Philosophy Now Forum

Dontaskme wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 7:46 pm

Atla wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 7:30 pm
Rarely there are counterexamples too, for example UG Krishnamurti, for whom awakening was a rather devastating experience.

He called it a calamity. I couldn't agree more.

It's beyond cruel, no intelligent force would have intended it. Rather, and this is just my opinion, not fact, it should never have happened.

That it did, is what we must endure now for all eternity. And endurance is all we can endure, and we do.

Once we see it, we can't unsee it, huh.

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 7:04 pm

Atla wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 5:35 pm

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 1:51 pm but it seems, especially with dontaskme, like you KNOW what is really going on.

Two nondualists may disagree about a lot of things, but this issue we all agree on.

From what I've seen, it's more common for women than for men (but still very rare), to go out into nature, far removed from everyday civilized life, just walk around in nature, and then have a spontaneous nondual awakening (spontaneous ego-death). Where you suddenly realize/remember that you ARE nature.

But this isn't really connected to any specific place, so it's actually off-topic.

Maia wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 5:56 pm
I think you're probably right about that. A lot more women than men seem to be attracted to Pagan paths such as Wicca, for example, including myself, though I found it a bit too structured and ritualised, and soon left to do my own thing.

A lot of modern mindfulness (and perhaps I could drop the word modern there) is about chasing this feeling, internalising it, and for some, making it permanent. That feeling of non dualistic unity with everything. That's been on my mind a lot this year.

Is it really possible, or even desirable, I wonder, to have this feeling constantly, all the time?

Dontaskme wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 5:06 pm There is nothing sacred or spiritual or divine about any of this except as conceptual empty storytelling, all very fleeting and temporal with about as much reality as a mirage is to the observer of a mirage, or a dream is within the dreamer.

Well, then 'divine' is just one of many mirages, but you seem bothered more by ideas related to God or the sacred or divine. But when you respond it seems all labels, words, categories, 'persons'....it's all just a mirage.

But some mirages are worse, it seems, given the focus and reactions.

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 8:30 pm

Dontaskme wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 5:06 pm There is nothing sacred or spiritual or divine about any of this except as conceptual empty storytelling, all very fleeting and temporal with about as much reality as a mirage is to the observer of a mirage, or a dream is within the dreamer.

Well, then 'divine' is just one of many mirages, but you seem bothered more by ideas related to God or the sacred or divine. But when you respond it seems all labels, words, categories, 'persons'....it's all just a mirage.

But some mirages are worse, it seems, given the focus and reactions.

Ok if you really want to know..I'm bothered by the whole enchilada, ok.

I would rather none of this mirage was happening, but it is, and there is nothing I can do about it.

Atla wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 7:59 pm
Once we see it, we can't unsee it, huh.

So it is.

That which is just apparently happening, cannot not be happening, nor unhappen.

No more than spilt milk can put itself back in the milkbottle. Or sperm cannot put itself back in the penis.

Seems like an awful lot of pain for just a moment of pleasure.

Dontaskme wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 8:35 pm Ok if you really want to know..I'm bothered by the whole enchilada, ok.

I certainly can understand that reaction.

I would rather none of this mirage was happening, but it is, and there is nothing I can do about it.

How do you know that?

Is that where the anger comes in, if it is anger, when people talk about God or the sacred, etc? That it's some kind of false hope and so it is cruel?

Harbal wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 5:09 pm I thought DAMs post (Yes, there is the experience of feeling goosebumps at nature. It's your own nature, not some other thing called divinity beyond you.) was a succinct way of putting my own view into words, and that is why I said it was well put, but I didn't mean to imply that my view is any more than an opinion, or any more valid than Maia's view..

OK.

So, just to be clear, I am not making an assertion, I'm just expressing an opinion. I would actually find it very interesting if places did turn out to have an actual mystical essence to them, rather than just a perceived one.

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 8:42 pm

How do you know that?

I don't.

I is known, but not by I because I is a concept, and concepts know nothing.

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 8:42 pmIs that where the anger comes in, if it is anger, when people talk about God or the sacred, etc? That it's some kind of false hope and so it is cruel?

Anger just arises as does everything else, from nothing. Opinions that life is cruel or is divine bliss arises from nothing. And this nothing is happening, and cannot not happen or unhappen. And there is nothing anything can do about it. For one very good reason, things have no existence apart from the knowing which is unknowable.

And by the way Iwannaplato, if you, I'm only assuming, if you love living life, then jolly good for you, but it's not for all of us.

Maia wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 5:43 pm

iambiguous wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 5:25 pm

Maia wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 6:23 am

I find it difficult to understand how anyone could not experience such numinous feelings with regard to nature, but that's just me, of course. And yes, the power of nature is awesome, and can indeed be frightening. This in no way detracts from its power.

