The Philosophy of the Self.

in post 433321, twyvel wrote:

in post 434071, twyvel wrote:

in post 435081, twyvel wrote:

As you and I have said many times, it is the experience not the experiencer. There's no subjects in this world.

in post 439708, twyvel wrote:

and now, twyvel wrote:

Prove, prove, prove.

I have not said I am proving anything. It has been stated over and over and over again that there is an attempt by fresco, JLNobody and myself to "explain" nondualism, with the caveat, IF it is even possible.

For someone who hasn't been trying to prove anything, you sure have been making a lot of proof-like deductive statements. I suppose that even you, twyvel, are so tied to traditional logic that you can't eschew modus ponens syllogisms, despite the fact that such syllogisms are only used in deductive proofs.

As for your "caveat," I went through all of your posts in this thread (an exercise I would not willingly repeat), and I failed to see any caveat.

twyvel wrote:

Do you get it at this point? There is no attempt to prove anything. Period.

I'm glad you've finally come around to my way of thinking.

twyvel wrote:

You have admitted that you do not understand what is being discussed here, and your ignorance of the subject at hand has been mentioned by fresco an JLNobody many times. Yet you come here and attempt to twist this thread towards your own agenda, interest and knowledge base with the apparent effect of coving up your own ignorance of the subject.

Try to keep your stories straight, twyvel. First you say that I admitted my ignorance, and then you say that I am trying to cover up my ignorance of the subject. Perhaps this makes sense in a nondualistic universe, but it's wildly inconsistent here.

twyvel wrote:

Criticisms, and counter points are certainly welcomed and needed as JLNobody has mentioned, and some of yours were insightful, but mostly you are arguing with a strawman of your own making.

Sorry, twyvel, but there's no strawman here. Your argument has been much more insubstantial than that.

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One of the difficulties of this thread, but also one of the exciting things about it, is that there is quite a range of philosophic knowledge among the participants. There has been (I think) a core discussion going on, and a variety of people have piped in as it has been ongoing. We are at something like post 140 by now, and a fair percentage of the posts have good explanations, though always challenged, about one point of view or another.

My own difficulty is that I am void, absolutely absent, of terms, thus words like meta, and nondual, have flown like birdies oe'er my head. I have heard of Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti and others, but have not explored what they might be talking about. Thus this thread is a wash upon my curly head, but some of it is sticking.

I can see that understanding metaphysics could be important in life (it is not important in mine, now, past figuring out what they're talking about, but perhaps) and don't think it is just elegant chatter. A lot of thought goes into people posting their points of view. (But perhaps all ARE one, Diane...)

Letty, you probably asked your question when various parties were working up their next carefully worded answers in the main discussion.

A lot of people are following this, and I am aware that my own posts are too much diversion to the core discussion. Let's just say that my posts from 'noteven' the nondual or even dual world serve to set a context for the discussers.

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That's an interesting point of veiw, JL, and I agree that it is probably true in many cases, but since (I hope you'll agree) people turn out to be vastly different as they grow older, doesn't that negate any possibility of free will or environmental influence? You say that everyone is born the same, and that we do not change - why then, are we all different? Why aren't we all just carbon copies of each other in different bodies?

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truth
Rufio, I don't see that anything you say in your last post has anything at all to do with what I've been saying...except that I expressed "an interesting point of view." Thank you.

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If it didn't have anything to do with what you were talking about, why did you say it?

"Fresco, when I say we are all equally enlightened (I don't think I said "equally unenlightened"), I am trying to eliminate the dualistic dichotomy between enlightened and unenlightened, and I am doing so in the somewhat ironical sense of zen master Dogen's notion that we do not change when we have awakened, when we have come to our senses, as it were. Let me give a few quotes to illustrate my point:
Zen master Bankei admonished his students thusly: "You are primarily Buddhas; you are not going to be Buddhas for the first time [as a future result of their meditation efforts]. There is not an iota of a thing to be called error in your inborn mind...If you have the least desire to be better than you actually are, if you hurry up to the slightest degree in search of something, you are already going against the Unborn [which I interpret to be Atman, Big Mind, Universal Mind, Original Mind, Buddha Mind, Essential Mind, etc.]."

H. Benoit, in his book, The Supreme Doctrine (an unfortunate title), said: "Zen calls [the realization of satori] to 'return home.' You have FOUND YOURSELF now; from the beginning nothing has been hidden from you; it was yourself who shut your eyes to reality" [attachment and dualism is the shutting of one's eyes, as I understand it].
I love the equations, "samsara = nirvana and "zen mind is ordinary mind."

And finally, from the Buddha himself: "I have truly obtained nothing from complete, unexcelled Enlightenment."

How wonderfully subtle and paradoxical is the whole process of self-revelation.

We do not study to be beome what we are not; we study to become what we truly are-- in this sense self-fulfillment is not an extreme makeover, even though it can be described with the term "transcendent mind" a "no-mind that transcends dualism and attachment to reified absolutes.
I hope you now understand what I meant."

