Well, this all leads to a bit of understanding to me. I will have to read up a bit. But, I must say that this set of beliefs, or non-belief, does not have instant appeal, as stoicism has (for me).
Non-Duality is terrifying
- chewybrian
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- chewybrian
- Posts: 1602
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- Favorite Philosopher: Epictetus
- Location: Florida man
Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
Well, it does seem many lives to this point have been lived with comfortable lies as their foundations, like religion and monarchy. And, few of us live in ways that acknowledge our mortality, but prefer to lose ourselves in trivial nonsense, which is the big lie.chondriac wrote: ↑May 11th, 2018, 9:43 pm
Another thing interesting about the falsity of things is what value falsity has. Nietzsche says it better than I could:
4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.
This "philosophy which...placed itself above good and evil" seems to be gaining steam, in the people who take science as religion. They embrace science, which is fine. But, they take it to the 'inevitable' conclusion that we lack free will. Just because we are built through dna and experience does not mean we have no choice. These would lead to inevitable probabilities of choice, and such probabilities may be extremely high. After all, to different people with the same ability, needs and experience, the same choices would have great appeal as 'best'. Because we do not take a poor choice does not mean we were not free to do so.
Even the science boys don't really live as if they believe in the inevitable conclusion. They have morals, they know right and wrong, and they go on living their lives, chasing goals, etc. Without free will, why bother? Isn't it a lie for them to live this way if they don't think they have free will?
I choose to seek truth while holding fast to free will. I don't see any contradiction, if I begin with the premise that free will is self-evident, yet beyond proof or disproof. If something defies proof, must I delay judgment, or am I free, or even compelled, to take a 'best guess'? Not believing in choice seems like intellectual suicide. Many things were true in the past prior to our ability to prove them true, and perhaps this is such a case.
Any path you choose in this regard is foolish, perilous, frightening. It would be much easier to go back to worrying about football, I suppose.
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
What absurd assertion exactly? You too seem to be convinced, just like me, that "enlightenment"/"awakening" is something real, as far as we can tell. Reading your comments, you seem to be arguing in favour of it too. And no, I don't really consider this a belief. And still, I am open about being refuted about awakening. And again: in my opinion. We can never be perfectly sure about anything, of course, it's just the best guess imo.
You are perhaps even more sure of awakening than I am, and yet you "call out my absurd assertion". Just how backwards can you get it and then you accuse me of being upset.
Where we seem to differ is what "awakening" actually entails. Trying to separate fact from fiction. But the general idea is the same.
"interesting".. who is upset here and projecting?[ad hominems removed] [ad hominem removed] [ad hominem removed]
As I said, you seem to be stuck in a monistic understanding of nondualism. Which is why you seem to think that "oneness" contins something extra that can be directly experienced. That's a false experience, a very common trap. It doesn't matter if you have personally experienced that something "extra"; it's just your imagination, or you mistake some sensation inside the head for a sensation of universal oneness. Unfortunately most Eastern philosophies seem to fall into this trap.I do not need to 'believe' in 'France', I have experienced it for myself, si I Know, as have so many others.
Your lack of experience [ad hominem removed] is your own limitation, not that of France!
Yes, the awake state is a wildly different "experience"/"state" from the ordinary "experience"/"state". BUT the Absolute is beyond conceptualization and there is strictly speaking nothing "extra" about it to experience.
And just because you think that you can time travel etc., doesn't necessarily mean that that's true.
I know that, of course it can't be understood, grasped through dualistic human thinking. But we have to talk about it somehow, and we're on a philosophy forum, so we have to express ourselves somehow and try to divide things into categories etc. I too basically try to express myself through metaphors.All 'understanding' is duality.
Non-duality cannot be 'understood'.
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
"A lot"! Hahahahah! *__-chewybrian wrote: ↑May 12th, 2018, 4:52 amWell, this all leads to a bit of understanding to me. I will have to read up a bit. But, I must say that this set of beliefs, or non-belief, does not have instant appeal, as stoicism has (for me).
What a wonderful and rarely intellectually honest thing, to be willing to research and think about something that one finds less than appealing/safe (BEFORE automatically arguing! *__- )!
Reality is very 'counterintuitive'!
