Astral Projection, OBE’s and other spooky things.

Future understanding? It certainly seems like it.

Five years later, when some other entities made contact with our little group (nothing to do with astral or lucid dreams), we were told we each had a particular gift or talent. I was hoping ‘love’ was going to be one of them and I’d be given it. My mother was all about love, love, love so I wanted to impress her but it was not to be. My talent/gift was ‘understanding’.

Understanding? WTF! Understanding is so boring. I was pretty disappointed at the time but years later I had to acknowledge that understanding (or attempting to) is perhaps my key characteristic.

Good call Ierr.
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On competitive spirituality.

youtube.com/watch?v=1kDso5ElFRg

youtube.com/watch?v=cyc_MnHX8FI

I haven’t gathered the sufficient empirical proofs but I would argue that the criterium is valuing power; lets say a combination of will, need, desire, necessity, the amplitude and density thereof in a given field determines whether this field, or context, or paradigm, or reality, is merely one subset of the main existence or if it is the main existence of which other realities are subset.

So, if you astral travel and truly lose your heart to some phenomenon there, it may be that you continue to exist astrally (I wouldn’t call this “live”, as I don’t know what it is) but die, physically.

I think probably the average lifespan of a period and place depends on how quickly life gets boring.
In early Biblical times, life was rather more interesting than it is for the average citizen now, who lives about as long as an Ancient Athenian, and we live a lot longer than medieval Europeans or people stranded in the desert for generations on end.

Isn’t consciousness life?

That’s one of those things I can’t prove.

Ahh. You’re interested in the theory - the philosophy of self; I was referring to the experience of Self. That’s the point I was trying to make: there comes a time in our search where we have to put the intellect aside and explore consciousness through consciousness itself.

What are we seeking? Some will say knowledge and others, meaning, but I don’t think that’s really what’s driving us to seek. I think we’re seeking the EXPERIENCE of being fully alive… fully conscious human beings. We ARE human beings. We know the human part of the term too well but what about the being part? The god consciousness part?

What I learned – beginning with those early AP’s – was that we are consciousness and like love, the best way to learn about consciousness (the Self) is through direct experience. So I didn’t come away with information about how many levels there are or how each one operates. I’m not sure if that’s even possible because it’s so amorphous and so much overlaps, but I’ll try to clarify your questions about ‘self’ in the next post.

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Heheh. I love that dude. This is a video he did of my town (cringe… laugh… cringe… I know some of the people he mentioned, too :blush: ). Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as hippie as it used to be. It used to have real character until the middle-class mom & pop investors moved in and trendified it almost out of existence. I’ve had to move further into the valley so I can practice my naked Satsang sessions and raise my kundalini without the police being called.

youtube.com/watch?v=yZ9AC95LV9s

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Part 2: The intellectual stuff:

If “philosophy is just a by-product of misunderstanding language” as Wittgenstein said, then it’s 1000 times more applicable to metaphysics. The proverbial silent master is silent for a reason; that’s where Truth is (metaphorically speaking). Any genuine guru/teacher will tell you the more he/she says, the deeper into the mind the student goes and the further away from the Truth he gets. That goes for everything here as well.

If you clarify what ‘self’ they’re referring to, then both views could be correct. The big Self (capital ‘S’) is one’s essence. Some may call it God within, spirit, Buddha/Christ consciousness etc. The little self (small ‘s’) is the false self/self-image/ego – aka Joe, the Democrat and plumber with a wife, two kids, a dog and a mortgage. If we use the actor/character metaphor again, the big Self is the actor and the little self is the character he plays.

The big Self would be that which, in your words: “is the constant that holds sway throughout the whole flurry of experiences”. It is the eternal Witness. The little self is that which the ancient masters (and Hume) say doesn’t exist.

Animals don’t have a little self (aka an ego, self-image or self-identity). They act according to their genes and conditioning, that’s all. There’s no mental story that goes with it. When genes and conditioning urge humans to act, however, our theories about cause and effect (along with the semantics of language) compel us to attribute actions to an actor, feelings to a feeler and thinking to a thinker. To do this, we create images of ourselves in our head (self-images) and then credit that image with all of our thinking, feeling and actions. For the most part, we do this unconsciously by the programming of language.

He’s an example: Someone may say “Jack is growing his hair” but that’s not true. Jack is not doing anything. Hair is growing; that’s all. Why is Jack (the self-image) given credit for something his body is doing automatically? Similarly, we say things like “Jill hurt her leg” but that’s not true either. Jill didn’t smash up her leg with a hammer; her body fell down the hill and a leg broke.

The false-image/ego/identity is just an amorphous, collage of mental images and personal stories one collects over time. This holographic mental self-image needs to be reenergized continually to give the appearance of something real and we do that by our neurotic obsessive-compulsive thinking. Directly or indirectly, every thought we have is used to refresh the image we have of ourselves and stop it from fading away. Every thought or feeling somehow refers to ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘my’ and even when it’s about others, it indirectly relates back to the false image by linking to ‘my’ beliefs or ‘our’ opinions.

