lorenzop wrote: ↑Fri Jun 24, 2022 3:58 am
If you mean this question . . .
"In this sense, I can ask you the counter-question: what gives you the confidence that we can safely focus on our present state and see it as inconsequential for anything that happens in the world? I know that this is a highly convenient view to hold but what is it from our practical experience which suggests, which gives us the clear understanding, that we can safely ignore everything that pertains to Time, and imagine that we attain to the highest Truth when we live in the current frame without any consciousness of the temporal landscape of which the frame is an organic part?"
. . . it's pretty much goggeldygook. If the goal is freedom from suffering and wheel of life\death, then there is nothing lacking in any given present moment. If the goal is a winning lottery ticket, then ya, maybe mastering Time would be a good strategy.
Lorenzo,
I have really applied myself to try to see what’s written here from the perspective of the one who has written your words (I cannot say ‘from your perspective’ because I have no idea if I nailed it or not, which will actually be my question in a minute). I am always amazed how, coming from different perspectives, the same reasoning, expressed in a series of sentences, can be made sense of in 1001 different ways. That's why I am curious to find out.
So you say ‘typically’. When you say typically, what are these typically occurring facts, what are these typical facts, what are these types you refer to? You are bringing some sort of variety of types in the reasoning, aren’t you? Do you mean typically, in the various sacred texts and traditions that tackle reincarnation? Or, typically, for the typical individual who goes through that cycle, or which other variety of types?
This ‘typically’ suggests me (but am I right?) that the implicit perspective you are standing in here, when you look at the process of reincarnation, and in this thread, is the perspective of this or that individual. Could be your own, or the perspective of one of the various characters in the Upanishads, etc. So my guess is, you are reading here from the eyes of one of them, either your own eyes, or the eyes of any other individualized being. Is this the case?
If it is, I would think, that’s why you feel that ‘what you are proposing sounds eerily like this type of pursuit, ie, 'I want more success in this and future mind\bodies'.
Also, you look interested in understanding why the proposition here ‘sounds’ like a pursuit of more cattle. When you say ‘sounds’ I understand that you acknowledge that the proposition might mean something else in good faith, however from your end, that’s how it ‘sounds’. You are signaling the sound of it at your receiver’s end, and at the same time you are signaling that you are aware that in the way the proposition was intended, it might very well contain something else. This something else might very well have a very different sound, even if that’s not how it makes its way to your ear for now. Is this correct? (sorry if this goes all too slowly, I am just more afraid to misrepresent you than to bore you)
In case the previous is correct, may I suggest a test. Tedious, but maybe interesting. I have just tried it myself, to be sure what I am recommending. Would you read again the whole post (Clerics), and this time, when making sense of every sentence, like literally every sentence, one by one, would you apply yourself to see if there’s another way to look at the intended meaning of the sentence, that doesn’t flow out from the perspective of the typical individual?
This is really tedious, I know, because it’s probably not going to flow as we usually want a reading to flow. It’s the same with the body. I teach strength classes in my spare time and maybe you know what I'm talking about. When we are used to performing a certain physical exercise in a certain form, mobilizing certain muscles in certain directions, and even if we are doing it wrong, the movement flows, somehow, especially if it's in music. But in order to get stronger safely we have to learn how to step out of the wrong mode. So we apply ourselves to go through the same exercise again, but from a different perspective, trying to slide our muscles in movement into a different functionality or logic, trying to get in touch with the new flow we're getting at through this other technique. So tedious, I can tell you. But also so worth it...
For instance, when reading here from that post: ‘It's about getting a feeling how the past grows into the present and how the present seeds the future.’, how does it feel, reading this sentence, to step in and out the perspective of the typical individual? Would you be willing to read this from that perspective, and then read it again, but from the impersonal perspective of the past itself, which grows into the future. How does it change your look at the described process? Has the past any profits to gain form the process? What would these be?
And when you do this same tedious test on the whole post, how is this going to change the comments that you will be interested in sharing?
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