Death is an illusion

wil said:
If today references time, and implies there was a time when it wasn't an illusion.
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When I read the rest of his post, my thoughts were something like "at different times people have different illusions"

Jonathan Parker was a self help and spiritual teacher my mom used to buy tapes from. Here, you can see one of his prominent courses is called "Piercing Illusions"

I still have that old set of cassette tapes. I listened to it many times years ago. I only remember it slightly, but remember it being about reality vs illusions, becoming a spiritual master, and being in tune with the Universal Mind. I don't know if I have a working cassette player now, I should get one, maybe give them a listen again.
 
powessy said:
There are minds that will teach you things that "make sense" to everyone like religion.
There are minds that teach you things about anything that "makes sense" to you, your family and friends and your body/self.
There are minds that teach you things that make "no sense" to anyone, these are like thoughts you have about the world or the universe.
There are minds that teach you things that make "no sense" to you, this is like questions you have about yourself, soul body, mind.
Minds can not teach you anything unless you try to figure it out first.
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This sounds poetic, and maybe profound, but even after reading it over a few times, I'm not quite sure what you mean.
 
TheLightWithin said:
This sounds poetic, and maybe profound, but even after reading it over a few times, I'm not quite sure what you mean.
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All this means is that astral projections come from several different types of minds. The first would be like you teaching yourself something this is like a new habit, and you would dream about this. The second would be like your mom or dad or friends teaching you something and you would dream about them teaching you something. The third would be an alien showing you something that you have never seen and you trying to figure it out, and the forth is you trying to self diagnose yourself mentally spiritually or physically, like am I a reality shifter guru or what, or about different foods and the ingredients they are made of.

IF your minds can figure it out you will ask questions about the dream tomorrow and they will try to find time regarding your thoughts the more you ask questions the more they will try to figure things out. The game is to teach you nothing at all and to have you ask no questions tomorrow at all. If they can figure it out they try to become your minds and then teach them nothing at all. The more you can figure out the more time you get to ask questions but this also means I figured them out first and can now teach them nothing here first by teaching them inside of themselves.

I know none of this makes sense to many here but they hear these words and try to figure me out, I have been doing this for over twelve years now it is a game we play.


Astral projections, are mostly formed by the above mentioned minds but there are many others on many timelines.

powessy
 
Alif Balaam Yashin said:
The only way we are capable of knowing reality is through the mediation of our consciousness - that is, subjectively. We experience our own consciousness directly, but we cannot directly experience the consciousness of someone else. We can only infer their consciousness from their behaviors. Conceptual thought begins from the pure, unsupported apprehension of one’s conscious self as an existential reality: the ba of ancient Egypt, the psyche of the Greeks, the Golden Flower of the Tao.
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Nice. That is when we should take help of science. It brings us closer to the truth. It is independent of our consciousness.
 
Alif Balaam Yashin said:
In the Objective Universe ... in the Subjective Universe ...
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Quite ... in a provisional sense, for there to be 'object' requires 'subject' – the two go hand in hand.

It requires subject to identify object as 'object', and that observation offers self-reflection to the subject.

Both subject and object are instances of being. Without being, there is neither one nor t'other.

Alif Balaam Yashin said:
We experience our own consciousness directly, but we cannot directly experience the consciousness of someone else. We can only infer their consciousness from their behaviors. Conceptual thought begins from the pure, unsupported apprehension of one’s conscious self as an existential reality: the ba of ancient Egypt, the psyche of the Greeks, the Golden Flower of the Tao.
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I'd say experience our own consciousness directly superficially, that is at a surface level – and some hardly do this at all – but it is always possible to go deeper, but the deeper into being, the more the surface phenomena is left behind, the greater the not-knowing.
 
otherbrother said:
Besides, most religion is not spiritual, but more moralistic.
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Morality is an integral part of religion, in that it concerns how we relate to each other. It's 'cleariong the ground' in that sense. No-one gets to the top of the mountain by piling dead bodies to make a ramp.

otherbrother said:
And even that part of religion that does emphasize spirituality is more focused on optimal wholeness than mastery of spiritual practices or spiritism as a means to being more “spiritual.”
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Is it ... or is that your appreciation of it?
 
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As an addendum, or perhaps a postscript, to my post #155 above ...

Another excerpt from DBH:
"One might reasonably suppose that, if life and mind really were the emergent results of composite forces, and if their relation to their ingredient parts were purely mereological, then the special qualities distinguishing them from the non-living and non-mental material order would appear only at the highest supervenient system-levels of organism, as the final result of the accumulated totality of their subvenient causal tiers. And yet we find quite the opposite to be the case.

We find instead principles of unified agency, seemingly intentional powers of adaptation to new circumstances, ingenuity, the conatus essendi or will toward persistence, and all sorts of elaborate coordinations of discrete processes within every organic cell comprising a chromosome.

This seems to be a fairly vast problem for both the reductionist and the emergentist pictures of things. For the former, to what is one reducing an organism in seeking to explain away the uniqueness of life or mind if even that organism’s tissues and nerves and biochemical constituents are already composed of cognitive systems?

For the latter, from what are the novel properties of life and mind supposedly emergent if so many of the elementary functions of the organism are already fully invested with those properties?

To posit a transition from the purely mechanical level of nature to that of life and mind (or the “appearance” of life and mind) so very near the threshold between physics and chemistry, or between chemistry and the most rudimentary organic compounds, defies the very logic of either approach to the question. And, of course, at the core of every cell with a genome is an exquisitely precise genetic code comprising sixty-four codons that have together repeated one and the same seemingly intentional structure without variation for roughly two-billion years.

It is perhaps no great surprise that the accelerating advances in cell biology and molecular biology over the past few decades have occurred at roughly the same time that forms of panpsychism have begun to be taken seriously by philosophers and scientists alike.