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truth
Rufio, the quotation you give as evidence for my having said that we are born the same and do not change does not contain any such statement (?). Your mention of my views negating "any possibility of free will or environmental influence IS relevant to the spirit of my general message . I think the perennial debate between determinism and freewill-ism is a false issue for the reason that it assumes the existence of an ego-self that makes free decisions or is compelled by causal influences to make decisions unfreely. My life is "determined" by (actually, I think it IS) a complex web of influences too vast to be seen, but since I AM that complex web (and everything else), there is no feeling of unfreedom. At the same time there is no feeling of freedom for there is no self to enjoy that freedom--there is just freedom in the sense of spontaneity. No problem at all. The absence of a "self" renders the theoretical distinction between free will and determinism a false dichotomy.
BTW, let me add that I think YOU (and everyone else) have the same feelings and lack of feelings that I describe for myself above.

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I'm with osso. Most of the time, your language about transcendence, dualism, non-dualism, and all that other mumbo-jumbo flies way above my head. I understand logic, buddhist, Jefferson, and cocktail party. However, some of the stuff you guys are discussing provides me with some hint of the subject matter under discussion, like a baby's first step. Wink

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Determinism aside, we can't be born the same, unchanging, and still turn out different. It's not logical. So are you saying that wer are all predetermined to be different, or that something else (free will or otherwise) changes us after birth? Being born the same I thought was implied by "equally enlghtened" unless you meant something else by the term that you didn't elaborate on.

Would you consider logic an influence? It surely "determines" your thinking and your decisions, and thus, your character, to a great extent. But where does it come from, if it's only an influence? What about emotions? Where do they come from? When do we learn when to feel happy or sad?

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It's a lot like God in that case, twyvel. It can proven. It can't be disproven. Any stance on it is an act of faith, not philosophy.

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Some of it is faith, some of it is intuitive, some is observation, some aspects are derived and based on reflection and meditation, but nondualism is that which one IS, is my understanding, which cannot be proven becasue according to nondualism there's no one to prove it to, and becasue it is subjective.

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Letty,

Apologies for no reply to your question:"Do you have children ?". I think you asked this as an appeal for simplicity, and ironically "see through a child's eye" is advocated in the esoteric traditions.
The way out of the word salad is simply "observe yourself"..the rest follows. Sounds easy doesn't it !

As for "what has been accomplished" ...one of the "emergent truths" is that "doing" and "becoming" are antithetical to "being". Now this might sound like cryptic mumbo jumbo to most, and heresy to the concept of a "vibrant society" but I assure you (and the audience) that even "sabbaticals" in this mode have a significant effect on the experiencer and a potential for removal of conflict. (Krishnamurti illustrated this in his address to the UN in the 50's/60's). The fact that most of us seem "trapped in boxes" (a French metaphor) is perhaps the tragedy of humanity.

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Where does that intuition come from? Why were you, and not I, for instance, blessed with this particular intuition? Observation is purely materialist and could only lead to a materialist base.... your idealism comes from rejecting your oberservations. It's faith, twyvel.

Of course, my adamant dislike of it is faith too, but I'm cool with that. Smile

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twyvel wrote:

No. Color is a delightful mental depiction of light of a certain frequency, but some other mental images (such as lines) are "real." My guess is that things that can be perceived with more than one sense are more than just mental constructions. For instance, forms can be touched. I don't know how people who are blind from birth form mental images of shapes (or for that matter how a dog perceives a world of smells) but apparently the brain is hard-wired to convert data from our senses into graphic form.

Computers can convert raw data into a variety of images. The difference is that they do not have a "self" that can appreciate the result.

twyvel wrote:

IMO, thoughts arise from sensory data and/or data from memory processed by the brain. Sensory data comes from patterns of photons, energy and chemicals (including those created by other human beings) that impinge on our sense organs. The ultimate source is a physical universe that was created in the big bang and has been expanding, changing and evolving for the last 13 billion years or so.

Quote:

Terry: If I am not at one with every other person, how can they be at one with me?

twyvel: Just because you see a mirage it doesn't mean others do.

You missed the point. If non-duality was "true" then minds that were not part of the collective consciousness could not exist.

Twyvel wrote:

Can you honestly say, based on experience, on analysis of perception, that you have ever perceived a material world?

Yes. Can you honestly say that your perceptions are anything other than a graphical display of sensory data from a material world? Or do you really think that you dreamed up everything yourself?

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BoGoWo wrote:

are we our 'selves', or the 'perception(s)' of that 'self'?

IMO, we are selves, or some might say we "have" selves. Fully functioning brains generate both a core consciousness (the self, or twyvel's unobserved observer) and an extended consciousness which includes memories, autobiographical data which gives us a sense of who we are, volition, high-level data manipulation, etc. Damage to specific areas of the brain impair the function of extended consciousness. Core consciousness can exist without extended consciousness, but not the reverse.

