Who we are..

[Wizard of Whatever]

The witness part of the Self observes, the more inner part of the Self experiences. Thus they are both part of the same Self.

 

[RainbowSingularity]

i feel, i act, i think
i think, i act, i feel
i act, i feel, i think

 

[davewhite04]

2 questions.

1: Is my sense of who I am (when I am aware of it) the same as another person's sense of who they are?(ie is it a basic shared function of simply being alive?)

2:Is this sense of who we are (when we are aware of it) actually the same as who we actually are?(ie is who we are a direct function of who we think we are and are our delusions about how we perceive of ourselves "real" even if deluded**?)

**it would be my personal assumption that our self perceptions are probably shot through with delusions ,that hopefully we can try to "float above" or ignore.

My view is that who you are mostly dies off human wise, but the soul(who you really are) learns something from geordief or maybe nothing when the human body dies.

Who we are?

Theist: eternal being, is who you are.
Atheist: shared function of simply being alive.

I'm always aware of who I am. It's not intermittent.

 

[RainbowSingularity]

My view is that who you are mostly dies off human wise, but the soul(who you really are) learns something from geordief or maybe nothing when the human body dies.

Who we are?

Theist: eternal being, is who you are.
Atheist: shared function of simply being alive.

I'm always aware of who I am. It's not intermittent.

How can you truly know who you are until you have challenged your awareness and self ?

 

[Olga]

I feel there is that commonality. Consciousness floating free of memories and thoughts, as happens in meditation. A more generic awareness, free of worldly attachments and preoccupation, sometimes referred to as the Buddha nature.

Вы умеете медитировать, Теват? Отстраняться от самого себя? Тело отдельно, душа отдельно?

 

[Olga]

Just in terms of an abstraction hanging together well, I have less problem with generic subjectivity or a ubiquitous "witness" or a literal God's eye view (etc) when it's depicted purely as grand manifestation with no meanings and significances whatsoever attached to it. Lacking not only judgments but anything to do with cognition (identification and understanding). But that may be a rare occurrence, if it ever happens at all in literature and lectures.

There always seems to be a suggestion of a degree of intellectual apprehension lingering, even after supposedly eliminating reason, concepts, language, self, etc. The latter is dependent upon information storage and actively utilizing that to make make distinctions and establish connections between phenomenal events.

Of course, at a specific or individual level an "overarching manifestation" of existence (or whatever) would contain these thoughts of memory-based entities like humans who would be representing, classifying, and comprehending the world in various ways (because that falls out of the intricate structure of their brains). But a "panphenomanal whole" itself would be missing a corresponding cause for such cognition, like that. And there's no reason why it should be "intelligent", since the latter entails limited organisms struggling to get past the representations of their brains and grasp "what's going on" as it really is. (Even if the latter were -- ultimately, just the unity of all private manifestations -- from visual to tactile, and many alien modes unknown to humankind.)

In contrast, for strict materialism (where matter is normally non-conscious and thereby devoid of appearances) death is a return to what the universe normally is to itself: the absence of everything -- no representations and manifestations. And those products of brains also lack any "cosmic" overarching unity with each other, and there is no entertaining of Russellian monism (where most matter activity might harbor primitive internal states -- not just the complex ones of neural processes).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

What Is the Difference Between the Self and the Witness?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...e-difference-between-the-self-and-the-witness

KEY POINTS: There is a difference between witness consciousness and the self. Witness consciousness refers to the process of cultivating "pure awareness" without judgment of good or bad. The self grips the world and motivates you to act in service of your interests. Buddhism has long clarified the difference; modern psychology needs to be more explicit about it.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

David Darling (Zen Physics): Living in a world of words and concepts and inherited beliefs, says Zen, we have lost the power to grasp reality directly. Our minds are permeated with notions of cause and effect, subject and object, being and nonbeing, life and death. Inevitably this leads to conflict and a feeling of personal detachment and alienation from the world. Zen's whole emphasis is on the experience of reality as it is, rather than the solution of problems that, in the end, arise merely from our mistaken beliefs.

Because it eschews the use of the intellect, Zen can appear nihilistic (which it is not) and elusive (which it is). Certainly, it would be hard to conceive of a system that stood in greater contrast with the logical, symbol-based formulations of contemporary science. More than any other product of the Oriental mind, Zen is convinced that no language or symbolic mapping of the world can come close to expressing the ultimate truth.

