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Cognitive_Shift said:

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c0sm0nautt said:
Try and stop thinking for a mere 5 minutes and tell me who is in control.

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No one is in control, only people striving for control.  However when it comes to my mind/body i am in control.  I am responsible for my actions.  The control of your mind is a basic civil liberty, and to not think so is simply disempowering your self.

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c0sm0nautt said:
Mind and actions don't exclusively correlate. I;m saying you don't have control of many of your thoughts. Many pop in from unconsciousness. When one becomes aware of the mind, begins to dis-identify with the mind, true power arises. The light of consciousness makes it impossible for the egoic mind to take control of the body through negative emotional responses.

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appleorange said:

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Icelander said:
Identifying with the ego mind is necessary for survival as a living being. You do it and I do it. If we were to disengage from that identification we wouldn't live long even with the support of a culture. That's why the monk begs for food. If he gives up his identification to his physicalness he starves to death.

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You're dead on. In the video I posted on the other page, the monk talks about how it is delusional to remain in formless awareness. It would be something akin to Nihilism.

This is why the Buddha talked about the Middle Way. It's acknowleding that all of this is a dream, but knowing that this dream is still our only reality, and it would be downright insane to go around telling people that they do not in fact exist or they are not suffering.


I'll illustrate the middle way in a picture of sorts.


A------------------B------------------C


Point A is where most people live, they believe that the dream is real. Point C is Nirvana/Enlightenment/Formless Awareness and it is seen that nothing exists.

It's impossible to live in point C. You have to live acknowledging that fire burns you, water will not disintegrate you, terrorists blow up buildings. So you live in point B which means that you still live and play in the world of forms, but you are filled with a sense of ease and do not take life so seriously because you realize that none of it is real.

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Cognitive_Shift said:

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c0sm0nautt said:
Mind and actions don't exclusively correlate. I;m saying you don't have control of many of your thoughts. Many pop in from unconsciousness. When one becomes aware of the mind, begins to dis-identify with the mind, true power arises. The light of consciousness makes it impossible for the egoic mind to take control of the body through negative emotional responses.

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I agree with the top part of your quote, many thoughts are not controllable as a part of the subconscious, but the subconscious is not the entire mind.  It is only part of the mind, much more the minds thoughts are controllable and based on the environment.  However i disagree with your "egoic mind control"  The ego is just as much a part of the mind as the subconscious and other aspects of the mind.  The ego is not a pathogen.

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Cognitive_Shift said:

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c0sm0nautt said:
Mind and actions don't exclusively correlate. I;m saying you don't have control of many of your thoughts. Many pop in from unconsciousness. When one becomes aware of the mind, begins to dis-identify with the mind, true power arises. The light of consciousness makes it impossible for the egoic mind to take control of the body through negative emotional responses.

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I agree with the top part of your quote, many thoughts are not controllable as a part of the subconscious, but the subconscious is not the entire mind.  It is only part of the mind, much more the minds thoughts are controllable and based on the environment.  However i disagree with your "egoic mind control"  The ego is just as much a part of the mind as the subconscious and other aspects of the mind.  The ego is not a pathogen.

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Hieroglitch said:
So, I've been confused for the longest time about something, and Cosmo suggested that I post my thoughts here about it, so I will..

From all of the stuff I've read on here, it seems to me that (by my interpretation) if there's only ONE consciousness or whatever, then all living things are puppets. They aren't real, they're on auto-pilot, and the one consciousness is experiencing the world by going into one puppet at a time. Everyone around you is an empty puppet, acting out in the way they inevitably would while you experience life from a specific puppet. Once you die, you realize that you're a single being, you encompass everything, there's no higher realm that your consciousness because you create everything.

So basically it was like this time I was smoking something really weird with one stoner friend and a sober friend.. I basically started tripping in a bad way and I was seeing that they were all empty vessels acting out and I was realizing that I was the only consciousness, which was a very lonely and terrifying, torturing thought. No wonder I split myself into a million fragments and gave myself amnesia if that was to be the case.

Cosmo simply said to post my thoughts.. Hoping someone could enlighten me as to how I've misinterpreted the ideas expressed here. It might be "selfish" to think it's a terrifying thing that you're the only consciousness that exists, but if we're all one universal consciousness, is it selfish for that universal consciousness to realize it's really a single entity? In theory, there's only one observer, no? And even if there're others, then when they die that observing consciousness ceases to be while the others continue to observe until they go out, or in a spiritual scenario, they merge with the universal observer/consciousness. Which is a single observer. ONE. How fun is it to be a formless consciousness talking to yourself for all eternity? Maybe that's why we're all here?

