Philosophical Speculations

Lou Gold wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 3:11 am

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 3:02 am

Lou Gold wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 2:11 am

Might it also be true that the individual is but the appearance of what 'we' feels like? Does anyone think the feeling of bellyache-ness is radically different for others? Consider a situation where a friend is speaking of the memory of a trauma injury and you feel a shiver of pain. Imprisonment or empathy? Feelings can be the appearance of connectivity.

Yeah, it's truly terrifying to think genuine empathy is not possible because the only other possibility is perpetual war. It's no wonder people today feel more alienated and isolated than ever when the best we have to offer them is, "you are imprisoned in your private space of experience until you die".

Perhaps I mean it differently. Not as evidence of individual empathy with others but as the collective appears empathically as an individual?

I mean it metaphysically as well. The appearance of individual empathy speaks to deep metaphysical reality, truly shared space of experience. The difference may be I don't think that makes the individual any less real than the collective.

Eugene I wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 12:22 am As I said before, in "my" (a-la Buddhist) scheme, there are definitely progressing levels of spiritual ascension, but they are rather sort-of vertically ascending horizontal layers rather that concentric spheres, which corresponds to the Buddhist levels of progression called "bhumis". And that is not a fantasy, but rather an analogy that comes from my own spiritual experience.

O bhummer : https://www.learnreligions.com/ten-bhum ... ism-450015

How's the Boddhisatva wow been working in your life, "well-born" Eugene?

Can't say that I'm fully "purified of immoral conduct and dispositions", but when I was more into Buddhism (but never took refuge in Sangha), by some slip I gave to myself the promise of what I thought was the promise of Ksitigarbha. That period was also my dark night of the soul, associated with creeping realization that promise to liberate all sentient beings from all hells kind of meant also creating all the hells. The idea of eternity became very terrifying.

First session with Ayahuasca, guided by a Christian Vegetalista shaman, took the burden of the wow from me, with experience of infinite love and mercy in the form of creating a whole universe just to heal me. Heavy in its own way, that too, dunno know how literally the "universe" aspect of the experience should be interpreted. The love felt very real.

Lately, Camus' investigation in the Myth of Sisyphos has been in thoughts. The finishing line "We must imagine Sisyphos happy" sounds deep. On the math side, I like very much the "middlepath" of undecidability of Halting problem, between the nonsense of completed infinity and lifeless void surrounding finite universe. Or the nightmare idea of "Groundhog Universe", superposition of Einstein-4D-blocks.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 1:38 am How can we truly relate to and empathize with others and God if we can never experience their perspectives?

By feeling their pain and joy, in some moderate proportion. Each perspective is Unique, each experience is Unique, for life and love to exist.

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 4:06 am

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 1:38 am How can we truly relate to and empathize with others and God if we can never experience their perspectives?

By feeling their pain and joy, in some moderate proportion. Each perspective is Unique, each experience is Unique, for life and love to exist.

Exactly!

Well... what can I say. Suddenly all talks about nonduality, it's all one consciousness, the one mind at large, etc., etc. all turn out to be nothing but empty words. The whole talk about the (non-)existence of a self turned out to be a game of words. When things truly approach the crux of the matter, somehow everyone becomes surprisingly individual-bubble-preserving. Everyone has their own justifications. Yet if we really look without prejudice at things, we find the bottom line is always to preserve the inviolability of the personal bubble. "Theoretically" all bubbles are part of the one consciousness but as soon as we approach the real, fully conscious experience of this oneness, the bubbles shudder and close themselves even tighter, as clams. One would much rather believe that this real experience of oneness is an illusion because it's considered that the one consciousness is actually unconscious and blindly-instinctive on large scale. Or if the one consciousness is admitted to be conscious it is considered so alien and unbridgeable that for all practical purposes the intellectual self remains fully isolated from it (at least until death). This gives comfort to the bubble. Anything is acceptable as long as it keeps the bubble intact.

As I always say, it's not my desire to disturb the comfort of anyone but when there are groundless attack against some truths, the least thing that can be done is to present the balancing facts. The smallest thing that anyone can do is to investigate unbiasedly his inner world and ask "Are there any bubble boundaries? Could there really be any separation between my inner conscious space and those of others unless I imagine this separation through my own thinking? Do I really perceive such separation in the given? Or I add it myself because it suits the way I feel about everything that is not me?"

Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 10:32 am Well... what can I say. Suddenly all talks about nonduality, it's all one consciousness, the one mind at large, etc., etc. all turn out to be nothing but empty words. The whole talk about the (non-)existence of a self turned out to be a game of words. When things truly approach the crux of the matter, somehow everyone becomes surprisingly individual-bubble-preserving. Everyone has their own justifications. Yet if we really look without prejudice at things, we find the bottom line is always to preserve the inviolability of the personal bubble. "Theoretically" all bubbles are part of the one consciousness but as soon as we approach the real, fully conscious experience of this oneness, the bubbles shudder and close themselves even tighter, as clams. One would much rather believe that this real experience of oneness is an illusion because it's considered that the one consciousness is actually unconscious and blindly-instinctive on large scale. Or if the one consciousness is admitted to be conscious it is considered so alien and unbridgeable that for all practical purposes the intellectual self remains fully isolated from it (at least until death). This gives comfort to the bubble. Anything is acceptable as long as it keeps the bubble intact.

As I always say, it's not my desire to disturb the comfort of anyone but when there are groundless attack against some truths, the least thing that can be done is to present the balancing facts. The smallest thing that anyone can do is to investigate unbiasedly his inner world and ask "Are there any bubble boundaries? Could there really be any separation between my inner conscious space and those of others unless I imagine this separation through my own thinking? Do I really perceive such separation in the given? Or I add it myself because it suits the way I feel about everything that is not me?"

One thing I found appealing for me in Buddhism is its brutal honesty (well, by far not all Buddhists follow this standard unfortunately). In the Buddhist practice we work on ourselves to examine and remove our delusions and experience the world as it is, and we tell that to people. We have cosmology and hypotheses about how things work and beliefs in the afterlife and incarnation (and many modern Buddhist actually don't believe even in that), but we honestly admit that they are just inferences, we can chose them as beliefs but we don't actually know if they are true or not. Zen Buddhists follows this standard most consistently, they approach the world with open mind and open heart but never lie to themselves and others that they know anything about the world for certain.

Everyone who has a college level familiarity with philosophy heard about Hume and knows that it is impossible to prove anything about the world outside and beyond the stream of conscious phenomena of one's private conscious experience. If anyone tells us that he definitely "knows" what is there outside and beyond that stream one's private conscious phenomenal experience (be it matter, consciousness, God or anything else) - then that person is lying to themselves and to others. It would be more honest to admit that we do not know what is there outside "the bubble". We can have beliefs, inferences and hypotheses about it, but this is all they are - just beliefs. There is nothing wrong with having beliefs, we all do. The difference is whether or not we declare them as "truths" and lie to ourselves and to people. But of course it feels very uncomfortable to suspend ourselves in such uncertain epistemological position. We want to know about the world and be certain in our knowledge, and we want it so badly that we choose to lie to ourselves (and others too) that we know in order to avoid that uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty.

I must concede that when I ponder the ipseity of those light beings I encountered as a child, wordlessly transmitting an indelible message of our shared quiddity, all I can really say is that they seemed very real, but now still can't definitively say that they are what they seemed to be. However, whatever their provenance, emanating from some empyrean realm, or from deep within one's subconscious dreamtime, what seems most crucial and paramount is the pointing to That which one is in essence, and is never not the case, whatever astonishing experience we may be exploring ~ such as sipping this morning cup of chai.

Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 12:06 pm I must concede that when I ponder the ipseity of those light beings I encountered as a child, wordlessly transmitting an indelible message of our shared quiddity, all I can really say is that they seemed very real, but now still can't definitively say that they are what they seemed to be. However, whatever their provenance, emanating from some empyrean realm, or from deep within one's subconscious dreamtime, what seems most crucial and paramount is the pointing to That which one is in essence, and is never not the case, whatever astonishing experience we may be exploring ~ such as sipping this morning cup of chai.