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
The profoundness of philosophy I think is comparable to learning a new language, except that this language is hidden at the bottom of a hellenic labyrinth. If I get out with it nobody is going to be able to understand what the hell I'm on about, and I'm not going to be any better than the muscled guy successfully earning money, friends and sex until the questions I want answers to feel "at home" in the world. This labyrinth is composed of the habitual inertia in which I go about each day, between my active desires there are neutralizing forces (such as new knowledge) that more or less accelerate this two-fold struggle between complacency and ideals. In terms of free will I think "sometimes" we have it, but most of the time we don't think about anything intimately relatable to the self, in which case we "are not". I think therefore I am? Or--to be or not to be. Another problem is memory, no one hardly ever remembers anything about anything, because they do not understand it. I don't understand anything I'm reading of itself either, I can only use suppositions to reference or relate. If I could remember even 5% of everything I've ever read I would probably understand a great sum of being and knowledge. But most of the time we're all just flailing around in the dark.chewybrian wrote: ↑May 12th, 2018, 6:35 am
Well, it does seem many lives to this point have been lived with comfortable lies as their foundations, like religion and monarchy. And, few of us live in ways that acknowledge our mortality, but prefer to lose ourselves in trivial nonsense, which is the big lie.
This "philosophy which...placed itself above good and evil" seems to be gaining steam, in the people who take science as religion. They embrace science, which is fine. But, they take it to the 'inevitable' conclusion that we lack free will. Just because we are built through dna and experience does not mean we have no choice. These would lead to inevitable probabilities of choice, and such probabilities may be extremely high. After all, to different people with the same ability, needs and experience, the same choices would have great appeal as 'best'. Because we do not take a poor choice does not mean we were not free to do so.
Even the science boys don't really live as if they believe in the inevitable conclusion. They have morals, they know right and wrong, and they go on living their lives, chasing goals, etc. Without free will, why bother? Isn't it a lie for them to live this way if they don't think they have free will?
I choose to seek truth while holding fast to free will. I don't see any contradiction, if I begin with the premise that free will is self-evident, yet beyond proof or disproof. If something defies proof, must I delay judgment, or am I free, or even compelled, to take a 'best guess'? Not believing in choice seems like intellectual suicide. Many things were true in the past prior to our ability to prove them true, and perhaps this is such a case.
Any path you choose in this regard is foolish, perilous, frightening. It would be much easier to go back to worrying about football, I suppose.
"Whether there is or is not a one, both that one and the others alike are and are not, and appear and do not appear to be, all manner of things in all manner of ways, with respect to themselves and to one another."
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
"However, unlike the thousands of made up delusional belief systems, this is the one thing that's actually real."
"Perfect surety" has nothing to do with (awakening into) Enlightenment/unconditional Love.You too seem to be convinced, just like me, that "enlightenment"/"awakening" is something real, as far as we can tell. Reading your comments, you seem to be arguing in favour of it too. And no, I don't really consider this a belief. And still, I am open about being refuted about awakening. And again: in my opinion. We can never be perfectly sure about anything, of course, it's just the best guess imo.
100% certainty is an intellectual/emotional aberration; zealotry, fanaticism, cult...
You don't even know what you are upset about!You are perhaps even more sure of awakening than I am, and yet you "call out my absurd assertion". Just how backwards can you get it and then you accuse me of being upset.
A few moments ago, you didn't even remember, now you suddenly remember?
Obviously we are on different pages, as your glance at my initial answer to your first question here might imply.
It had nothing to do with 'awakening'.
I was not talking about awakening, I was referring to your absurd comment on 'delusions' vs your one truth.Where we seem to differ is what "awakening" actually entails. Trying to separate fact from fiction. But the general idea is the same.
I do not need to 'believe' in 'France', I have experienced it for myself, si I Know, as have so many others.
Your lack of experience [ad hominem removed] ...
I seem to be censored for no good reason. I refuse to dance around the censored redactions. The delicate need to grow some skin on a philosophy site.
No chance to even refute the censored offending phrases.
Nope, bye
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
I don't know what you're talking about. By awakening I mean the realization that "we are it" / tat tvam asi. As I said: unlike the thousands of made up delusional belief systems, this is the one thing that's actually real, in my opinion. And I see "tat tvam asi" as not really belief, but more like a simple fact.Namelesss wrote: ↑May 13th, 2018, 7:31 pmYou don't even know what you are upset about!
A few moments ago, you didn't even remember, now you suddenly remember?
Obviously we are on different pages, as your glance at my initial answer to your first question here might imply.
It had nothing to do with 'awakening'.
I'm just getting straight to the point. I don't care if some people think I lose credibility, as long as no one can give a single valid counterargument against nonmonistic nondualism. Modern science pretty much confirms it too.