The social self that we project to others by our words and actions can reflect who we really are, or may be a deliberate misrepresentation in order to get what we want (food, favors, sex, prestige, etc).

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joefromchicago wrote:

One can no more prove the existence of a subject-less universe with subject-dependent logic than one can measure distance with color.

Actually, cosmological distances ARE measured with color. Distances to very distant galaxies and quasars are determined by the amount of red-shift in the light they emit. Smile

What kind of logic is not subject-dependent? IMO, any belief system should be internally consistent and logical within its own framework. Non-dualism does not seem logical to me, given what I think I know about this world and lacking any mystical experiences. The reported experiences of non-dualism seem to may be nothing more than self-hypnosis due to prolonged meditation/practice with the expectation of achieving an altered mental state.

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twyvel wrote:

If you had said this about a hundred posts ago, I would not have felt the need to make the points that I did. If you had, a hundred posts ago, issued the kind of caveats that you now note you should have used, much of this would have been unnecessary.

twyvel wrote:

I disputed the argument that you made, not the argument that you wanted to make or the argument you're making now. There was no strawman, twyvel, only a flawed, unconvincing argument that you have now retracted. Given that, there is nothing more to be said on the subject.

twyvel wrote:

I perhaps took it for granted that other understood that.

I still don't understand it, but I'm content to leave such metaphysical matters to those who genuinely give a damn about them.

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Terry wrote:

Actually, cosmological distances ARE measured with color. Distances to very distant galaxies and quasars are determined by the amount of red-shift in the light they emit.

Scientists have found a correlation between light shift and distance. Thus, light shift is evidence of distance, not a measurement of distance. Cosmological distances are still measured in light-years, not "light-reds" or "light-yellows."

Terry wrote:

What kind of logic is not subject-dependent? IMO, any belief system should be internally consistent and logical within its own framework. Non-dualism does not seem logical to me, given what I think I know about this world and lacking any mystical experiences.

A reasonable demand.

Terry wrote:

The reported experiences of non-dualism seem to may be nothing more than self-hypnosis due to prolonged meditation/practice with the expectation of achieving an altered mental state.

This appears eminently sensible to me.

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joefromchicago

Quote:

If you had said this about a hundred posts ago, I would not have felt the need to make the points that I did. If you had, a hundred posts ago, issued the kind of caveats that you now note you should have used, much of this would have been unnecessary.

I have said several times, "if it is even possible", and as I said I tend to say, "I suspect, I think etc. JLNobody, fresco and I have mentioned many times that dualist concepts can only point to nondualism as nondualism, universal consciousness, unity consciousness, big mind, totality, absolute, etc., is translogic, transconcepts, transreason.
As JLNobody said: "You argue RIGHTLY that "nondualism be defended strictly on nondualistic terms". Unfortunately that is not possible. Language is inherently dualistic (as we've noted many times)."

Quote:

I disputed the argument that you made, not the argument that you wanted to make or the argument you're making now. There was no strawman, twyvel, only a flawed, unconvincing argument that you have now retracted. Given that, there is nothing more to be said on the subject.

Oh no, there has been no retraction. I'm only pointing out the obvious, that most of what has been said on this thread, the quote of sages, Krishnamurti, Buddhism etc. is not about proving anything one way or the other, as it is understood that not only can most of it "not be proved or disproved", because among other reasons, it can only been grasped subjectively (even though nondually speaking there is no subject), but because "proving" is not the point. Self(?) realization is.

From my perspective this thread has been and is a discussion about beliefs, insights, reflections, intuitions, meditations, and observations etc. of the nature of what is understood as the "self(?)", and understanding from what we have learnt and grasped from readings and relationships etc. And in the course of that discussion there has been disagreements, arguments, affirmations, counter views etc. and many back and forth questions.
It has not been about proving anything.

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Terry

Quote:

No. Color is a delightful mental depiction of light of a certain frequency, but some other mental images (such as lines) are "real." My guess is that things that can be perceived with more than one sense are more than just mental constructions. For instance, forms can be touched. I don't know how people who are blind from birth form mental images of shapes (or for that matter how a dog perceives a world of smells) but apparently the brain is hard-wired to convert data from our senses into graphic form.

Point was it seems obvious that everything one knows, observers, perceives etc. is mental.

Quote:

You missed the point. If non-duality was "true" then minds that were not part of the collective consciousness could not exist.

Quote:

Can you honestly say, based on experience, on analysis of perception, that you have ever perceived a material world?

Quote:
Yes. Can you honestly say that your perceptions are anything other than a graphical display of sensory data from a material world? Or do you really think that you dreamed up everything yourself?

Well it's quite amazing that most don't know. I think I can honestly say that I have never experienced, observer, perceived anything other then what we call 'mental events'.

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