... Zen differs from other meditative forms, including other schools of Buddhism, in that it does not start from where we are and gradually lead us to a clear view of the true way of the world. The sole purpose of studying Zen is to have Zen experiences — sudden moments, like flashes of lightning, when the intellect is short-circuited and there is no longer a barrier between the experiencer and reality. Sometimes its methods can seem bizarre and even startling. To catch the flavor, if a Zen master found you reading this book he might grab it from you and hit you over the head with it, saying: “Here’s something else for you to think about!” Such shock tactics, however, are intended not to offend but rather to wake us up from our normal symbol-bound frame of mind.
_

Ну, т.е. вернуться в растительное состояние. Никаких символов, никакого мышления, просто существование. Ни больно, ни хорошо, ни плохо... вообще никак. Обратная эволюция.

 

[TheVat]

Do you know how to meditate, Tevat? To distance yourself from yourself? Body separately, soul separately?

I do meditate, but it's different - more Zen, which does not separate body and soul. The distance is rather between consciousness and thoughts/desires. (I'm not good at meditation because I don't do it often enough)

 

[Olga]

I do meditate, but it's different - more Zen, which does not separate body and soul. The distance is rather between consciousness and thoughts/desires. (I'm not good at meditation because I don't do it often enough)

Даже те, кто этому всю жизнь посвящает, живя в монастырях, они тоже мало кто умеют.

 

[DaveC426913]

Even those who devote their entire lives to this, living in monasteries, few of them know how to do it.

How exactly does one determine whether or not someone else "knows how to do it"?
What is the criteria for success or failure? How do you determine if they've met it or not?

 

[parmalee]

How exactly does one determine whether or not someone else "knows how to do it"?
What is the criteria for success or failure? How do you determine if they've met it or not?

Successful meditation is objectively determined via measurement of theta wave activity. (Kidding, sort of.)

 

[DaveC426913]

Successful meditation is objectively determined via measurement of theta wave activity. (Kidding, sort of.)

I had no idea that Olga had access to the theta wave readouts from a large sample of monasteries...

 

[Olga]

How exactly does one determine whether or not someone else "knows how to do it"?
What is the criteria for success or failure? How do you determine if they've met it or not?

Мне было лет 16-17, когда я познакомилась с одним человеком, который изучал эти практики напрямую у специалистов в этой области. Я тоже с немного с ними общалась. Там мало просто изучать, нужно ещё и способности определённые иметь. Можете проверить легко: попробуйте расслабиться, и пусть вас кто-нибудь уколет или ущипнёт. Если вы действительно отделили сознание, вам будет всё равно, как будто вы со стороны увидели, как ваше тело укололи. Это очень неприятное ощущение, кстати - абстрагирование. Может, поэтому многие и не умеют.

 

[Olga]

I had no idea that Olga had access to the theta wave readouts from a large sample of monasteries...

На днях передачу смотрела с внучкой Бехтеревой. Она рассказывала, что её отец, который тоже возглавлял институт изучения мозга, сейчас находится в буддистском монастыре, изучает там сознание.

 

[parmalee]

You can check it easily: try to relax, and let someone prick or pinch you. If you really separated your consciousness, you will not care, as if you saw from the outside how your body was pricked. This is a very unpleasant sensation, by the way - abstraction. Maybe that is why many do not know how.

Not to sound glib, but this may also be indicative of an epileptic seizure in the form of an OBE--not uncommon amongst those with* temporal lobe epilepsy. That does in no sense invalidate the experience, but it may well explain the underlying cause of the experience.

* Even this, as far as making objective determinations go, is not necessarily easily or definitively established. The "measurements", via EEG, have to be taken either during or within a reasonable window of time prior to or following the seizure. Unless one is "lucky" and prone to seizing so often that some form of epileptogenic activity is indicated pretty much any and every time one is hooked up to the EEG machinery.

 

[Olga]

Not to sound glib, but this may also be indicative of an epileptic seizure in the form of an OBE--not uncommon amongst those with* temporal lobe epilepsy. That does in no sense invalidate the experience, but it may well explain the underlying cause of the experience.