Unconditional love has strictly speaking nothing to do with awakening. Do you realize how nonsensical that belief is? Do you understand what emotions are? Have you seen an awake sociopath? Do you understand that there is nothing "extra" to experience about the Absolute, even if some Eastern philosophies/religions claim so?with (awakening into) Enlightenment/unconditional Love
- chewybrian
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
I feel exactly the same about the Daily Racing Form.chondriac wrote: ↑May 12th, 2018, 11:02 pm The profoundness of philosophy I think is comparable to learning a new language, except that this language is hidden at the bottom of a hellenic labyrinth. If I get out with it nobody is going to be able to understand what the hell I'm on about... I don't understand anything I'm reading of itself either, I can only use suppositions to reference or relate. If I could remember even 5% of everything I've ever read I would probably understand a great sum of being and knowledge. But most of the time we're all just flailing around in the dark.
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
It's quite different from that. The "mind" and "matter" you speak of here are the two main Western philosophy substances. First, we need to realize that in reality there are no two substances; it only seems that way to us Westerners, but it's more like a culturally created optical illusion, a culturally created split mind.chewybrian wrote: ↑May 11th, 2018, 7:02 am We (our minds as well as our bodies) are matter, and the mind as separate from matter is merely an illusion we create. Is that it? If so, why bother creating the illusion? (I know why "I" the self would want the illusion, but I mean why would lower case "i", the piece of clay, bother?)
"Mind" and "matter" are both real but they are one and the same thing, which means that everything is consciousness/experience/matter in the Hard problem of consciousness sense.
And this "one reality" has no substance / isn't a substance either. Western philosophy can't imagine the world without substances, so we have Western substance monisms like materialism and idealism. These philosophies make reality into one kind of, one type of thing, substance. Nondualism is NEITHER substance dualism, NOR substance monism. Once we make reality into "one kind of something", we are already boxing it in and distorting it.
Why was the illusion of separation created? Inside our head, there is a model of our surroundings, I'll call it the individual mind, it's needed for survival purposes which is why evolution came up with it. The individual mind isn't "a dual aspect illusion of an informational-computational emergent property arising out of complexity" or whatever profound nonsense people come up with nowadays. Some parts of the head ARE simply the individual mind. Or in other words the rest of the head / rest of the universe is the extended individual mind. It really can't be properly expressed through a dualistic language like English, so don't take anything I write 100% literally.
So the individual mind is a model of our surroundings, which automatically creates a sense of separation from the rest of the world. I think that most advanced animals too have some kind of sense of separation because of it, especially those that have some rather strong natural self-awareness, like humans do (I'm just speaking of raw self-awareness here, it doesn't imply a self).
And then, humans went further and developed the hallucination of the ego (ego in the Eastern sense): the hallucination of the individual, separate, autonomous "I". (I don't know for sure when it happened, I now put it mostly around the 2nd millenium BC, in most cultures.) It was probably born out of natural self-awarenss, abstract thinking, language, technological advancement, cultural causes etc.
So, creating the illusion of the separate "I" never had any purpose; it just happened, all over the world, as humanity advanced. So nowadays most people are only in the nondual state for the first few (3-4 or so) years of their lives, and then quickly develop, and become the individual "I".
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
- chaos_mora
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
Good point. The world/existence/reality (I use the world "reality" as in: all that there actually is), is of course real, but we normally experience it in a quite illusory/misleading way. Nondualism is about seeing through this illusory stuff. "Pulling aside the veil" as some would say.chaos_mora wrote: ↑May 24th, 2018, 4:44 pm Just a thought: I don't think you can meaningfully call your life an "illusion." I mean, even if it were a simulation, dream, or such, it's still "real." My point here is based on my perspective that "reality" is an epistemological judgement that can only be established by consciousness. As such (along the lines of the cogito) you can never really doubt that what you are seeing is "real." I don't know if this is at all related to the question, but I think it's worth mentioning.
But it's easy to misunderstand this, and fall into some sort of derealization/depersonalization. For example nowadays we have some pseudo-Advaitans running around who believe that everything is literally an illusion, and there's nothing actually there. They are convinced that they don't exist either in any way, aside maybe from some general sensation of blissful awareness.
Similarly, some Buddhists misunderstand their emptiness-approach and go too far with it. They start to believe that the true nature of reality is literally a total void, from which things temporarily seem to jump into being. Some Buddhists also try to completely dismantle the individual self and ego, one of the worst ideas people have come up with imo.
