The universe is mental

[Water by the River]

 

[Osaid]

7 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

Exactly, A state of total enlightenment is when it is the same whether they cut off your arm or the apple. All preference towards one side is energy that obscures real perception, which is why this perception is extremely difficult. People who say they are enlightened are blind to their limits. preference is the limit, and its energy is fear. For this reason, if you want to have a moment of enlightenment, since they will only be specific moments unless you are a Buddha and lack self, you must understand your structure very well and manage to lower the frequency of energy/fear in specific moments.

Distinctions and preferences are not actually limitations. You say that in order to be unlimited, you have to remove things, like fear, pain, apples, arms, etc. However, this is just another limitation you are putting on yourself. You are saying that those things cannot exist, otherwise you are limited. I am saying that you are always unlimited, and that everything that exists is unlimited, you are literally just using your imagination to think that you are not unlimited, like how someone would imagine that they are a unicorn when they aren't. You are not actually experiencing limitations, you are experiencing the imagination of limitations, this is what is actually going on in your experience and everyone else's experience. You are experiencing imagination, not limitation.

The experience of pain is not a distinction or preference, it has nothing to do with a self or limitation. There is no limitation in the experience of pain. It only feels limited if you imagine another situation that contrasts it.

[Osaid]

14 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

It makes you see your limits, your need for others, your incompleteness. All of this is caused by your fear.

Is it a limitation to desire something? Is it incomplete to desire things? Do you always have to desire something out of fear? Does desire always have to be tangled with fear?

You're not entirely wrong, fear seems to be accompanied by limits, but it is actually not mutually inclusive. This is only the case with psychological fear or imagined fear. When it comes to fearing physical things, like a bear, you do not have to imagine any limitations to do that because the bear is not imaginary. When it comes to psychological fear, you do have to imagine limitations.

[Osaid]

11 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

A distinction creates the difference

This is like saying "imagination creates imagination."

It creates imagination. "Difference" is the experience of imagination. It is an intellectual inference which is not experienced outside of intellect.

11 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

Which is to say, self and not-self is a distinction already operative in your experience, regardless of belief system. If your arm were to be cut off, you'd be really pissed; if the apple is cut off, you'd be fine.

No, it's not operating anywhere, for anyone. You're just imagining that it is.

I would feel pain, adrenaline, and worry. But none of those have to do with a self. Those are literally just sensations and intelligence operating. You don't need a self to do anything other than imagine something that doesn't exist, that is my point. The desire to fix or heal my arm is not a distinction or difference, it is just a desire. My desire cannot alter the metaphysics of my experience. It has nothing to do with a separate self. You don't need a separate self to feel pain, you don't need a separate self to feel adrenaline, and you don't need a separate self to worry about something. Not to mention, none of those things have anything to do with distinctions either. Pain is not a distinction. Adrenaline is not a distinction. Worrying is not a distinction either. You cannot locate a boundary or distinction for any of these, or any experience in general. The idea that the ability to feel pain is a distinction is a complete misinterpretation of how distinctions work. The perception of pain is not a distinction. The different qualia that you experience have no limitations, therefore they do not have distinctions.

Again, it does not exist in any case, it's not there. When you act as if relativity actually exists, you are mistaking the map for the territory; the map that exists in your imagination. Your experience is not made up of distinctions, that is logically impossible because distinctions are always parts of the whole by definition. You never experience a part of something, only the whole thing.

11 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

But I wouldn't reference externalities nor abstract terms to communicate what I'm conscious of.

I'm not trying to be abstract, you can observe what I'm saying in your current experience. You have separated experience from consciousness and I am just trying to figure out why because I don't see a difference.

Edited February 3 by Osaid

[Breakingthewall]

6 hours ago, Osaid said:

. I am saying that you are always unlimited, and that everything that exists is unlimited, you are literally just using your imagination to think that you are not unlimited,

You think that because it's true, Any living being knows that it can feel pain and be destroyed by external agents, this is not a thought of the ego, it is real, it is written in DNA. If you are in a room with a tiger, you will see without a doubt, there is a clear limitation between you and the tiger, and the threat it poses is completely real. If they hit you on the foot with a hammer, the same thing. where is the doubt? I don't understand what we're arguing about, it's something obvious.

This limitation creates the self, and the self closes perception, making it limited. Awakening is opening perception, making it unlimited, and to do this you have to dilute completely real, atavistic, genetic limits. It takes serious, focused, very intelligent work, since what you do goes against the normal flow of life, which pushes towards more limitation not less, you must reverse a process, gradually, until you reach the end, and this is what we call enlightenment, something very difficult

[Osaid]

1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:

You think that because it's true, Any living being knows that it can feel pain and be destroyed by external agents, this is not a thought of the ego, it is real, it is written in DNA. If you are in a room with a tiger, you will see without a doubt, there is a clear limitation between you and the tiger, and the threat it poses is completely real. If they hit you on the foot with a hammer, the same thing. where is the doubt? I don't understand what we're arguing about, it's something obvious.