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Imo there is no why to know if you are right or wrong ultimately. However I'm going to assume you are not the only consciousness because I feel like i'm conscious and I assume that everyone feels that too.

Now when I look at other people acting like  puppets I also notice most of my actions are unconscious and puppet like or you might say programmed and on auto pilot.  This is basically true imo. It's a condition of being to some extent.

Now being separate is a lonely feeling and we all strive for connectedness. Why? There may be many reasons but one is that it feels very safe to be part of a group and have the support of others. We feel protected and can relax and let down our survival guard.

That's about all I have to say on this subject at this time. It's a good question.

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c0sm0nautt said:
Here you go Icelander. I believe this will answer the question in your OP. I uploaded a selection from The Power of Now audio book. It is only 15 minutes long.

http://kiwi6.com/file?id=fqbkko9mw4

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I don't see an answer here. The state he refers to is an animal awareness that is not encumbered by thought. That is all. It's a basic animal awareness that allows for the best chances of survival in a threatening environment. Culture, which supports our safety allows for this lapse of attention without immeadiate negative consequences.

In the future I would appreciate not being given long tombs to listen to. You can state it very well yourself and in a concise fashion.

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Icelander said:Reply

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Imo there is no why to know if you are right or wrong ultimately. However I'm going to assume you are not the only consciousness because I feel like i'm conscious and I assume that everyone feels that too.

Now when I look at other people acting like  puppets I also notice most of my actions are unconscious and puppet like or you might say programmed and on auto pilot.  This is basically true imo. It's a condition of being to some extent.

Now being separate is a lonely feeling and we all strive for connectedness. Why? There may be many reasons but one is that it feels very safe to be part of a group and have the support of others. We feel protected and can relax and let down our survival guard.

That's about all I have to say on this subject at this time. It's a good question.

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I don't feel lonely being seperate. How can you be lonely if you're around others? If you all become a single thinking consciousness, some kind of universal conscious field, you are not a bunch of thoughts thinking from different observational points, you become a single observer. Unless I could be wrong and we can all be part of this "field" and still retain our individual consciousness.

The auto-pilot thing I basically felt myself from my trip, I felt like even my thoughts were on auto-pilot, every single thought that I was having become a linear action, as if on a tape recording and I was somehow realizing that me realizing it was just another auto-pilot action. Even me typing to you guys is an auto-pilot thing in the end. These thoughts make me literally feel very distanced from myself and my surroundings. Only myself as the observer is really all I identify with anymore, I don't know anything.

Thanks for replying, though.

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Icelander said:

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c0sm0nautt said:
Here you go Icelander. I believe this will answer the question in your OP. I uploaded a selection from The Power of Now audio book. It is only 15 minutes long.

http://kiwi6.com/file?id=fqbkko9mw4

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I don't see an answer here. The state he refers to is an animal awareness that is not encumbered by thought. That is all. It's a basic animal awareness that allows for the best chances of survival in a threatening environment. Culture, which supports our safety allows for this lapse of attention without immeadiate negative consequences.

In the future I would appreciate not being given long tombs to listen to. You can state it very well yourself and in a concise fashion.

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c0sm0nautt said:

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Icelander said:

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c0sm0nautt said:
Here you go Icelander. I believe this will answer the question in your OP. I uploaded a selection from The Power of Now audio book. It is only 15 minutes long.

http://kiwi6.com/file?id=fqbkko9mw4

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I don't see an answer here. The state he refers to is an animal awareness that is not encumbered by thought. That is all. It's a basic animal awareness that allows for the best chances of survival in a threatening environment. Culture, which supports our safety allows for this lapse of attention without immeadiate negative consequences.

In the future I would appreciate not being given long tombs to listen to. You can state it very well yourself and in a concise fashion.

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I'm not sure if I would agree that it is an 'animal awareness'. What we are talking about here is a symbiosis between a pure awareness and minimal use of the though-mind for 'practical' purposes. The end of suffering.

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Other animals do not suffer as far as we know. Why? They don't dwell on their pain. All of the search for enlightenment seems to me an attempt to return to our primal thoughtless nature. And who could blame us? Thinking is problematic.

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Icelander said:
Thinking is problematic.

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Your getting it! Especially when our thoughts are in a unchangeable past and future. There is only the Now! Breath and smell the flowers! Make a conscious effort to stay in that mode of unthinking. Deal with your problems when they are your problems. What problems do you have Now?