Doubt

[alifesurreal]

I have been on the path for roughly two years now – gradually learning and experiencing new angles to the relation between reality and consciousness.

Two days ago I watched Leo's latest video, the rant about naive realism (which i loved!)
and while it helped me greatly to further my process, I noticed a slight bit of irritation or maybe doubt growing in me.

 

Now I am hoping to get some clarification/help by posting this here:

As I understood it, it is stated (in Leos video as also in several other sourecs) that the reality outside our mind & perception does not exist.
In a video linked in another thread ("Is There an Outside World?"), Rupert Spira points out that the only way we can access the reality outside our minds and bodies, is through our experience and senses as we cannot experience reality unfiltered as raw data.

I agree with that.

But it seems that Spira (as well as Leo) deduce from this that the outside reality may actually not exist at all.

And I have a slight problem with this argumentation. It sounds to me like the message is:
Just because we cannot experience reality unfiltered through our senses, reality as we know it is overthrown in its entirety.

And this does seem a bit random to me.

This leads to a burning question for me:
Are those very rare and few individual experiences of awakening and enlightenment in this world enough to disprove myriads of information about reality gathered from human experience every day?

For example: How does a an unexpected accident fit in here? Let's say a person gets struck by a falling tree, completely unaware and unprepared. This person's reality ends abruptly and without warning.

If there is no world outside our mind, what was it that lethally struck this person on the head?

If you infer that this accident's only a figment of our own imagination/reality and that this person never existed in the first place, wouldn't that be a bit too convenient?

I mean, I do firmly believe that reality is way different than we think it is – but I am worried that this way of arguing is a flat out denial of reality instead of an exploration of its true nature. And isn't denial as egotistic as anything?

I may be wrong, but doesn't non-duality mean that there is no difference between the observing subject and the object and that the subject/object distinction is misleading?
How can we deduce from this that nothing exists outside our minds? This reverse logic seems a bit unbalanced.
 

I understand the importance of open-mindedness, yet as these ideas are presented via egotistic tools like language and logic, they also need to make sense to some extent and be able to withstand critical questioning. (unless I've simply misunderstood it all completely )

To sum it up:

Leo, or anyone reading this, please help me out here as I feel I may have either misunderstood or confused things, or there are indeed aspects in those videos about reality that need further explanation.

 

Thanks

 

Edited January 17, 2017 by alifesurreal

[Dodo]

What i am thinking about here and thought about before is Flat earth vs Round earth.

By first hand experience we should not believe its round or that there even is a planet. Just the room I am in currently exists, nothing outside it. Not only that, but just the perception of the room can be verified and not the rooms existence itself.

Truth within the dream (science) has for a base root something supposedly unreal (the dream itself). Which means that science may perfectly explain how it all works, but it will just be an explanation of something unreal to begin with, so ultimately it is false.

But within the context of the dream, imo, it's true. If you want to go deeper into truth you need to first find who is looking for truth. Science focuses on the objects and spirituality focuses on the eternal subject. Both play a game of adventure and when they meet, become one (my projection). Logic is half truth, it cannot be without it's counterpart.

Focusing entirely on the here and now is helpful to concentrate and function best I guess. And also points to what we need to explore ourselves and see if its true. That we are conciousness itself and only that is real. Not planets, people, etc, these are dreams. Or at least thats my current working hypothesis as a human entity within a suspect dream

Edited January 17, 2017 by Dodoster

[cetus]

8 minutes ago, alifesurreal said:

Leo, or anyone reading this, please help me out here as I feel I may have either misunderstood or confused things, or there are indeed aspects in those videos about reality that need further explanation.

@alifesurreal You may be missing something. That something is the direct experience of what is outside of reality. From that point of view reality collapses into an illusion. Physical reality is still reality as far as the mind and body are concerned, but it becomes an inferior reality by comparison. Think of it this way, what is infinite and changeless far overshadows what is finite and forever changing. Reality than takes on kind of a cheep plastic, flimsy feeling by comparison.

[alifesurreal]

1 minute ago, cetus56 said:

@alifesurreal You may be missing something. That something is the direct experience of what is outside of reality. From that point of view reality collapses into an illusion. Physical reality is still reality as far as the mind and body are concerned, but it becomes an inferior reality by comparison. Think of it this way, what is infinite and changeless far overshadows what is finite and forever changing. Reality than takes on kind of a cheep plastic, flimsy feeling by comparison.

