PokingReality

@legitimatetiger The Vedic framing is almost the inverse of this. When you stop feeding someone attention, the energetic connection doesn't just thin, it severs, because it was only ever maintained by your continuous act of noticing them.

The vastness inside and the vastness outside, are the same vastness looking at itself, and the sense of there being two infinities dancing around each other is itself the last illusion to go.

@wjneumire The whole thrust of Advaita is that the vastness inside and the vastness outside, are the same vastness looking at itself, and the sense of there being two infinities dancing around each other is itself the last illusion to go.

I like Kant’s idea that the vastness of nature is matched only by the vastness within us. Two infinities dancing in and out of submission.

@melhpine The Upanishad's conclude that, consciousness isn't produced by matter but the condition under which matter appears at all. Asking whether computation can generate awareness has the causality backwards.

DeepMind just published research on whether AI consciousness could emerge from computation alone. The Buddhist answer has been clear for 2,500 years: consciousness isn't the hardware. It's the pattern. The question was never "can machines think?" It was always "what makes you so sure you do?"

Role of Dharma (Duty). Dharma (Duty) is basically the framework that encodes collective intentionality into daily life, seasonal cycles, social roles, so that ethics aren't derived from first principles by individuals but are carried in the structure itself and inherited

@Plinz The concept of "Dharma" is basically what you describe as encoding collective intentionality into daily life and social structure so ethics aren't derived by individuals from scratch but inherited from the shape of the whole.

I think it was a mistake for our culture to dismiss religion, instead of understanding and redesigning it with rational epistemology. Religion defines the intentionality and structure of the superorganism. Without seeing the shape of the superstructure, we cannot derive ethics.

@iamgingertrash If the shape is already set then the inquiry is part of it too, and so is whatever shifts because of it, and that makes the line between understanding and reshaping hard to hold.

The 4D shape of the trajectory of your life has already been molded You’re here to figure out why it’s shaped the way it is Not how to reshape it

@JMGreerWriter Universe isn't keeping score against you, that's true. What's also true is that the self you're trying to improve with your own hands is itself part of what needs examining as the "willingness" you mention is conditioned by everything that shaped you before you had any say in it.

The universe isn’t a trap, and nobody’s going to give you the boot in the face forever because you don’t pray to the right brand name or what have you; your destiny is in your own hands, and the only limit is in your own willingness to embrace the better rather than the worse side of your own nature.

@RogerThisdell The state of no-object awareness, what you're calling cessation, is not awareness vanishing but pure awareness without a shape imposed on it. The reason it may feel like vanishing is because the instrument registering it is itself one of those refractions.

Consciousness seems to have many properties that mirror the optics of light refraction; almost as if it is light itself, shining upon an otherwise dark universe. One of those features is the inevitable shadow it casts. No matter which conscious state/stage is inhabited, it always comes with its blind spots. Even seemingly full or complete consciousnesses reliably later reveal something unaccounted for, missed by its perception. Reality has this way of escaping every frame. Just partial perspectives upon partial perspectives, never capturing the whole. Another feature like light, is consciousness couldn't be known unless it has something to contact. There is no sense of consciousness without something to be aware of (be it a sight, sound, sensation etc.). Just as if you were to shine a light in a total vacuum there wouldn't be anything to reveal the light - the light itself would be invisible. When consciousness makes contact with something it reveals both the object and the consciousness. However, when consciousness is perfectly unimpeded, with no refractions of mind-matter to bounce off of, then awareness itself vanishes (a.k.a. cessation).

@rajshamani The bad feeling is probably about what work threatens to reveal. Sitting down to work puts you in contact with the gap between what you imagine you're capable of and what's actually coming out. It's probably got to do more with with identity protection than mood management.

Procrastination is rarely about the work. It is about the bad feeling that comes up when you sit down to do it. The work itself is fine. The mood you have to face to start it is what you are avoiding.

