ego. All the ego ever does is try to hold onto nothing by inventing stories and objects.

The appearance of the night sky is given all of its reality, all of its existence as anything rather than nothing, by you. Without you, there is no night sky. What you were perceiving as the night sky was an appearance that only exists because you, the ego, want it to. Whilst at first the material world seems like something outside of our sphere of control, deep down, things only exist because we ourselves are willing/thinking/imagining them into being in an incessant attempt to survive. Survival here, can be defined as seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, and it is all that you and I ever do.

Another way of saying this message is: what you experienced as looking up at the night sky was merely a thought of looking up at the night sky that was overlaying/obscuring the truth of that situation, which was and is always nothing at all. As awkward as it sounds when written or spoken, what you actually saw was what you actually never see, which is always the same, regardless of where you direct your gaze or when you look. Objects on our desk, events that happen, and anything else, just don't exist in the way we think, nor any way we could think, that they do.

Worse still is that true nothing is not and cannot be something we ever get to experience. When 'you' experience nothing, there will be no 'you' to experience nothing, and so the experience will happen to no one, will not be an experience, and will never have happened. As with every unenlightenment experience, the enlightenment experience, when it ends, will be merely another concept for the ego to hold up in a painful effort to escape its constant pain, and in so doing inadvertently perpetuate the pain there-after. The ego only perceives its own creations, it is a label maker, a describer, and a suffering-machine. The ego cannot know the face of God, and it never did and never will, because when you are enlightened, there is no 'you' to be enlightened.

To sum up, from the perspective of non-duality as I've come to an intellectual understanding of it: the surface appearance of the night sky was the entire thing. That's it. It could be a very disappointing answer.

[Tyler Durden]

@softlyblossoming Thank you for your answer. Very deep insight. I'll need to contemplate more about that.