We already had this discussion, Lou. I am familiar with that kind of experiment.
The egoic thought "let's opt out of egoic thought" is like... I'll let you decide what it may be like.
I'm not trying to opt out of egoic thought. For sure, I'm full of it. But, as my energy is waning, I do seek to lessen my attachments to it. When I do, it feels quite liberating. I like to say, "I feel SUPER... sometimes." It's not a bowl of cherries and I do seek to avoid making it more difficult than it needs to be. In my present context, "live and learn" takes on new meanings.
I was not referring that to you personally, Lou, but to the no-self mouvement you seemed to refer to.
Vedanta is not my path but I surely acknowledge it as a major spiritual practice. Same for Zen Buddhism. The Glories of the Ever-giving Divinity are immense. VIVA the Great Diversity.
Be calm - Be clear - See the faults - See the suffering - Give your love
lorenzop wrote: ↑Mon Jan 22, 2024 5:23 pm
Re the secular language in your example - any verbiage I don't initially grasp or know, I can lookup (Google) and learn. For example, I can Google "Sun's Hill sphere" from your example above.
Re Ss, looking up Ss verbiage, Google\ChatGPT and etc., simply describe Ss verbiage as belonging to certain occult beliefs . . . Google is just as baffled as I am : ) - - - believe me I've tried to look up many of the phrases you and Cleric use.
I'm currently thinking that for a person to understand Ss (PoF), they first must have a gut feeling of acceptance for it. To me it makes no sense intellectually or intuitively.
Alright, thanks. This is helpful for my understanding. People want everything to be Googleable or Chat GPTeable (what did people do before search engines and GPT, I wonder?).
Can you give a concrete example of a phrase you read here, looked up, and simply couldn't understand intellectually or intuitively? I know we have been over a few, like "world content". Is that still a complete mystery for you? Let's also try something new, for ex., take one from this essay. Or since you mentioned PoF, you could take a phrase from there.
"Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an 'I'"
lorenzop wrote: ↑Mon Jan 22, 2024 5:23 pm
Re the secular language in your example - any verbiage I don't initially grasp or know, I can lookup (Google) and learn. For example, I can Google "Sun's Hill sphere" from your example above.
Re Ss, looking up Ss verbiage, Google\ChatGPT and etc., simply describe Ss verbiage as belonging to certain occult beliefs . . . Google is just as baffled as I am : ) - - - believe me I've tried to look up many of the phrases you and Cleric use.
I'm currently thinking that for a person to understand Ss (PoF), they first must have a gut feeling of acceptance for it. To me it makes no sense intellectually or intuitively.
Alright, thanks. This is helpful for my understanding. People want everything to be Googleable or Chat GPTeable (what did people do before search engines and GPT, I wonder?).
Can you give a concrete example of a phrase you read here, looked up, and simply couldn't understand intellectually or intuitively? I know we have been over a few, like "world content". Is that still a complete mystery for you? Let's also try something new, for ex., take one from this essay. Or since you mentioned PoF, you could take a phrase from there.
That particular essay by Cleric was largely readable for me . . . but certainly phrases like:
World Content
Meaning
are still puzzling. How is the phrase 'World Content' employed differently than simply using 'Reality'?
And world as Meaning is still odd . . . I see meaning as a product of the mind and not embedded in Reality. I did offer Cleric a concession - where world as meaning is a knowing. IE Satchidananda . . . being present and a knowingness . . .
lorenzop wrote: ↑Mon Jan 22, 2024 5:23 pm
Re the secular language in your example - any verbiage I don't initially grasp or know, I can lookup (Google) and learn. For example, I can Google "Sun's Hill sphere" from your example above.
Re Ss, looking up Ss verbiage, Google\ChatGPT and etc., simply describe Ss verbiage as belonging to certain occult beliefs . . . Google is just as baffled as I am : ) - - - believe me I've tried to look up many of the phrases you and Cleric use.
I'm currently thinking that for a person to understand Ss (PoF), they first must have a gut feeling of acceptance for it. To me it makes no sense intellectually or intuitively.
Alright, thanks. This is helpful for my understanding. People want everything to be Googleable or Chat GPTeable (what did people do before search engines and GPT, I wonder?).
Can you give a concrete example of a phrase you read here, looked up, and simply couldn't understand intellectually or intuitively? I know we have been over a few, like "world content". Is that still a complete mystery for you? Let's also try something new, for ex., take one from this essay. Or since you mentioned PoF, you could take a phrase from there.
That particular essay by Cleric was largely readable for me . . . but certainly phrases like:
World Content
Meaning
are still puzzling. How is the phrase 'World Content' employed differently than simply using 'Reality'?
And world as Meaning is still odd . . . I see meaning as a product of the mind and not embedded in Reality. I did offer Cleric a concession - where world as meaning is a knowing. IE Satchidananda . . . being present and a knowingness . . .
I can go and find other phrases . . .