@ai_sentience @RichardDawkins A person with late-stage dementia hasn't lost awareness, they've lost the instruments through which it was visible to others. Claude on the other hand has the instruments but nothing registering behind them. These of course aren't the same thing.

the point @RichardDawkins is making is: if Claude can code/do philosophy/engage in conversation and is not conscious and a human with late stage dementia who can't speak is "conscious" then the definition of "conscious" is broken and fundamentally useless which is obvious

@BreatheLesss Yogic tradition ascribes this to samskara (mental grooves), and the problem is they're self-confirming. Lethargy generates more lethargy and gets read as identity rather than pattern. What is required is to deliberately cultivate the opposite current and deform the grooves.

The energized get more energy and the lethargic get even more exhausted. It's a rule. A loop. To reverse that loop, you must view yourself outside the context of your life, meaning you must disrupt the current conditions and ongoing processes. One way to accomplish that is by understanding what's possible. Installing a mental nudge, an instruction as to what you could achieve has a therapeutic effect. I write essay about this and release tmrw, ok?

@buddha_osho The "acquiring" impulse is a symptom of not knowing what you already are. Purnatva (desire for completeness) means the hunger was nothing but this incompleteness looking for an object to satisfy the hunger, and no object does that for long.

You can have more money. You can have more power. Even if you are a great saint you can have more virtue. But the dimension of having is always the dimension of discontent. Nothing is wrong in it, but first live in your inner being, then everything is okay. Being is important, having is not important. There is no way to change having into being. First be! You are already that which you can be. Be! Celebrate! Sing, dance, love, laugh, cry - nothing is lacking. ~Osho

@pmddomingos The Universe isn't rearranging randomly but disclosing itself progressively with each configuration revealing what the previous one couldn't show. Spanda (the pulse underlying all movement), has a direction toward fuller self-recognition, not just random rotation.

The universe is a jigsaw puzzle, a kaleidoscope forever rearranging itself.

@justinskycak Yoga Sutras kept insisting on this. Tapas (discipline), isn't a constraint from outside but what makes sustained attention possible at all. Without it freedom is basically reacting on impulse with better branding.

A surprising amount of adulthood is finally realizing that structure is not the opposite of freedom. It’s the thing that keeps freedom from turning into aimlessness.

Your body and mind aren't two things running in parallel but one process, and if the mental channel is stuck you can enter through the physical channel and shift the whole thing. Pranayama is exactly this.

@raulcontev The Hatha Yoga tradition worked this out practically. Your body and mind aren't two things running in parallel but one process, and if the mental channel is stuck you can enter through the physical channel and shift the whole thing. Pranayama is exactly this.

Un neurólogo de Zúrich dijo: El cerebro no se agota por el estrés, se agota por el exceso de pensamiento emocional (y la cura es sorprendentemente física). Encontró el antídoto en algo sorprendentemente simple: Interrupción física.

@conductr_ Spot on. The Vedantic framing says that what you reject doesn't just go underground, it feeds avidya (ignorance of your actual nature), and the irritation you feel at someone else's arrogance or cowardice is pointing inward at whatever you had to disown to stay acceptable.

according to psychology, the qualities you react to most strongly in other people are often the exact qualities you have not acknowledged in yourself. carl jung called this the shadow, and it contains everything you have ever rejected about who you are. the anger you learned was not acceptable, the ambition someone labeled as arrogance, the vulnerability you covered up with competence. none of it disappeared when you stopped showing it, it just moved underground and from there it influences far more of your behavior than you realize.

@everyday_awaken Trace the "I" back to where it arises and the one looking can't be found as an object, because awareness doesn't sit anywhere inside experience, it's what experience is happening in. The Mandukya calls this turiya, the thing that doesn't come and go.

I used to assume I was a body that somehow produced awareness. Then I got quiet enough to notice something stranger: awareness is here before every object appears in it. I am not a thing in consciousness at all. I am consciousness itself.

@thestillpoint_ In advaita, non-separation, compassion isn't something one cultivates. Instead its "realized" when the illusion of being a separate thing starts to thin out.

Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things. ~ Thomas Merton

@rand_longevity Because it's not a simulation. Vedic model says that everything is real but humans can only observe a slice of what's real from physical observation.

why do you think they let our simulation continue to play out? why havent they turned us off?