* Even this, as far as making objective determinations go, is not necessarily easily or definitively established. The "measurements", via EEG, have to be taken either during or within a reasonable window of time prior to or following the seizure. Unless one is "lucky" and prone to seizing so often that some form of epileptogenic activity is indicated pretty much any and every time one is hooked up to the EEG machinery.

Вряд ли это похоже на эпилепсию. Я видела несколько раз эпилептические припадки у людей на улице. Они совсем другие. Это больше похоже на некий самогипноз, что ли. Вот от этого и идут все представления о душе, я думаю. При критических для организма состояниях, например при клинической смерти, люди тоже могут видеть всё как бы со стороны.

 

[C C]

How exactly does one determine whether or not someone else "knows how to do it"? What is the criteria for success or failure? How do you determine if they've met it or not?

A big question is how one could remember[1] what transpired (or didn't) during meditation, if discriminating thoughts were successfully suspended during it. Even noting that one entered a "blank state" would still be cognizing that a blank state was present, in contrast to, say, a person who claims that they never dream (i.e., there's just missing time between going to sleep and waking up, rather than an exhibition of nothing slash silence slash absence of feeling).

I guess it boils down to there being many trenchant types of meditation that address subduing a specific area of categorizing or awareness. Rather than necessarily accomplishing a wholesale missing of the self apparatus and all of its sub-functions. "There remains no definition of necessary and sufficient criteria for meditation that has achieved widespread acceptance within the modern scientific community. [...] individual teachers may teach distinct types of meditation."

- - - footnote - - -

[1] Information storage seems to need discernment beforehand. The reason for infantile amnesia might be that there is no language-based conceptualization of sensory events taking place at that age. Or, if there is some kind of memory indexing going on that is instead based on emotions or whatever, it is too foreign and alien for later language regulated understanding to access and apprehend it.
_

 

[parmalee]

It hardly looks like epilepsy. I have seen epileptic seizures in people on the street several times. They are completely different. It looks more like some kind of self-hypnosis, or something. This is where all ideas about the soul come from, I think. In critical conditions for the body, for example, during clinical death, people can also see everything as if from the outside.

Conversely, it looks exactly like epilepsy--and this is coming from a person who can't tell you how many seizures they've had in the past month and at least a half dozen or so neurologists and epileptologists I've known over the decades.

 

[Olga]

Conversely, it looks exactly like epilepsy--and this is coming from a person who can't tell you how many seizures they've had in the past month and at least a half dozen or so neurologists and epileptologists I've known over the decades.

Эпилепсия происходит у вас спонтанно, вне зависимости от вашей воли, а тут люди добровольно сами вводят себя в определённые состояния. И помнят всё происходящее до мелочей.

 

[parmalee]

Epilepsy happens to you spontaneously, regardless of your will, but here people voluntarily put themselves into certain states. And they remember everything that happens down to the smallest detail.

And? So what?

Perhaps you need to review your Dostoevsky--particularly his more autobiographical writings and especially the words of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot:

The unforgettable Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (1868) arrives unannounced as a Christ-like figure, compared by some to Don Quixote. This was Dostoevsky’s most personal novel, based on several real-life events and, most notably, his epilepsy. Myshkin describes an aura that finishes with ‘an ecstatic and prayerful fusion in the highest synthesis of life’.

Prince Myshkin (The Idiot): the falling sickness, The Gambler, and ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ - PMC

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Though I'd recommend Myshkin's descriptions in his own words, I just didn't feel like looking them up at the moment.

 

[parmalee]

A big question is how one could remember[1] what transpired (or didn't) during meditation, if discriminating thoughts were successfully suspended during it. Even noting that one entered a "blank state" would still be cognizing that a blank state was present, in contrast to, say, a person who claims that they never dream (i.e., there's just missing time between going to sleep and waking up, rather than an exhibition of nothing slash silence slash absence of feeling).

Yeah. In Katsuki Sekida's Zen Training, he describes the satori experience in terms of "nen actions" (not gonna define--based on Chinese nien, meaning "thought", and the whole wu nien ("no thought") thing (uhhh... see the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Hui Neng, I guess?)), and the defining absence of subsequent nen actions building upon one another (abstraction, reflection, all that crap). So it's a bit of a conundrum.