Such people can say with perfect confidence that they are not there and nothing exists. Telling them that the ego may be in some ways illusory, but there is still a human speaking (and that human always has some personality / individual self left), and the world is still there, seems to have no effect: it's met with a blind stare on their part. Unfortunately such people also seem to be making the most noise, many of them go around aggressively telling everyone that no one is there and nothing exists; giving Eastern nondualism a bad name.
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
Originally, I wanted to open my own thread for my thoughts here (I will do so afterwards). I have already posted in a Austrian Philosophy Forum. My wish is that my idea can spread as quickly as possible.
Now that I see someone very suffering from doubts.
Therefore, I will answer here first. Yes, I also had a "mystical" (from the perspective of a doubter), non-dual experience that was exceedingly clear and most pleasing.I seem to be on the brink of death speaking about these troubling thoughts. For now, everything seems bearable. But I don't know where I will end up if this destroys me. Any thoughts to this?
For a long time afterwards, I came up with the idea of turning my personal experience into a generally valid (based on logic), simple thought experiment, which I believe I have succeeded in doing. I am confident that this will free you from your doubts once and for all.Because non-duality is experienced, it is not known by a rational explanation.
The starting point for these considerations is the term "selfishness". Selfishness seems indispensable; without them, I would not even care if I'm alive or dead! The effect of selfishness consists in the delimitation; certain boundaries become meaningful to me.
Conversely, there are no meaningful boundaries without selfishness. In the state of absence of selfishness, unlimitedness is experienced.
This is already the end result of this really very simple thought experiment! All that remains is to present three examples of unlimitedness that I have experienced:
1. The limitations of my body are meaningless. My body is meaningless; the condition of my body is meaningless. In the state of selflessness, physical death has no meaning.
2. The boundary between subject and object is meaningless. The inner realm of my thoughts and the outer reality are a unity. Everything that exists is my thoughts; everything that exists is created by my thoughts.
3. My ability to change the status quo is unlimited. My personal power is bound to no limit. But since I have no doubt I do not have to check this. In the state of selflessness, I have nothing to be desired and therefore will not use my power.
Of course, there is much more to be said. But I hope that is enough to help. Maybe I will add something more here or elsewhere.
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
As I see it, because language is based on metaphors, language is an abomination.
You can not, it is irreverent to, speak of, give a name to God or any other hidden, secret,
Sacred, Entity.
The existence or non-existence of anything that is not readily apparent, is not measurable as to location and momentum in Space-Time, is a lie, is at best “Uncertain”.
In Quantum Theory that Reality itself is generated by the mind, is not born of experience, that man must look upon, see a Reality before it can exist.
For the Quantum Theorist, because he or she has no Knowledge of what existed before the so called Big Bang that Universe has no beginning; have been forced to modify that theory.
The theoretical scientist now believes that the Heaven and the Earth, the Universe, the Reality of Everything is born of Nothingness.
This works for the Religious Theorist because he and she believe that Heavens and the Earth, that the Universe, that the Reality of Everything was born of the Mind of God, that not only the Mind of God but also the Mind of Man has no material, physical, existence.
Duality for Descartes was the Duality of Mind and Body, however not only Body but also Mind was theorized to physical, a immateriality,
Man without a doubt has a dual quality, Mind and Body, Spirit and Flesh, however Mankind is not a Duality.
It is said in the Bible that the two are to become One
It is said in Tao te Ching that if the two become One that man will enter the gateway to the Stars,
Hermes Trismegistus was Three Times Great.
From the Emerald Tablet.
Who it is without false hood certain and most true, that that which is above is like to that which is below and that that which is below is like to that which is above to accomplish the miracles of wondering.
In order for the so called Jesus Christ to become the Savior of Mankind he had to die in the Flesh in order for the Spirit to rise up to the Heavens, the Spirit then to return to the Body so as to allow the Savior of Mankind to walk the Earth, with the Physical and Spiritual Bodies acting as the whole of a Single Reality.
The Two as One being Three Times Great, the One being greater than the sum total of the two as individual Singularities.
Man’s downfall began with the death of his and her conscious mind, the separation of mind and body, Eve eating of the Tree o Knowledge good and evil,
In order for man’s Salvation to take place the Mind and Body must walk the Earth as the Whole of a Single Reality.
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Re: Non-Duality is terrifying
2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
2023 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023