Reality

truth
Yes, Fresco, the only ontologically correct grammatical form for talking about the world as it is may be the gerund (-ing) form.
BTW, this is an ancient notion going as far back as Heraclitus. Reality consists of process and becoming, not static being.

Here's another "reality" quiz.
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Moral Dilemma


This test only has one question, but it's a very important one.

Please don't answer it without giving it some serious thought. By giving an honest answer you will be able to ascertain where you stand morally.

The test features an unlikely, completely fictional situation, where you will have to make a decision one way or the other. Remember that your
answer should to be honest, yet spontaneous.

Please scroll down slowly and consider each line - this is important for the test to work accurately.

You're in Florida. In Miami, to be exact. There is great chaos going on around you, caused by a hurricane and severe floods. There are huge masses of water all around you. You are an Associated Press photographer and you are in the middle of this great disaster. The situation is
nearly hopeless.

You're trying to shoot very impressive photos. There are houses afloat around, people floating disappearing into the water. Nature is showing all its
awesome power.

Suddenly you see a man in the water - he is fighting for his life, trying not to be taken away by the masses of water and mud. You move closer.

Somehow the man looks familiar. Suddenly you know who it is -

it's George W. Bush!

At the same time you notice that the raging waters are about to take him away, forever. you have two options. You can save him or you can take the
best photo of your life. You can't do both. You can either save the life of George W. Bush, or you can shoot a Pulitzer Prize winning photo, a unique photo chronicling one of the world's most powerful
men in a battle against the power of nature itself.

Here's the question (please give an honest answer):






Would you select color film, or instead go for the simplicity of classic black and white?

truth
I must confess, you got me. But I was going to say--in jest, of course--I'd take the photo and then shoot him as he went down, just to make sure. But the joke was on me.
Seriously I would choose "classic" black and white, if I were to take the photo.
Even more seriously, on moral grounds I would not just let him die; on ethical grounds I might consider all the depressed lives of poor children and elderly people and actual lives of American military youth and withhold my help just as he has withheld so much necessary help from poor Americans and injured V.A. servicemen

Sorry to be such a square in this context of fun and hilarity.

JLN, My sentiments about this crass president leaves me with the same conclusion as yours, but I would pick color to show his cowardess.

I'm trying, JL... it just seems like a tautology to me. I mean, with non-dualism, you know everything because you ARE everything (or that's the idea anyway) and when you switch over back to dualism, you look around and think that you don't know everything anymore. And the dualist would say that this is because we really don't, and that the nondualist is living inside his imagination and not the real world, and the nondualist would say that it is because the dualist is blinding himself to reality. So it's sort of a "duh".... no matter what your philosophy is, it seems kind of self-evident that the world would be known to nondualists and unknown to dualists.

My original question was how do you rationalize nondualism when you discover something new about the world that you never knew - and it seems from your post that the way you would do it would be to say simply that you had lost the proper "way" of seeing the world in a nondualist sense and were being infected by dualism or something. Which is no explanation at all.

Rufio,

Your concepts of "knowledge" and "the world" are dualistic. What you mean by "new" is something like "the uncovering of a hidden piece of reality which was there all the time". What I (as a non dualist) mean by "new" is "a previously non-existent state of mutual interaction between observer and observed". Good analogies abound in early education where a student might not have the intellectual equipment to "receive" (interact with) a concept until he/she has undergone earlier interactions at "a different level". We might call this "learning something new" but the "the new" was not independent of the learning process.

To some extent (and without being judgemental) your own difficulties with "understanding" non dualism could originate from your incomplete assimilation of earlier concepts. The argument for this is that whereas non dualists completely understand (and use) a dualistic mode, the opposite is rarely, if ever, the case.

What is a big mystery to me is to observe young children learn the use of language. Some have innate skills such as Mozart who learned to play the piano at three, and compose music at six. It just boggles the mind. "Dualism and non-dualism" doesn't make any sense to me.