One could, perhaps, suppose that the entirety of the organism as a system, in its integrated totality, imposes discrete cognitive functions on lower levels within the system, as an apparently emergent structure of top-down agency; but what would this mean other than that within each organism there is some sort of primordial, unified, organizing principle of order and form and intelligence—in other words, a soul?"

In the original its a single paragraph – I've broken it down for easier access.
 
wil said:
But I do wanna discuss/explore "as it is lived today".
If today references time, and implies there was a time when it wasn't an illusion.
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Well I don't think there was ever a time when our perception was not clouded, or veiled.

But having said that, I do tend to consider that at times our vision waxes and wanes.

I would say we fall foul of assuming that what we can see is all there is ... but that's old ground we've been over many times.
 
Thomas said:
Quite ... in a provisional sense, for there to be 'object' requires 'subject' – the two go hand in hand.

It requires subject to identify object as 'object', and that observation offers self-reflection to the subject.

Both subject and object are instances of being. Without being, there is neither one nor t'other.
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Yes, they both go hand in hand while we are physically alive
Thomas said:
I'd say experience our own consciousness directly superficially, that is at a surface level – and some hardly do this at all – but it is always possible to go deeper, but the deeper into being, the more the surface phenomena is left behind, the greater the not-knowing.
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"experience our own consciousness directly superficially" I don't understand this
I don't see it as 'superfical' just the opposite, to experience our own Consciousness delivers us directly into something no longer at the "surface level', but something beyond that, something REAL.
 
Alif Balaam Yashin said:
I stated the facts, no one suffers from mass auditory hallucinations without something going wrong in their brain . . . either that or someone is making shit up.
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Alif Balaam Yashin said:
Auditory hallucinations aren’t exclusive to psychosis—they’re also common in religious experiences, meditation, and ritual states. Hyperactivity in the temporal lobes can create intense mystical experiences, including hearing divine voices, angelic commands, or demonic whispers. Studies show that intense prayer, fasting, and chanting increase dopamine levels and reduce activity in the prefrontal cortex. This can enhance spontaneous auditory phenomena, making gods, spirits, or ancestors seem to speak. In dissociative states, the brain disconnects from the sense of self, making it easier to experience external voices, visions, and commands from an "otherworldly" source.
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Uhhuh.... Okay...
 
Aupmanyav said:
I saw it. That is why I said 'Nice 'word-salad''.
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I don't see how it was a salad.
Word based or otherwise.
It was a summary of a little thesis about the possible role of loneliness in people presuming consciousness in objects.
Maybe a salad has a consciousness, or many from its constituent ingredients.
I don't think his thesis summary was a salad.
 
Thomas said:
"We dream of creating a virtual reality responsive to our needs in a way that the now spiritually evacuated world around us no longer seems to be. Even among many analytic philosophers, whose entire intellectual mission is to think as boringly about everything as humanly possible, perhaps the most fashionable theory of mind at present is panpsychism, which tells us that the material world may yet be in some sense full of life and intelligence after all."
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Denial of God, soul and religion does not mean the end of what we term as 'spirituality'. It only removes superstition.
Yeah, every atom has been alive for 13.78 billion year (except those which we turned into energy :)). In what way is it boring?
At least, I find it fascinatingly interesting.
 
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Aupmanyav said:
Yeah, every atom has been alive for 13.78 billion year..
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..and that needs interpretation.
It is dependent on measurement .. and I know that it has to be a theoretical measurement..
..because nobody has a "tape-measure" long enough to measure that. :D
 
powessy said:
All this means is that astral projections come from several different types of minds. The first would be like you teaching yourself something this is like a new habit, and you would dream about this. The second would be like your mom or dad or friends teaching you something and you would dream about them teaching you something. The third would be an alien showing you something that you have never seen and you trying to figure it out, and the forth is you trying to self diagnose yourself mentally spiritually or physically, like am I a reality shifter guru or what, or about different foods and the ingredients they are made of.
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What you described could be useful even if not true in an objective or metaphysical way, because the human mind as it imagines and thinks or even perceives is always projecting and often does not reclaim the projections in the form of personal insights from them or spiritual growth. Even if it is all only in a subjective reality, Ken Wilber’s upper left quadrant of kinds of “truth.”
Perhaps believing that the projection is physical is a useful, meaningful, myth that could help us give more attention and weight to the projection/reclamation process? Or it could be physically true also. Either way, we benefit, as long as we take responsibility for our spiritual growth and don’t give in to fatalistic superstition via insisting on literalism. Hold mental and physical gently in our minds so that they might work together for our transcendence of mere illusion and for our spiritual growth, positive transformation.
 
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Alif Balaam Yashin said:
Yes, they both go hand in hand while we are physically alive

"experience our own consciousness directly superficially" I don't understand this
I don't see it as 'superfical' just the opposite, to experience our own Consciousness delivers us directly into something no longer at the "surface level', but something beyond that, something REAL.
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I should clarify that statement: Most beings on Earth encounter moments of Consciousness without realizing it, fleeting glimpses that pass unnoticed. As Gurdjieff observed, they remain trapped in a state of mechanical unconsciousness, moving through life like automatons. This surface-level awareness is shallow and accidental, far removed from the deeper, sustained Consciousness revealed through deliberate inner work.
 
Thomas said:
Interesting ... how would you define 'spirituality'?
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Ooo....oooo....mister Cartair (horschack reference for aging US audience)

I so wanna answer but will hold off. But I do believe requiring a belief in G!d to be spiritual is a very limiting constraint, and that there were spiritual folk prior to the concept of gods or G!d. But I will wait before I continue that line.
 
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