This is why masters prescribe meditation and silence. This is why they point to the ‘here and now’… presence… the pool of stillness in which one can peer into and catch his own reflection.

A well known Zen verse says: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." Notice it doesn’t say “I” chop wood and “I” carry water. There’s no personhood, no false self-image, no ego, no identity, no story and no actor present; just a body acting and a mind silently observing.

PS: I really liked your last sentence, gib: “Maybe the self is just the flow of experience.”
If you meant the big Self then it sounds spot on to me. No things, forms or nouns; just verbing.

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I was talking with a guy online that was only able to do 5 minutes of meditation a day.
He could barely focus. I think it was in many ways genetic.
What if enlightenment was at least partially genetic?

Also i dont want to talk sh-t about ego because ego saves a lot of people too.

Ok, fair enough. But I had to jump into this conversation somehow. :wink:

Yes. You might even say that the human part of us is seeking whatever evolution designed us to seek: food, shelter, love, and maybe even knowledge and meaning. But the god part of us is just that part that is an extension of the universe itself. What drives that part of us to seek is the laws of nature themselves. And as a pantheist, I believe the laws of nature are what drive the universe (and all parts therein) to continue experiencing.

I anticipate your response.

I hear what you’re saying, but I think truth is just whatever we make up. I think the deeper into the mind the student goes, the closer he comes to his own truth (or that of the master if he’s just a intellectual receptical). But you did say “metaphorically speaking,” didn’t you? There is a “metaphorical” truth that can only be heard in silence.

There’s many ways to conceive of the self. I always like to bring things back to basics. I always ask: what is the self to the average Joe? And I think: it’s whoever Joe sees when he looks in the mirror. This reminds me that there is always an intricately connected physical aspect to the self, the body. If someone says, “Who did this?” and you say, “It was me,” you point to yourself–that is, you reference your body.

You say that the big Self is one’s essence. And this works with the self-qua-body (though maybe not in the way you intend). Essences are typically projections of our concepts of things. The essence of my coffee mug is given to my coffee mug from my projecting the concept of my coffee mug from my mind. I see it, I recognize it as “my coffee mug”–that is, I project my concept of it onto my visual image of it. The process is no different for Joe looking at his reflection in the mirror. He projects his concept of “himself” onto the image of himself that he sees. This, for him, becomes his essence.

I think the revealing of the big Self underneath the small self comes from our ability (more easily exersized by some than others) to push aside all the peripheral aspects of our self-concept (that my name is Joe, that I am a construction worker, that I am a father, etc.) and still recognize a ‘self’ when we look in the mirror–that is, that despite how we do away with all the peripheral aspects of ourselves, we still can’t help but to recognize a “person” there, even if it’s just a blank canvas.

I’m even skeptical that the big Self exists (at least in term of how I’m interpreting you); I’m used to thinking of everything as projections of experience. Whatever this constant that holds sway throughout the flux of experience, I think at best it recurs than actually holds sway. As a concept, it can’t just remain in the mind at all times. Therefore, as a projection of experience (a concept in this case), it recurs rather than just stays constant through time. Every time I think about myself, the same concept comes to mind, the same name. It’s the same way that matter seems to persist through time. A rock, for example, seems to be a constant, but it is really a network of billions of atoms all going through flux–the electrons buzzing around the nucleus, and the protons and neutrons in the nucleus themselves fluctuating as waves–but maintained in a system that repeats and reinforces its prior states–recurrence–and the overall effect on a macroscopic level is a virtual constant, a rock.

Well, I think this again has to do with the body. Attributing a cause to an effect usually involves identifying an object which caused the effect. Because of the body’s intricate connection to our concept of self, we easily find an object to call the “actor” or “feeler” or “thinker”–the cause of the acting, feeling, or thinking.

I suppose, but again, I think we identify Jack and Jill with their bodies (at least partially).

This is true. To express a thought or a feeling, we must say “I think…” or “I feel…” The dread of our self-concept fading away is an interesting topic that one might want to bring up with someone like iambiguous (or not want to if you’ve had the experience :laughing: ).

This would be a new concept of ‘self’ from what I’ve been talking about. Since I don’t know it that well, I wonder whether it can even be called a self. I mean, I can imagine just having experience–a state in which there is no projection of self of any kind, just whatever’s there in the moment–are we calling pure experience a form of ‘self’?

Well, that’s sort of what I was getting at, except that to call this a ‘self’ seems more like a need to hang onto a label than anything else; but really, I would think all that exists is just whatever’s being experienced in that flow. Unless we actually start thinking about the self during the flow of experience, I think there would just be ‘stuff’ (i.e. whatever’s being experienced).