You are conflating distinctions with sensations. This is a very common conflation. This is why you get people saying "if non-duality is true, why don't you eat dirt off the ground if it is all the same." What you call a limitation is not a limitation, it is just an actual sensation, which itself has no limit. The sensation of pain is not a limit. Only things you imagine are limited.

Your idea of unlimited reality is that certain sensations are not allowed to exist. This itself is a limit you are imposing on to reality.

[Breakingthewall]

4 hours ago, Osaid said:

You are conflating distinctions with sensations. This is a very common conflation. This is why you get people saying "if non-duality is true, why don't you eat dirt off the ground if it is all the same." What you call a limitation is not a limitation, it is just an actual sensation, which itself has no limit. The sensation of pain is not a limit. Only things you imagine are limited.

Your idea of unlimited reality is that certain sensations are not allowed to exist. This itself is a limit you are imposing on to reality.

You haven't understood what I mean. Let's see, any living being perceives itself as limited, since it has been born and is going to die. This is not a mental story, a worm perceives itself as limited without the need to think, a fly, a bacteria even. They are an entity surrounded by external factors. They must seek out and use things outside themselves to feed themselves or they will die. They must flee or defend themselves from external agents or they will die. Their mission is to live and reproduce, this is life. humans are life. complex, but with the same bases.

Since you are a child you have been afraid. If you leave a 2-year-old child alone in the forest, he will be afraid, and if he finds a hungry dog, he will shit his pants, without needing to elaborate conceptual thoughts. It is the essence of life. With this foundation the mind develops and quickly identifies acceptance with security, since we are tribal beings. beyond tribal, hive beings. the whole cloud of thought that is executed like software constantly is survival. attachment and fear. It is a real energetic structure that interacts with other structures and evolves. This structure closes you, limits your perception, your consciousness. What you call enlightenment is the opening of this structure to allow the greatest range of perception, of consciousness, possible.

Total openness is what would be called complete enlightenment, it is at another completely different frequency than normal perception, since it transcends space-time and cause/effect, therefore it is unthinkable, unlimited, open, and impossible to maintain in the time if you want to be a functional individual. You will have to re-establish limits to be able to live, this is how reality is configured. The game is to dominate the mind to open yourself as much as possible to what you are, since this is freedom and life.

[Osaid]

11 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

any living being perceives itself as limited, since it has been born and is going to die.

You can't perceive yourself experiencing death or birth. If you were perceiving either of those, you could not exist. 

11 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

This is not a mental story

Yes it is, because you can't perceive it. You can only imagine it by thinking about the past or future.

11 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

impossible to maintain in the time if you want to be a functional individual.

This is just a biased perspective that psychedelic users pick up because they cannot function while in their drug-induced states. You can be entirely functional. You do not need to imagine something which does not exist in order to function. The ego does not exist. Losing something which does not exist will not make you dysfunctional.

Edited February 4 by Osaid

[Breakingthewall]

3 hours ago, Osaid said:

Yes it is, because you can't perceive it. You can only imagine it by thinking about the past or future.

I think it's quite obvious. A fly knows that it can dead, it escapes if you get close, every living being knows this, even a bacteria, it has no relationship with the conceptual mind. The conceptual mind is constructed over this base. They also know that they have to eat, or have descendants, they don't need to think about it and neither do you, it is inscribed in who you are.

Edited February 4 by Breakingthewall

[UnbornTao]

You may be thinking of distinction as a thought you have in relation to something. However, that you experience something is the distinction. The distinction itself is and determines (your experience of it) what's experienced.

It is operative because you're imagining it. Despite its conceptual nature, self can and still is likely being used/operative experientially. Without a self, how could worry show up, in relation to whom? There must be an identity that you're holding (self) that feels threatened by something outside of itself (not-self), hence the possibility of fear, worry, etc.

About the arm example, it isn't just an object. The point is that it is your arm; you're likely attached to and identified with it as well as with the rest of your body -- and with plenty of other stuff, too. A few enlightenments won't free you from self either. You can identify with humanity as a whole, the universe, the world, a group or an organization, yet that would still depend on the dynamic between self and not-self. It'd be a radically different experience as the one we now have, as our respective selves would be expanded a great deal, although it'd be based on the same dichotomy/building block (of itself versus what's outside it, what's not it).

I'm leaving the nature of existence aside. We're dealing with the relative domain.