Rufio, you are where Cicerone is. At least he just comes out and admits it. Dualism is not a fault; although the Bible (which is no authority for me in general) does seem to define it as the Original Sin, i.e., eating from the tree of knowledge of good and bad, [true and false, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust--all possible oppositions]. Let me say that this last post of yours is very intelligent. From your position of "ignorance" regarding the nature of non-dualism you phrase your confusion insightfully, honestly, and intelligently. So I hope you know that I am not demeaning your perspective; it is to be expected. But few people could describe it as insightfully as you have.
Non-dualism does not imply that the non-dualist "knows every" fact about the universe. To me, it's quite the contrary. When I am truly enjoying the non-dualist state of consciousness, I am knowing NOTHING--and at such times my absolute unknowing is blissful. All cognitive knowing to me is a form of dualism: being able to formulate propositions about the world "out there." But the world "out there" is ultimately--from the non-dualist perspective--not separate from your true nature (which is everything). It is "separate" from your false nature, from your ego/self. When Fresco talks about knowledge being the result of interaction between the "self" (inner being) and phenomena in the "outside" world, he is describing the process of obtaining knowledge about the world. This is a dualist process, but as he describes it "transcendently" it does not presuppose a REAL SEPARATION between a self and a surrounding/separate world. As such, even when we dualistically learn "new" things, it is ULTIMATELY a non-dualistic process. As Twyvel reminds us, "One cannot deviate from the Tao." I wish I could explain this "reality" in terms that do not conflict with your dualistic conditioning. But this, for the time being, is the best I can do.
And Fresco, pardon me if I have misrepresented your position.

JLN

For the purposes of answering Rufio I think it is important to qualify the phrase "knowledge about the world". I would want to paint the picture of "knowledge" as an "interaction pathway" with "new knowlege" being like the formation of a rivulet from an existing river. So just as a river's course is determined by both the current and the terrain, knowledge is about inner AND outer, not just outer.
The nondualist position is of course represented by the "reality" of a river being the inseparable relationship of the water and its bed, neither being sufficient in itself to define the river. (With apologies to you JLN who already know this analogy)

Fresco, if new knowledge does not come from reality, than where does it come from? The only other option is that it must come from the self, but since it is new to the self, that is already out of the question.

JLN, the bible also defines homosexuality as a sin and says that men are biologically superior to women and condones slavery if you read it the right way.

About non-dualism - if the idea is that we are all ignorant of the world, doesn't that imply an external world rather than an internal subjective one? No dualist would ever claim to know everything about the world either, though he would claim to have the methods to understand it. As non-dualists don't seem to think they have methods to learn the truth, the truth is effectively reduced to a subjective internal one - that is, you know everything there is to know, because anything you don't already know is not knowable without dualist methods. And how is learning new things a non-dualistic proccess? I could see how you might be meaning that our ego is discovering things that it thinks it did not know but which our "true selves" actually did, being non-dual and one with everything and so forth.... but you also said that you can't know anything non-dually.

truth
Rufio, it seems you are caught in the grip of an "either-or" paradigm. Fresco says, referring to his river analogy, that "knowledge is about inner AND outer, not just outer". And you respond with "if new knowledge does not come from reality, then where does it come from? The only other option is that it must come from the self...". Do you see that you are equating "reality" with the "outer" world? Yet it seems plain that Fresco is indicating that reality is BOTH outer AND inner. This is part of what is meant by non-dualism (both/and rather than either/or).

No, I agree with that, JL - new knowledge comes from outer fact and inner method. Naturally no method is completely transparent....

No "facts".... only factING
No "methods"....only flowING

"Facts" + "Methods" = "NO UNDERSTAND"

FactING = UndertandING.

So interpreting. Sure. But there has to be something there to interpret first.

No "thing"..... only "thingING" !