You may be right! I am currently watching a TED-talk about this and now things start to make a bit more sense for me:

Do We See Reality As It Is?

I can agree with reality being vastly different from what we perceive. Still working on the "it's ALL an illusion and hence not there" part

[cetus]

@alifesurreal This universe/reality may turn out to be just one big thought process and nothing more.

[Dodo]

Hmm objective reality can exist even outside our perception if there is a God-subject that is always perceiving everything. So in that case, if a tree falls and there is no one (aka only God) around to hear it, does it make a sound? Hellsyeah! Because NoOne is everywhere and experiences absolutely everything that could be perceived.

But this is a bit out there isnt it. Just for me it looks like it falls on what we are talking about here, nothingness and infinity, which allows illusion to be reality to another illusion.

Edited January 17, 2017 by Dodoster

[Bob84]

@alifesurreal Unfiltered reality is for a lack of a better description "nothing" and "meaningless". That what gives meaning to it is also what creates the filters. 

[Dodo]

2 minutes ago, John Flores said:

• @cetus56 I saw two or three people post this recently. I though it was very trippy

yes it's kinda true, but we also have to incorporate the rational world. In all for the Pledian prophecy lol 

This makes me think i am the unconscious God of my own universe and my minions are suffering due to my ignorance I'll be quick to send them peace and love, energy and wisdom.

[cetus]

8 minutes ago, John Flores said:

• @cetus56 I saw two or three people post this recently. I though it was very trippy

yes it's kinda true, but we also have to incorporate the rational world. I'm all for the Pledian prophecy lol 

This may be exactly what the "rational world" is.

[Dodo]

5 minutes ago, John Flores said:

@Dodoster I think it's a message from God to realize that infinity means "there is no end ?"

 

The fastest way to hnderstanding infinity os to simply embrace that you are the endless continuity of ALL of Existence. Our purpose is not to be him, but to draw close. We draw close by doing his will and being like him, through compassion and kindness. He does have qualities of "severity", but or responsibility is to blot it out through the light of His other "traits".

It also looks like we are inside the neural network of a single 4th dimensional being who is our immediate God (the next step up) and he is probably doing a lot of 4th dimensional drugs considering the state of things :D Hope he gets an intervention soon

Edited January 17, 2017 by Dodoster

[Dodo]

13 minutes ago, John Flores said:

@Dodoster lol. god's infinite...don't be fooled by the rational world....infinite light is the best way to describe it. Because all that exists is "potential" which is another way of saying energy and or stored energy. Therefore, all that exists is everlasting, ever eternal, and ever encompassing light of joy and pleasure...

 

Our goal is to expeience this, but this physical world blinds us and makes us think that this physical pleasure is significant next to the divine light of love, acceptance, BRILLIANCE, peace, glory -- when you are overwhelmed by his/its  Greatness

 

people say God's a she...God has no gender, so i don't get where they are coming from 

 

Yeah i mean i said immediate God, not ultimate ? i dont xpext God to be a 4th dimensional being,  because if there is a 4th, there is a 5th and so on to infinity. Games of creation, while God,  the infinite and 0th dimension, both is all things and experiences all things in all dimensions at once,  I'd bet.

0 and infinity are the only two no-things. Everything else is object.

 

Edited January 17, 2017 by Dodoster

[alifesurreal]

1 hour ago, cetus56 said:

@alifesurreal This universe/reality may turn out to be just one big thought process and nothing more.

I am considering this possibility as well, I just think things might be a bit more nuanced as in the reality we perceive has its own rules which make sense within that frame of reference. But that does not have to mean that this reality seizes to exist when nobody's looking.

I really liked the comparison with the computer desktop in the ted video - that our reality is like a desktop, and what we cannot see is the code behind it which actually creates this interface in such a way as to be usable for us with our particular set of perceptive tools.

So if I jump in front of a train, it will kill me. Even if I have my eyes closed and the train shouldn't be there. Because this reality is very real as long as I am a participant in this domain. Outside this domain, like for example on a quantum level or beyond I am not even alive at all as life in itself is just a concept, right?