Quote

When you act as if relativity actually exists, you are mistaking the map for the territory; the map that exists in your imagination. Your experience is not made up of distinctions, that is logically impossible because distinctions are always parts of the whole by definition. You never experience a part of something, only the whole thing.

Everything is a distinction -- experience, something, anything, part, whole, nothing. Without distinction, you wouldn't be going through this particular experience you're having now. Refer to the first paragraph above.

Quote

I'm not trying to be abstract, you can observe what I'm saying in your current experience. You have separated experience from consciousness and I am just trying to figure out why because I don't see a difference.

In relation to you bringing up concepts such as non-duality.

Again, absolutely, no difference. Relatively, there are. We live within the relative. You don't eat absolute consciousness, you eat spaghetti. That shows up as a specific experience.

Edited February 5 by UnbornTao

[Osaid]

7 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

but that it is yours, you're attached and identified with your body -- and plenty other stuff, btw.

No, it is not mine. I am not attached or identified with anything. It's just that your idea of what that looks like is inaccurate.

I think you are mistaking "taking care of something" as ego or self-image. If I want to take care of my arm, that is not self-image. That is just something I want to do which does not involve a self, because my arm is not imaginary. Your arm is not a self, and it is not "mine", it does not need either of those things to exist and be cared for, because both of those are literally just made of imagination. Again, you do not need to imagine something that does not exist to survive. Your imagination still operates after enlightenment, that is why I can worry about my arm, however, the imagination does not waste energy imagining a separate self. Taking care of something is not attachment or identity, you don't need either of those to take care of something. If I started worrying about future or past events related to my arm, that would be self-image. Taking care of it in the present moment is not self-image though.

Your idea of no-self is not actually no-self. Your idea of no-self is that you can't feel pain, or that you can't take care of things. This is not what "no-self" really is, and you can see this by looking at anyone else you consider enlightened, because they are all functional and do show care towards things.

Edited February 4 by Osaid

[Osaid]

8 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

I think it's quite obvious. A fly knows that it can dead, it escapes if you get close, every living being knows this, even a bacteria, it has no relationship with the conceptual mind. The conceptual mind is constructed over this base. They also know that they have to eat, or have descendants, they don't need to think about it and neither do you, it is inscribed in who you are.

Fearing something is not the same as perceiving death. Survival is not the same as death either. That is just life.

I am not saying you don't have to survive, I am saying that you can't experience death, by definition. If you are still here, you are not dead.

[Breakingthewall]

9 hours ago, Osaid said:

Fearing something is not the same as perceiving death. Survival is not the same as death either. That is just life.

I am not saying you don't have to survive, I am saying that you can't experience death, by definition. If you are still here, you are not dead.

Yes ok but all living beings perceive limits between them and what is not them, just because that limits exist

[UnbornTao]

@Osaid Why would you care about something at all?

Survival isn't, and doesn't have to be, based on what's true, which you disagree on. There is no self, but you still manage your finances and fix your car whenever's broken. There's self-survival demands behind these, and this is a fundamental thing that no amount of wishful thinking will overcome. One of my points is that there's more work to be done on this domain. Perhaps Ramana would be one of the few people to have actually transcended self, I don't think a couple of enlightenments will do it.

17 hours ago, Osaid said:

Your idea of no-self is not actually no-self. Your idea of no-self is that you can't feel pain, or that you can't take care of things. This is not what "no-self" really is, and you can see this by looking at anyone else you consider enlightened, because they are all functional and do show care towards things.

No-self as in what's outside self, however you hold yourself to be. I'm not sure what you mean by the second sentence. I think you can be enlightened and have some sort of self, even if you recognize its nature, for example by having a family and a certain degree of attachment towards them. 

[Osaid]

3 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

I think you can be enlightened and have some sort of self, even if you recognize its nature, for example by having a family and a certain degree of attachment towards them. 

No, the self completely vanishes because it is seen as a non-existent entity. That is what enlightenment is. 

You can still care for family, just not your imagination of them and how it relates to you. It's just that simple. Attachment is just clinging to your imagination of things. Attachment is fear of losing things in the future, but this type of fear cannot exist without an imagined self. There are no degrees of attachment if you cannot imagine yourself, there is just "what can I do right now?"

3 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

Why would you care about something at all?

Because I am someone who likes to care about things. Nothing more to it.

[Breakingthewall]

41 minutes ago, Osaid said:

Attachment is just clinging to your imagination of things

When the farmer takes the pig to sacrifice, the pig knows exactly what is happening and what is going to happen, it knows its limits without a doubt, it knows that its life is going to end, and it screams in terror. He knows this innately, it is the intelligence of life, which is total intelligence.