In the static candlestick/faces ambiguous figure, neither is "the reality". The transcendent observer is aware of both and the geometrical mutuality between them

In the dynamic self/world neither is "the reality". The transcendent observer is aware of both and of the existential mutuality between them.

fresco, a "former airline pilot" may not be the most reliable source for current scientific thought on quantum theory. Interesting that you should mention Bohm, since unlike the Copenhagen interpretation, his pilot wave theory is deterministic and does not require an observer to collapse a wave function.

So how, exactly, do you think that Paterson's misapprehensions regarding quantum theory repudiate the scientific view of consciousness?

I agree that mind cannot exist independently of the physical brain that creates it, but reptilian and lower brains do not have the capacity for creating higher level consciousness (nor do some brain-damaged people), so brains can exist without minds.

Of course matter does not exist independently from space. Einstein showed us that. But what does that have to do with dualism?

JLN, twyvel has been droning on about infinite regress for years. I don't know why, since it is obvious to me that my self does not require an infinite regress of observers to exist, and we now know which brain structures ultimately produce core consciousness as well as the physical processes involved, although we do not know "why" we experience it as we do. But as you say, infinite regress it is a grammatical argument that has little bearing on reality.

The "self" is not an alien being that imposes its will on the body. It is not a homunculus. It is a synthesis of brain states that can compare data from memory with current sensory data and/or thoughts to solve problems, weigh alternatives, make decisions, and act on them.

You might think of it as a 4-dimensional virtual structure formed by processing various configurations of neural states over time, somewhat like a 3-dimensional view can be produced from 2-dimensional drawings.

If non-dualism cannot explain anything and is at odds with everyday experience, what real value does that viewpoint have?

Terry, You're the only participant in this discussion that I truly understand. Dualism and non-dualism has very little meaning to me. I've always been a fundamentalist with simple and direct answers. Your's fit that criteria.

truth
Terry, it is very difficult to respond to your "proofs" for the absolute validity of dualism. It seems to rest on "observations" of a real--not a mind-made--world "out there" in reality land. It seems to rest on rock solid "brute facts," meaning things and events that carry their own reality, almost as if God given. The dualist position is more inclusive of the human input. To us there is nothing more "brutish" than the notion of a brute fact. As Fresco notes there is only "fact-ing", a perspective that acknowledges facts as little theories, imposed on experience by the "understanding" human observer.
Referring to my analogy, your note that the "self" [and I was so pleased to see it in quotations marks] is but a "synthesis of brain states" that combines brain states of memory with "sensory data and/or thoughts." In other words you describe it as a "virtual structure". That's what I've been saying: it is an epiphenomenon of underlying processes, not a solid phenomenal thing (a brute observable thing) within bodies. When I move to promote or defend my "self," which is what we all do, I am dancing around a phantom.
I leave it to Fresco to discuss the implications of non-dualistic methodology in the new scientific paradigms. And I generally leave it to Tywvel to describe in intricate implications for human experience of realilzing one's no-self. But I would like to return to the classic Hindu dictum, Tat Tvam Asi, (thou art that) to make a non-dualist point. When one meditates, one will eventually "see" that there is no dualism in one's immediate experience. If you sit down and look carefully you recognize EITHER that you ARE the context of your room. or that the room is the context that is you. In the first perspective, there is furniture, floor, walls, vases, books AND you. The context is not around and separate from you. In other words you have OBJECTIFIED yourself as "the world". There is only the unitary reality of the room, of which you are an essential ingredient (at that moment. You may leave to another context, and the room will have a new integrity or configuration) But you can also realize that you can take the opposite and equally non-dualist perspective on the you-and-the-room situation. Instead of objectifying the situation, you can--also as an expression of "tat tvam asi", SUBJECTIFY the context: the room and all its contexts becomes you. It is pure experience, and the feeling of you is only an equal part of this experience. In this case there is also a unity, a subjective intregrity. The same applies to all the experiences we have of the world. Ultimately it is us and we are it--two different ways of saying the same thing.