Yes, I understand this. And I certainly have no doubt that your own experiences are powerful indeed. But each of us have lived and do live and will live different lives. So, our interactions with nature will be different. You have been able to acquire a "spiritual Self" through nature that allows you to anchor this Self to something that is far bigger than your own individual existence.

And I had accomplished this as well. First through God, then through ideology. Now, however, in a No God world it seems reasonable to eschew what I construe to be moral and political and spiritual objectivism. Instead, I am now considerably more "fractured and fragmented". And for all of the reasons I have attempted to explain to you and others.

All I can really do is to come back over and over again to just how many like you are "out there":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies

And to speculate that what they all share in common is what I call the "psychology of objectivism". The need to anchor their Self to a frame of mind that comforts and consoles them in what I construe to be an essentially meaningless and purpose existence that ends for each of us one by one in oblivion.

And then hope that perhaps someone might be able to nudge me in a direction that allows me to scramble up out of the hole I have dug my "self" down into. Philosophically, spiritually and otherwise.

I suspect that the spiritual experience itself is basic to all of us. The religious interpretations that people put on it, however, are products of human thought, and we all know how that can turn out. Personally, I try my best to strip away all such interpretation, though I'm not saying I'm completely successful in that.

It may well be basic but how it is manifested is, in my view, existential. And then the part where communication breaks down over and over again in regard to moral and political convictions. Someone may "just know" this is true spiritually about a particular set of behaviors while another "just knows" that it is not true spiritually.

And we will just have to agree to disagree regarding the role that dasein plays in all of this. The part where you agree that given new experiences, new relationships, and access to new information and knowledge you may change your mind about something. But only up to that crucial point...the part where your deep down inside spiritual Self makes the ultimate judgment. Something now completely alien to me.

Though even here this depends on the extent to which I understand your own frame of mind. Which, of course, takes me back to the no-getting-around-it fact that you and I have lived very different lives. So, really, what can we actually grasp about such complex assessments like these. I'm fractured and fragmented, you're not. In fact, I'm not even close to being on solid ground regarding my own sense of reality here.

iambiguous wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 8:53 pm

Maia wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 5:43 pm

iambiguous wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 5:25 pm

Yes, I understand this. And I certainly have no doubt that your own experiences are powerful indeed. But each of us have lived and do live and will live different lives. So, our interactions with nature will be different. You have been able to acquire a "spiritual Self" through nature that allows you to anchor this Self to something that is far bigger than your own individual existence.

And I had accomplished this as well. First through God, then through ideology. Now, however, in a No God world it seems reasonable to eschew what I construe to be moral and political and spiritual objectivism. Instead, I am now considerably more "fractured and fragmented". And for all of the reasons I have attempted to explain to you and others.

All I can really do is to come back over and over again to just how many like you are "out there":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies

And to speculate that what they all share in common is what I call the "psychology of objectivism". The need to anchor their Self to a frame of mind that comforts and consoles them in what I construe to be an essentially meaningless and purpose existence that ends for each of us one by one in oblivion.

And then hope that perhaps someone might be able to nudge me in a direction that allows me to scramble up out of the hole I have dug my "self" down into. Philosophically, spiritually and otherwise.

I suspect that the spiritual experience itself is basic to all of us. The religious interpretations that people put on it, however, are products of human thought, and we all know how that can turn out. Personally, I try my best to strip away all such interpretation, though I'm not saying I'm completely successful in that.

It may well be basic but how it is manifested is, in my view, existential. And then the part where communication breaks down over and over again in regard to moral and political convictions. Someone may "just know" this is true spiritually about a particular set of behaviors while another "just knows" that it is not true spiritually.

And we will just have to agree to disagree regarding the role that dasein plays in all of this. The part where you agree that given new experiences, new relationships, and access to new information and knowledge you may change your mind about something. But only up to that crucial point...the part where your deep down inside spiritual Self makes the ultimate judgment. Something now completely alien to me.

Though even here this depends on the extent to which I understand your own frame of mind. Which, of course, takes me back to the no-getting-around-it fact that you and I have lived very different lives. So, really, what can we actually grasp about such complex assessments like these. I'm fractured and fragmented, you're not. In fact, I'm not even close to being on solid ground regarding my own sense of reality here.

I only know what I experience. I don't try and subject it to any sort of religious interpretation. I'm always more inclined to try and find a physical cause, in fact, hence my speculations about electro-magnetism. But this in no way detracts from the numinous or spiritual significance of the experience, because I don't think such things are separate from the physical world anyway, but rather, a natural part of it.

