It’s trivially obvious to show that everyone’s experiences are subjective - the images being presented to my eyes right now differ from the images being presented to yours.
It’s also trivially obvious to show that human senses are limited and somewhat innaccurate - all I have to do is take off my glasses, or to notice the signals can get to a cell phone without me observing the signals in flight.
What isn’t trivial to show is that the reality underlying our subjective perceptions is “empty”. What’s that mean? What’s it empty of? We know for a fact that reality is real - it’s too persistent and consistent not to be. Is it supposed to be empty of spiritual juice? Ectoplasm? Fairy dust? Some undefined ‘meaningfullness’?
Pheh, made up nonsense. Reality is real, it’s there, and it’s what keeps you from dropping straight through the floor to the center of the earth. It’s full enough to do that.
I think by empty or pictures they mean what we think something is. Like good or bad, better or worse. In the case of people it would be strong, smart, wise, etc. in short our personal judgment that result from experience, that is what they are getting at. My guess is they claim that reality is free of our judgements and perceptions of it.
Like I said it’s like nihilism. That life is empty of the value judgments we assign.
Humans derive opinions of things via a few different approaches:
They observe things through their senses and build impressions based on those impressions.
They have imaginative flights of fancy and mistake those imaginations for reality.
Other people tell them things and they believe the other people.
(Approach 2 is the source of monsters under the bed and Buddhism.)
When you get your opinions based on approach 1, or from people who came by their opinions via approach 1, the impressions are based on observed reality - which is based directly on actual reality. There’s a solid underpinning to these opinions, so there’s a chance they’re right - particularly if you have conducted thorough and unbiased observation of the objective facts. For example I observe that my mother cares about me - which I have come to believe because she acts like she does, and has done so consistently and over a long period of time.
Now, is it possible to be wrong about what we observe, or to draw wrong conclusions? Of course! (Though using stuff like the scientific method helps.)
Opinions you come up with out of your imagination, though, those are empty. This of course includes all woo.
I guess I follow that. I can believe someone to be nice if their behavior is consistent enough. Of course things can change but there is usually a reason for it. People who hurt others usually have something behind the hurt.
But I guess in the post where I first talked about it they make it sound like this mind full of pictures taken through personal experience is false. That the truth mind is revealed through their method and your dirty lens that you see the world don’t true but they can offer a way to see reality as it is without our judgments.
Wellllll, it’s actually sort of valuable to sometimes step back and try to assess a situation as it would appear to somebody without the raging prejudices you happen to have about which flavor of cheese is best (or whatever). It’s entirely possible to have wrong ideas, and reviewing whether your ideas are wrong is valuable.
I’m not convinced that this is the kind of “seeing” they’re proposing. As best I can interpret your interpretation of their woo, they think that reality is somehow inferior and want out. (Why they want this is not entirely clear to me.) So I suspect that they “truth” they want you to see isn’t truths about reality, but instead some other “truth” about how heaven is better, or how buddhist annihilation is better, or how spending money on their advanced meditation program is better.
“Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.”
Don’t try to resolve the Capital “T” Truths until you understand and can be productive in a small, concrete way. Don’t reject reality as a sham until you have some dirt under your fingernails and have grown a plant or three from seed. Embrace the humble and the mundane, then transcend.
Transcend what exactly? It doesn’t sound like transcendence since your aren’t transcending anything. It’s more like creating another reality.
From what they say the true mind is not clouded by our experience and judgment, that it is true because it isn’t conditioned by experience. The mind of experience is false because it is as a result of conditioning, it is made. That’s what I guess they are saying. Sounds too much like Buddhism. But when they say you can find out what you really are they don’t refer to the “false” self based on experience or conditioning. Of course there’s no guarantee that’s what you really are. Evidence seems to suggest you are little more than a body, not the universe.
From what I read about meditation it alters your brain, which is the cause of the experiences people notice. It’s nothing spiritual or transcendent, in fact it can be replicated in a lab by stimulating the same areas. Makes me wonder if Buddha in a sense built a religion without knowing that, it sort of takes the wind out of Eastern mysticism then. But if I try to tell them that people just write it off as a story made by he mind or ego (even though it’s true).
I can’t help but giggle a little when people talk of transcendence. It’s more like an idea or arbitrary metric they have for greatness or something else. Really it’s just a different view. Discarding everything doesn’t give a clearer view just a different one
I think when they talk about imagining your life as a series of pictures, they are just trying to force you to reimagine defining moments of your life from the perspective of an objective third party, it’s a common meditation/ self-therapy technique,
If you don’t have a job, get one. Work changes the way your brain works. Too much navel-gazing is unhealthy.
I find it highly amusing when some people, after allegedly transcending their egos and attaining perfect enlightenment, immediately run out and proclaim themselves to be the wisest person that ever existed. I guess that ego always finds its way home.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that meditations are awesome. I’ve taken vacations based around them. They break down some of the neural pathways and patterning that become reinforced through constant use. They nuke my anxiety and depression better than any drug ever did. But there’s no magic involved.
For me meditation had the opposite effect. Disconnecting me from others and those I love, and my life. I grew apathetic. Depressed. I mean part of it talks about detachment for crying out loud. They have sing about abaonding your family, friends, desires, pursuit of wealth and status, pretty much things that make you human, even personality, for some perceived state of invulnerability.
The problem with your number 1 is that there is no such thing as an objective third party, just an uninformed one. Being truly objective would be like saying that it doesn’t matter, that nothing matters. Those defining moments happened but they have no meaning or significance. They are just events. It’s like draining the color from a picture, which would explain the sign they hung up.
Being objective would require you to not be human. Which doesn’t necessarily give a clear picture.
It’s possible to be more objective, though, which I strongly suspect was what was meant. It’s not about pretending you’re ignorant of the situation, it’s scanning your brain for the list of possible perspectives others might have and trying to use them to notice your skewed biases, and imagine how things would look without those biases, or with different biases.
Remember, there is an objective reality. My opinion upon whether a dress is black and blue, or white and gold, is personal and skewed by my assumptions, but the dress itself does have objective reality and its materials reflect and color the lights that hit it in a definite way.
That’s not what they refer to though. They are talking about cleansing the false mind which is the pictures based on experiences and your senses. In short they talk about a fabricated self and that the true one is what you get by letting go of everything.
Right, I was talking about what I believe Ann Hedonia was talking about (as I believe that person to not be insane). These loons, on the other hand, are coming from the perspective of a fictional construct where reality is inferior to some other nonsense thing that they made up. They claim that all of reality is garbage compared to their fictional construct and suggest you put your energies into following that fictional construct rather than whatever else you might be doing at the time.
The problem is that on some level I wonder if it is right. They say some dumb things like if Alzheimer’s patients are most present (which is idiotic, having no memeory isn’t a good thing it’s awful). Or how in the case of Amnesia where the self is forgotten and how without your memories there is no you. That you is just a story you carry but not a permanent core. I know people change though.
I think it’s also the argument that people are born blank slates, even though they aren’t. But they think that by cleaning our preferences, likes, dislikes, etc (which they judge to be false because they are conditioned) you see the truth. Which explained the contrasting pictures on their posters of colored pictures followed by empty sketches (like a blank coloring book).
I don’t like to think that my while life, my desires, likes, dislikes, etc are false and have to be purged. But part of me doesn’t want to be wrong either and even though it hurts and leaves me hollow I have unwillingly be doing so just to be “right”.
Or to put it one way, since it was “learned” it’s not “who you really are” it would be a lie. If that was “who you really are” then you would be so always.
Something about not being inherent that makes it false. Even though you don’t get to choose what you like.