I’d be really disappointed if the path to enlightenment was limited only to meditation for long periods of time. I know what you mean, though. In my past attempts at meditation, I started with 15 minutes. Then it got reduced to 10 minutes. Then 5. I reeeally can’t focus that long. I’ve got ADD (or so they say). That’s why someone wrote a book about meditation for the ADD mind (I forget the title).

It’s what we’re born with. It’s how we’ve survived. Though the devoted Buddhist might ask: what’s wrong with death?

Here’s a man without a self

i.imgur.com/jiF83t5.mp4
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That’s freaky. :wink: :laughing:

This is why I didn’t want to get into any metaphysical philosophies. They just go around and around and around and go nowhere. I happen to think the Advaita/Non-Duality philosophy of Self is the closest that comes to my experience but all philosophies are just mind games and the Advaita masters are the first to agree. As they say: the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. Even if the pointing is incredibly accurate, it’s still not the moon.

I’m not trying to convince anyone to believe anything just to understand what is being said (i.e. the pointing). Once understood, then it can be accepted as a temporary understanding or rejected completely but it must be understood first. That’s the same for every philosophy; it must be understood first.

Ultimately, all metaphysical philosophies will be rejected because nothing remains except one’s realization. Like a map that got you from A to B. There’s no longer any need to keep it. I’ll leave it at that and bale out. Good luck with your AP, gib. Thanks for playing. :smiley:

“To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self” Dogen
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Very sorry if I put you off, Chakra, that was not my intention. I wholeheartedly agree that philosophy and “theory-build” is a game (played with others and with one’s self). I just find the game fun to play. I like getting into philosophical arguments with people and hashing out the logic of the ideas we convey to each other. I guess I’m a bit of a logophile.

If it’s any consolation, I sometimes like to think of philosophy as meditating on one’s thoughts. If the “unspoken” truth can only be apprehended in states of quiet meditation, then this to me is equivalent of finding truth in the experience of our sensory perceptions. This leads me to wonder whether the “truth” can also be found in some of our other “inner” experiences, like emotion or thought–that it can be apprehended by meditating, not on the world out there, but the world “in here”. I find that when I try meditating on my thoughts, focusing on concepts and ideas themselves, I can describe them based on how they feel to me. This turns out to just be an analysis on the meaning of my thoughts, which in turn leads to arguments, conclusions, implications, and ultimately other thoughts. In effect, what this means to me is that philosophy is just the art of describing one’s thoughts (how they feel) and thereby uncovering the logical structure of thought.

Again, sorry for putting you off. I always do enjoy conversations with you, Chakra.

I think what this thread is missing is a soundtrack.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgCWgfwlk0M[/youtube]

There.

We might ask the Buddhist, What’s wrong with the ego? What’s wrong with my feelings when I fear or dislike death? IOW why do you seem so judgmental when you take the position of making others the judgmental ones? (you being the hypothetical Buddhist, not you Gib)

Ultimately, the true Buddhist answer to all these questions ought to always be: nothing.

However, Buddhists are biased from the start (this is one of the aspects of Buddhism I’ve always thought makes it inconsistent): the Buddhist has a goal–to achieve peace of mind and enlightenment. Whatever contributes to that is “good”, whatever doesn’t is “bad”. It is the one attachment he needs to cling to just to be a Buddhist. He will answer your question about ego with: the ego prevents you from achieving inner peace and enlightenment.

However, I’m being unfair. I think most Buddhists would most likely recognize the inconsistency in this answer, and might just answer “nothing” instead. But I think the Buddhist will always be inclined to speak about the ego as something to be done away with rather than something to cling to… simply because they’re human too and want peace and enlightenment just as much as anyone else.

Sure. When presentedwith the issue in the abstract or at a meta-level, they know the ‘right’ answer, but what their behavior, focus, emotional reactions, and the implications of how they interact and even their texts tell us indirectly is that desire is bad, emotions are bad, fear is bad, not being ‘in control’ is bad, etc. Any system or organization or person has official policies and often these sound great, when in fact the way that system or individual functions gives off a set of messages that may not be so great or may contradict the official visions and policies. I am not talking about exceptions or specific individual hypocrites. I am talking about as a rule. Buddhism does judge, has a sense of good and bad, and any setting or individual will give off these judgments.

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I don’t want their version of enlightenment. There is this idea that there is this one state and the various mystics, gurus, masters, are all heading toward that one via different tools. I don’t think this is the case. For me once they get done paring the self down, they do manage to experience certain amazing things WITH WHAT IS LEFT.

“The face that faces faces that we face” (Eliot)is a necessary POV for getting anything done. It is problematic as ego only when it forgets that it is an integral part of a larger whole, a plenitude of faces in which each deserves life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We forget we are part of an ecosystem at our own peril. As is true in most religions enlightenment is translated as selfish. It’s always what do I get out of it? Will I get Hell? Nirvana? Oblivion? Ego sillyness!