You are always bang on, Dana
And I do the same, with the only difference of the choice of tea: I drink Japanese matcha as a lovely part of my daily Zen practice

Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 10:32 am As I always say, it's not my desire to disturb the comfort of anyone but when there are groundless attack against some truths, the least thing that can be done is to present the balancing facts. The smallest thing that anyone can do is to investigate unbiasedly his inner world and ask "Are there any bubble boundaries? Could there really be any separation between my inner conscious space and those of others unless I imagine this separation through my own thinking? Do I really perceive such separation in the given? Or I add it myself because it suits the way I feel about everything that is not me?"

Cleric, if a nondualist chooses to believe in a unity of universal consciousness, sure, there are Buddhist and Advaita school that do that. If a non-dualist wants to believe that he will dissolve into unity after death, sure, Advaita has that belief. But honest Buddhists admit that these are all only beliefs and all we have as a raw experiential data is only the content of our private conscious experience, and that data is insufficient to prove anything certain regarding the world beyond the "bubble" of our private conscious experience. To deny that simple fact is to be not honest. But anyone is free to have any beliefs about how the world is outside the "bubble", there is nothing wrong with that. I think the idealistic belief in the fundamental unity of cosmic Consciousness is a beautiful, parsimonious and spiritually very beneficial one, and that is why it is my belief of choice. But I don't want to lie to myself and to people that I know for sure that this is the ultimate truth.

Eugene I wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 11:35 am One thing I found appealing for me in Buddhism is its brutal honesty (well, by far not all Buddhists follow this standard unfortunately). In the Buddhist practice we work on ourselves to examine and remove our delusions and experience the world as it is, and we tell that to people. We have cosmology and hypotheses about how things work and beliefs in the afterlife and incarnation (and many modern Buddhist actually don't believe even in that), but we honestly admit that they are just inferences, we can chose them as beliefs but we don't actually know if they are true or not. Zen Buddhists follows this standard most consistently, they approach the world with open mind and open heart but never lie to themselves and others that they know anything about the world for certain.

Everyone who has a college level familiarity with philosophy heard about Hume and knows that it is impossible to prove anything about the world outside and beyond the stream of conscious phenomena of one's private conscious experience. If anyone tells us that he definitely "knows" what is there outside and beyond that stream one's private conscious phenomenal experience (be it matter, consciousness, God or anything else) - then that person is lying to themselves and to others. It would be more honest to admit that we do not know what is there outside "the bubble". We can have beliefs, inferences and hypotheses about it, but this is all they are - just beliefs. There is nothing wrong with having beliefs, we all do. The difference is whether or not we declare them as "truths" and lie to ourselves and to people. But of course it feels very uncomfortable to suspend ourselves in such uncertain epistemological position. We want to know about the world and be certain in our knowledge, and we want it so badly that we choose to lie to ourselves (and others too) that we know in order to avoid that uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty.

I perfectly well understand you concern, Eugene.
But here again it's all a matter of self observation and understanding how our thinking works.

"it is impossible to prove anything about the world outside and beyond the stream of conscious phenomena of one's private conscious experience."
There's hardly any one more misunderstood word than 'proof' nowadays. Of course it's impossible to prove anything in this way! Can we prove the fragrance of a rose through pure mathematics? Can we prove the experience of Love through abstract thoughts about DNA pairs? Nothing is ever proven in this way. The only 'proof' is when we discover ideas that bring the disconnected facts into harmony and this harmony turns out to have real practical implications for individual and social life.
And here we automatically snap back to the objection "Yeah, harmony-shmarmony - but this doesn't at all prove if the world really operates in this way or it's only our personal thought projection that we claim to be some 'truth'." In your words: "If anyone tells us that he definitely "knows" what is there outside and beyond that stream one's private conscious phenomenal experience (be it matter, consciousness, God or anything else) - then that person is lying to themselves and to others."
And here again we have the deeply ingrained idea that there's a separate world outside and beyond our private consciousness. Trust me, if someone claims to know some world 'outside and beyond' I'll be the first to raise a brow! And this is the core problem. The talk about 'proofs' is just dabbling with words, avoiding the root cause.