 

Edited January 17, 2017 by alifesurreal

[SelfPeace]

Someone I've been following a lot as of late and I think will play an important role of our contemporary cultures view on realism/postmodernism in the near future is a professor named Jordan B. Peterson of the university of Toronto. Today he went on Sam Harris's podcast and from studying both men I knew there I suspected there will be an idealogical clash on this very subject between them. Peterson tweeted this today:

[alifesurreal]

2 minutes ago, SelfPeace said:

Someone I've been following a lot as of late and I think will play an important role of our contemporary cultures view on realism/postmodernism in the near future is a professor named Jordan B. Peterson of the university of Toronto. Today he went on Sam Harris's podcast and from studying both men I knew there I suspected there will be an idealogical clash on this very subject between them. Peterson tweeted this today:

Oh great!! Thanks for this - I will check him out!

[SelfPeace]

^ the podcast will become available next week. I found Leo's timing with his rant against realism to be impeccably timed for this interview. Btw if you are wondering what Dr. Peterson's case for Darwanism vs Newtonian view of reality is, I posted this video a while back: 

 

 

It's long but I promise it'll be a very interesting 3 hours if you're interested in the subject. You can search Youtube for shorter videos of his but you'll run into many other videos of his contraversies in taking on political correctness.

[Debil]

1 hour ago, John Flores said:

@cetus56 a brain cell? lol doesn't sound too rational to MEE haha...oh my God this world, rationally, is so infentessimally small conmpared to God's existence that it doesn't even exist

Read about modern physics' Strings theory that dictates there has to be multiple dimensions occurring at the same space.

Another possibility according to Simulation theory, is that this is all a computer simulation. Real scientists research this and how we would to detect if this was a simulation, like by going to a place that the program never thought we would go into.

[Leo Gura]

4 hours ago, alifesurreal said:

If there is no world outside our mind, what was it that lethally struck this person on the head?

This question reminds me of a critic who was so outraged by George Berkeley's philosophical position that the external world does not exist -- the world being nothing more than an idea inside the mind of God -- that the guy kicked a rock at Berkeley, causing him to bleed, and said something along the lines of: "There! Proof of an external world!"

The general problem with people who are stuck in a naive realist paradigm is that they are trying to judge other paradigms without first stepping outside their own. You cannot make a paradigm shift without leaving your old paradigm behind.

You are correct in this way: using ordinary human consciousness, we cannot know for sure if there is or is not an external world.

But when you experience Absolute consciousness, you'll realize that reality is not physical, because it is Absolute Infinity.

And if you start to develop paranormal abilities like OBEs, and other sorts of spiritual powers, you'll see that reality is non-physical.

Or just take a large dose of psychedelics.

This stuff isn't theory. You can empirically verify what is being claimed for yourself. If you really care, verifying it is not that difficult.

[Vytas]

5 hours ago, alifesurreal said:

You may be right! I am currently watching a TED-talk about this and now things start to make a bit more sense for me:

Do We See Reality As It Is?

I can agree with reality being vastly different from what we perceive. Still working on the "it's ALL an illusion and hence not there" part

Damn! I have seen hundred TED talks yet I think this might be one of the top 3 speeches. Very mind-opening, I ll probably watch it 5 more times just to get a deeper understanding of what he is saying. Thank you for sharing this @alifesurreal  Those ideas push me to question a lot

[alifesurreal]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

You cannot make a paradigm shift without leaving your old paradigm behind.

just take a large dose of psychedelics.

You can empirically verify what is being claimed for yourself.

Thanks for chiming in! I'm aware of the point you're making and I agree with it!

I feel a bit like a fish that's being told about those fabulous mountains and deserts outside the ocean which he has no way of ever seeing unless he finally leaves the realm of the ocean and his own familiar existence behind.

re: psychedelics - I am currently working my way up the ladder. Still in the very very low range with lots of care being taken as I have huge respect for these. But eventually the day may come that I (dare to) break through and then I guess I'll have to revisit this thread

 

[alifesurreal]

2 minutes ago, Vytas said:

Damn! I have seen hundred TED talks yet I think this might be one of the top 3 speeches. Very mind-opening, I ll probably watch it 5 more times just to get a deeper understanding of what he is saying. Thank you for sharing this @alifesurreal  Those ideas push me to question a lot

Haha, same here - I stumbled across this TED talk by accident right after I started this thread