Dontaskme wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 8:47 pm And by the way Iwannaplato, if you, I'm only assuming, if you love living life, then jolly good for you, but it's not for all of us.

My reactions to life vary widely. My point was neither 'I love life' nor 'you should love life'. I was looking at what might be a pattern where some people's interpretations get dismissed without qualitification with declarations of certainty that they are wrong. There is no God, nothing out their numinous, period. More or less, you're just fantisizing. Other beliefs are also fantasies, but it seemed like certain fantasies draw your ire in ways others do not. When I responded to this, most of your responses were general. They would see most of what every realist here, including Harbal for example, believes as being mere fantasy.

But only certain assertions find themselves, in the interpersonal dyanmic, on the recieving end of your metaphysical denial.

I get it. If I talk to you I will get, nearly all the time, a response as if I am talking to CONSCIOUSNESS or NONDUALISM not a person.

It's just this CONSCIOUSNESS seems angry about certain things and not others, and appears in specific dynamics. It doesn't react to all sorts of non-dual assertions. IOW, it still, amidst all the metaphysical talk and the extreme abstraction and generalities, seems to be a person. And then other people here also seem to me like people.

Someone asserts X and this voice of consciousness appears and says things like...

The cause of any feeling is the awareness of feeling. It's a form of desire to want more of the feeling by association. But in reality, there is nothing behind the feeling, the addiction to feeling, is as heady as any pleasurable sensation, but it's a desire for something very temporal and fleeting, nothing much to hold on to, much like chasing the wind, nothing more, nothing less

Your first post in the thread. A person telling another person.
That's just your desire. It's not real. You're addicted to feeling. You're wasting your time.
I know what you are experiencing, really, and it's not what you think. In fact, it's a futile enterprise.

You may think because you word it in non-dual ways, it's really something different.

And we could go back and forth and neither reach the other. For you the non-dual understanding is THE understanding and persons are mere hallucinations. For me the non-dual understanding and the sense that there are people are both true and don't exclude each other.

Harbal expresses his sense that it is likely that X is what is happening.
You tells someone, nah, you're addicted to the pleasure of this fleeting experience and it's not what you think, period.

Non-dual consciousness expressing itself that way seems not to understand those portions of reality it is talking to or it would change it's tone and approach.

The cause of any feeling is the awareness of feeling. It's a form of desire to want more of the feeling by association. But in reality, there is nothing behind the feeling, the addiction to feeling, is as heady as any pleasurable sensation, but it's a desire for something very temporal and fleeting, nothing much to hold on to, much like chasing the wind, nothing more, nothing less

Your first post in the thread. A person telling another person.
That's just your desire. It's not real. You're addicted to feeling. You're wasting your time.
I know what you are experiencing, really, and it's not what you think. In fact, it's a futile enterprise.

Is this really voice coming from a spiritual awakening? A deep insight into what's 'really' going on that seems not to understand other people. Life is fucking hard. Is that reaction leading to easing that hardness or is it adding to the hardness?

I'll bow out of this interaction here. We used to get into some real tos and fros, but I'm content to say my piece and move on. I know reacting to you as if you are a specific person and that person is real, doesn't really fit with your beliefs (nor does this sentence), but then that's all part of the non-dual reality anyway, either way

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Fri Jun 09, 2023 6:18 am
I'll bow out of this interaction here.

Good idea. The map is not the territory.

See you in boundlessness. The only place where you and I happen.

Nondualists who don't come back and rebuild some of the ego, are crazy imo. Or they have some major issues going on, that prevent them from doing so.

(Or they lack the natural self-awareness that most humans seem to possess. I think I've seen this once too.)

Nonduality is the ultimate truth anyway. It's pointing to the understanding that there is no truth. It's pointing to the understanding that there is nothing to understand,It's pointing to the mystery that is this immediate unknowing.
Nondualists simply surrender to this unknowing, that's all. They make no claim, nor desire fame, nor do they blame.

Time for a Nondual quote...

“Treating everything as a dream liberates. As long as you give reality to dreams, you are their slave.”
–Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Meanwhile, life goes on, same as it ever was, chop wood, carry water, eat when hungry, sleep when tired, fuck when horny, and the grass grows all by itself.

Atla wrote: ↑Fri Jun 09, 2023 1:41 pm Nondualists who don't come back and rebuild some of the ego, are crazy imo.

Speaking from personal experience, nondualists come back, it's not like there is any choice when it comes to partipating in life. Life forms are restrained and encapsulated by life, there is no escape.
Where-ever you go, there you are. Where ego - I go.

People come back, but not in the way 'other's' might think they do.

“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”