The trouble is that we make premature judgments. Just because we don't see how our conscious experience might have anything in common with those of others we feel obliged to fantasize separate bubbles for everyone. Then, logically, it becomes impossible to speak of anything that may lie outside our bubble - all we have is only mental representations of the thing-in-itself within our personal bubble. And it is precisely here that one must be brutally honest and realize that these fantasized bubbles would never exist in our mind if we were not supporting them ourselves (even if unconsciously). Nowhere we have a hint of direct perception of these bubbles, nor of world outside our consciousness - all we know is one consciousness. So now if I want to quibble I could say that it is exactly those who support the idea of separate bubbles that lie to themselves and others - they support with religious fanaticism a belief that they have never seen any evidence of! It is equally mistaken and arrogant to claim with certainty that knowledge of the outer bubble world is impossible, because this implies certain knowledge that such a world in fact exists. Those who don't fantasize separate bubbles are in more unbiased position - they simply accept the given. And the given is only one conscious experience.

If we understand this (and it really requires nothing else but sound thinking) we arrive at the next step of the problem. Assuming that we have overcome the artificially held bubble boundaries, we face the following. Now it is entirely up to us to realize that if there are more things to be revealed within the contents of the one consciousness, we need to do something about it. Anyone who has at least some experience of personal development knows that gradually we become conscious of things which up to that moment were completely non-existent - they were unconscious. If we understand this, and we also understand that there are no bubble limits to the one consciousness, we are left with the question "then are there any limits about what can be experientially known within this one consciousness? If all beings share the same conscious space what can stop me to develop the slumbering forces of my soul and spirit, such that I can perceive something of their perspectives?"

And here we arrive at something very different in nature. Now if someone accuses another that such states of consciousness are impossible, this again is not some hard and given knowledge of reality but simply a projection of the fact that they themselves have no experience of such states. This would be the same as if someone who doesn't understand math is to accuse others, who speak in symbols and numbers, to be liars. If we see this in the right light it will turn out that precisely the accusator is being arrogant. Just because they can't do something they believe that no one can. And as I've said so many times, no one asks for believing. The math people would respond to the accusator "No one is asking you to believe. In fact you can never understand our language if you simply 'believe' in it. You have to make it contents of your thinking and then it will become self-evident content of consciousness." It is similar with higher knowledge. At the moment we comprehend that no one is speaking about 'beyond' world but about nothing else than the one conscious experience, all we need is to think things through. By higher knowledge it is not meant knowledge of beyond and outside of consciousness world but knowledge of conscious phenomena that only become experienceable through certain effort. When we speak about mathematics, science, arts, crafts, etc. everyone agrees that these things take time and effort to be mastered. Each of these disciplines adds something to the personal conscious experience that was non-existent prior to that. Yet when the topic becomes spirituality, suddenly people think that they already possess the perfect spiritual equipment to unveil even the deepest secrets of existence. It doesn't occur to them that there may be a need for some gradual process of unfolding not yet developed inner forces. But this is not that surprising when we take into account the kind of spirituality that is being heavily marketed everywhere today. Spirituality is easy! Just empty your mind and there you are - at the grounds of existence! Sadly, humanity has much more to suffer until it finds out the hard way, the difference between the honest and hard work of spiritual development, and blissful ignorance.

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Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 10:32 am Well... what can I say. Suddenly all talks about nonduality, it's all one consciousness, the one mind at large, etc., etc. all turn out to be nothing but empty words. The whole talk about the (non-)existence of a self turned out to be a game of words. When things truly approach the crux of the matter, somehow everyone becomes surprisingly individual-bubble-preserving. Everyone has their own justifications. Yet if we really look without prejudice at things, we find the bottom line is always to preserve the inviolability of the personal bubble. "Theoretically" all bubbles are part of the one consciousness but as soon as we approach the real, fully conscious experience of this oneness, the bubbles shudder and close themselves even tighter, as clams. One would much better believe that this real experience of oneness is an illusion because it's considered that the one consciousness is actually unconscious and blindly-instinctive on large scale. Or if the one consciousness is admitted to be conscious it is considered so alien and unbridgeable that for all practical purposes the intellectual self remains fully isolated from it (at least until death). This gives comfort to the bubble. Anything is acceptable as long as it keeps the bubble intact.