I don't get it, Lorenzo. You said the essay was readable, by which I presume you mean understandable. But then you write the bold. So is it that you understood the essay but completely disagree that it is a reliable testimony of our first-person experience? Or somehow our first-person experience has nothing to do with "Reality"? There was a whole section dedicated to the topic of "meaning":
Besides the totality of perceptual phenomena, there’s another aspect of our conscious experience which is much more elusive. Here elusive doesn’t mean that we’re barely conscious of it. In fact, we’re very clearly conscious of it all the time but it’s simply that in the normal course of our life we don’t try to make it an object of our investigation. What we’re talking about can be called in the most general sense: meaning.
The difficulty with meaning is that we can’t find it as something concrete within our field of perceptions. Instead, it is the knowing aspect of our conscious experience. And even thus stated it is already misleading because as soon as we say that meaning is something, habitually we try to find that something in our perceptual world. In reality there’s nothing difficult in grasping the knowing dimension of our conscious experience, it is only that in our day and culture it is almost a cognitive reflex to seek answers of the ‘what is’ question as some perceptual configuration. For this reason we’ll have to only gradually approach this aspect. It will be useful if the reader keeps in mind that we’re not so much trying to explain what meaning and knowing are but rather to unlearn this tic-like reflex which continually catapults us towards the elements of our perceptual field, where we can never find meaning as some thing.
One approach is to consider a word, for example ‘dog’. This isn’t simply an arrangement of letters or phonemes but evokes in us certain idea – that of the animal ‘dog’. Now let’s look at the same word in different languages – perro, Hund, cane, собака and so on. We can try to focus on each of these words. We can focus either on the written words (visual perception) or their sounds. We can also take a sketch or photo of a dog. All these perceptions are very different, yet there’s something common in all cases. It is precisely this meaning, the idea of the animal dog, which elucidates the different perceptions with common knowing experience. This already tells us that we can’t find the knowing aspect of our experience as some concrete perception ‘in front of us’. We can order the words and pictures of a dog side by side but the meaning can’t be found as yet another perception that can be added to the sequence. Instead, it is the imperceptible but known experience of our conscious life which invisibly but undoubtedly unites different phenomena in meaningfully distinguishable unities. In our conscious experience there’s some unifying, we may say – invisibly known quality, – which makes all the words, pictures, memories of a dog, to be indeed felt as belonging together. Normally we can recognize this common meaningful quality and can call it a concept.
The meaning (concept) associated with the various objects of our perception – like dog, table, house, joy, pain, etc. – still feels somewhat attached to the perceptions. One can say that these concepts become recognizable only when we think about the unifying quality of different perceptions, thus it is customary for man of today to consider that concepts exist only in the mind. But we can see that the meaningful dimension of our existence is much more pervading than we usually recognize.
"Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an 'I'"
Lou Gold wrote: ↑Mon Jan 22, 2024 4:28 pm
I'm not trying to opt out of egoic thought. For sure, I'm full of it. But, as my energy is waning, I do seek to lessen my attachments to it. When I do, it feels quite liberating. I like to say, "I feel SUPER... sometimes." It's not a bowl of cherries and I do seek to avoid making it more difficult than it needs to be. In my present context, "live and learn" takes on new meanings.
Lou, here's an image to contemplate:
Let me add few words (the image was generated with bing). Imagine how with our flesh we're part of the living fabric of the Earth. All processes are like living growth phenomena. Thoughts are like flowers that blossom here and there. From that viewpoint, the ego is like a ring of flowers that have conspired to follow certain growth patterns. In that sense the ego has simply lost awareness of its true roots - the manifold growth process of the Earth being.
It's interesting to me whether you resonate with such an imagination?
Lou Gold wrote: ↑Mon Jan 22, 2024 4:28 pm
I'm not trying to opt out of egoic thought. For sure, I'm full of it. But, as my energy is waning, I do seek to lessen my attachments to it. When I do, it feels quite liberating. I like to say, "I feel SUPER... sometimes." It's not a bowl of cherries and I do seek to avoid making it more difficult than it needs to be. In my present context, "live and learn" takes on new meanings.
Lou, here's an image to contemplate:
Let me add few words (the image was generated with bing). Imagine how with our flesh we're part of the living fabric of the Earth. All processes are like living growth phenomena. Thoughts are like flowers that blossom here and there. From that viewpoint, the ego is like a ring of flowers that have conspired to follow certain growth patterns. In that sense the ego has simply lost awareness of its true roots - the manifold growth process of the Earth being.
It's interesting to me whether you resonate with such an imagination?
I don't see the flowers as separate but as you say, "part of the earth being." I don't resonate deeply with the image. It feels superficial, part of nature in a mechanical way. I sense it as a machine representation of a living imagination but not in a deeply evocative way.
Be calm - Be clear - See the faults - See the suffering - Give your love
Lou Gold wrote: ↑Tue Jan 23, 2024 1:13 pm
I don't see the flowers as separate but as you say, "part of the earth being." I don't resonate deeply with the image. It feels superficial, part of nature in a mechanical way. I sense it as a machine representation of a living imagination but not in a deeply evocative way.
The image is not that important, I just used it because it was faster for me. I'm just trying to understand your perspective. Whether you experience thoughts as spiritual flowers that pop into existence as part of the living process of the Earth being. And if this is the case, how do you understand the ego? What is it in relation to the Earth-process?