Fear and desire are the tool of life to preserve forms and perpetuate them, it is not something conceptual, learned or false, it is true and the conceptual structure is developed with this truth as a base. Enlightenment is transcending form, not transcending the conceptual mind. The conceptual mind is just a manifestation of the form

[Osaid]

3 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

Fear and desire are the tool of life to preserve forms and perpetuate them

Not fundamentally. Desires and emotions are fundamentally just what you want for yourself. All emotions are desires. If you are fearing something, it is because you simultaneously desire something. The fear is your reaction to the desire. Emotions only become problematic when you think you can imagine yourself, because now you are feeling fear in relation to something imaginary and limited which does not exist. This is also why fear seems synonymous with limitation, but that is only exclusive to imagined fear. There is no perceived limitation in fear which is experienced in relation to the present moment, because that type of fear does not occur in relation to an imaginary and limited self. Emotions are intelligent, they follow exactly what you desire. If you desire to perpetuate an imagined and limited version of yourself, your emotions will serve you in doing that. If you want to imagine yourself as limited, you are free to do that, but at the end of the day, it is not actually a limitation, it is just imagination.

3 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

Enlightenment is transcending form, not transcending the conceptual mind. The conceptual mind is just a manifestation of the form

No, you have conflated forms with limitations. Something which is experienced cannot be limited. Your idea of "unlimited" is itself a limitation because you are trying to remove certain aspects of your current experience. I am saying that not a single part of your experience is limited, your perception of limitation is actually just made out of imagination, it is a perceptual illusion.

Edited February 6 by Osaid

[UnbornTao]

3 hours ago, Osaid said:

Because I am someone who likes to care about things. Nothing more to it.

That someone is yourself.

How would you know it is your family if it didn't relate to you? See how you and not you are still operative?

Self might be taken as a superficial construct similar to a conventional thought, yet the self principle appears solid and is tightly intertwined with survival -- they might be synonymous. I think we may be approaching the matter superficially. Essentially we're asking, among other things, what is self?

Ironically enough, you might to some degree realize your nature, yet unconscious self aspects remain to be discovered and let go of. This is why enlightenment doesn't necessarily transform the individual. Getting completely free from self seems to be about personal transformation, which isn't the same as enlightenment. I define enlightenment as being conscious of your nature.

And then the laundry.

[Osaid]

36 minutes ago, UnbornTao said:

How would you know it is your family if it didn't relate to you? See how you and not you are still operative?

That is knowledge, not ego. Not all knowledge is ego.

Ego is the belief in knowledge about yourself, to put it another way. "Self" is just what you think you are, and that is a form of knowledge.

36 minutes ago, UnbornTao said:

yet unconscious self aspects remain to be discovered and let go of.

There are still psychological habits and beliefs unique to you which can be left over, but they really have nothing to do with a self. They are just habits and beliefs. You simply never encounter "yourself" in past or future ever again, but everything else stays the same. You live from exactly what is occurring right now.

Quote

I define enlightenment as being conscious of your nature.

Yes, and I am saying there is no difference between your true nature and what you are currently experiencing.

Edited February 6 by Osaid

[UnbornTao]

11 hours ago, Osaid said:

That is knowledge, not ego. Not all knowledge is ego.

Ego is the belief in knowledge about yourself, to put it another way. "Self" is just what you think you are, and that is a form of knowledge.

There are still psychological habits and beliefs unique to you which can be left over, but they really have nothing to do with a self. They are just habits and beliefs. You simply never encounter "yourself" in past or future ever again, but everything else stays the same. You live from exactly what is occurring right now.

Ego is an aspect of self. Self is who you take yourself to be. Leaving spiritual fantasy aside, you likely take yourself to be some way.

Yes, it may be a form of knowledge. But it isn't recognized as such; it appears to us as "reality". Concept isn't just a thought you have about something, as if you experienced things objectively, and then superimposed thoughts onto them. Concept creates the experience of self. Again, as a stark example, if I point a gun at you, certain feelings will come up -- these are based on self, on you wanting to remain in some way. Notice how it'd come up as a very real sense of you, your survival, being threatened. And then there's your nature, whatever that is. If you were completely free of self, you wouldn't mind dying as you'd be deeply conscious of what you are.

Pay attention whether you assume to be the one behind the scenes, behind your eyes and between your ears, the "owner" of those habits and beliefs. Easy to overlook this fundamental assumption that shows up as reality for us, especially if you've studied spiritual literature. Be experientially honest with yourself, I don't doubt you may have had enlightenments, but that freedom from self has been "achieved."

11 hours ago, Osaid said:

Yes, and I am saying there is no difference between your true nature and what you are currently experiencing.

It's true and it isn't.