As I always say, it's not my desire to disturb the comfort of anyone but when there are groundless attack against some truths, the least thing that can be done is to present the balancing facts. The smallest thing that anyone can do is to investigate unbiasedly his inner world and ask "Are there any bubble boundaries? Could there really be any separation between my inner conscious space and those of others unless I imagine this separation through my own thinking? Do I really perceive such separation in the given? Or I add it myself because it suits the way I feel about everything that is not me?"

Let's take this seriously, and study these phenomena of projections and surfaces in a non-judgemental way. Bubble is a day-light phenomenon, matter of visual sense. The everyday meditation of attending enlightened sense bubbles, together with surfaces of touch and sound. Some perspective, and/or gradations of perspectives is involved, and the surfaces of sound and touch are not walls of separation, but how, where and when these sensations happen. They surfaces of sound and touch have their local aspect, which we could call "region", using different word than the bubble aspect of visual daylight meditation in sunlight and other sources of light. We can see light reflecting from our skin, which to sight appears as a kind of bubble, but sensations of hot and cold in various degrees are felt inside a local region, a surface functions as a medium instead of reflection.

As sight has it's own kind of local perspective, we imagine various perspectives to non-visible dark regions of touch and feel, very often some kind of internality inside the dark regions of sound, smell and taste, touch and feel. Giving thought to these relations, there seems to be some kind of force combining various sensations into more or less coherent whole. Maybe the force is what is called 'self-narration', as attention is moving and giving various senses various degrees of attention. As this inquiry and self-narration is now becoming written, attending and perspectives are closely related, but different meditations in their unique ways.

I can't see Cleric etc. daylight, from this perspective imagining and feeling Cleric happens in a dark region. Imagining a visual shape is at best very blurry guesswork with minds eye projecting something vague into a sea of darkness beyond this bubble of daylight. Attention is more directed to reading dark regions of emotions and moods in the medium of languages. Various languages narrate and frame these regions in their different ways.

Pain is located in the various regions of emotion and mood, touch and feel. The actual pain. Memory and caution of pain in various self-narrations. Fear of pain is in the dark regions, and so are most intense sensations of pleasure and all variety between. How we speak of dark and light is often very metaphorical and symbolic, and not allways very coherent with actual sentience. In the dark region of thought, other dark regions as well as the light that imagines geometric forms etc. also in absence of daylight, mix and mingle in very complex ways.

Word 'consciousness' is used in different ways, most closely it seems to be associated with the the light that is able to imagine and mingle with various dark regions. In my language the maxim 'gnothi seauton' is translated: Tunne itsesi.. Translating from Finnish to English, the maxim reads: Feel thyself, instead of the standard English interpretation of Greek term gnosis, "know thyself". Following this translation, in this philosophical investigation we could perhaps take light of consciousness and dark of feel could as equally fundamental aspects of awareness. Coherence of sentience and sapience is another way to express same thought.

In this meditation, dark aspects of feel and sentience can be experienced as well as imagined as continuities. Various perspectives of self-narration processes, such as pain moderation, can mingle with light of imagination and form various forms and degrees of regional and local filters that can increase and decrease the continuous dark relations and flows, as well as solidify some of them to reflecting surfaces of various perspectives. In the continuous processes of self-narration, these dark filters and reflecting surfaces can become mechanized and automated functions, which do their work in the subconscious regions. They are also intergenerational, evolutionary and archetypal deep structures, which consciousness tends to perceive and study symbolically, as the functionality these of these subconscious mechanisms in the dark regions is being constantly revalued and reformed. This holistic process of self-narration seeks to avoid repeating same hurtful mistakes too much, while not to stay captivated by mechanized processes too much.

Dissolving empathy filters and barriers in the dark is a very care-full process, can never be complete in any costume of the spirit, and we can't promise that the process of dissolving and downgrading them doesn't hurt. Even symbolically reliving a traumatic experience can hurt for a short duration, for a longer gain. Various spiritual practices and traditions have been developed to sooth and help the process, they are all self-healing on the ontological level of empathy. Also each local region and it's perspective has power of self-healing, both building and removing spiritual scar tissue.

Many times "mind bubbles" are formed in our collaborative investigations as first tentative care-full touches with some structures in the dark regions of feel and sentience, questioning whether the energy stored in them is becoming ready to release.