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We have to make the best of things

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What is behind these orders of layers and levels?

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reality is created primarily from imagination

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Lion said:

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What is behind these orders of layers and levels?

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Emptiness?

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Emptiness works. But emptiness leaves everything as it is, which means I am still just here with all of my various beliefs and programs, including my ideas about what emptiness entails. The mind thinks it can imagine emptiness and how everything fits into that. The mind couldn't be more wrong, in my opinion.

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You mean the events as not interpreted by the mind? I think past our interpretations is the subconscious and unconscious, which points me in the direction of saying that through our various reality tunnels we are co-creating an illusory reality together. We are the imagination of ourselves, collectively.

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EternalCowabunga said:

I'm glad you agree. On the other hand I am hopeful that there is a transcendental and completely simple truth which is underlying all this mind business, a reality which operates on it's own principles separate from the mind. However, experience tells me that the only constant is change. Eternity need not be proof of an implicit order but simply the dissociation from the construct of man made time.

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daytripper23 said:

Dare I ask what you mean by insanity (and sanity)?

Assuming there is such thing, it would seem that this duality is a progressive liniarity. I think the best way to describe this, is to say it might be like time.

What if like time moving from past towards the future, we move from sanity to insanity. The point of this analogy is not to demonstrate which or what direction, but just that it is directional, liniar progression.

Progressive, liniar duality which emphasizes the absolute. (A progressive movement towards something).

different than:

Polar duality, which emphasizes relativity. (Ying Yang)

Disregaurding the social implications of each, I am paradoxically sold and unsold on both notions.

Buddhists will tell you, you are already in bliss, you are perfect at this moment, That everything is relative, and yet there are still teachings.

I believe awareness is liniarly progressive, and so you can understand why sanity seems to fall into this catagory.

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Ah yes, very interesting and familiar thoughts. Awareness is awesome

edit: what i am thinking about sanity is that it is being able to step outside of one's programming and see things from a transcendental perspective, past ying and yang. so it is hard for me to believe sanity exists, because i cannot be sure if, as you said, awareness is linearly progressive pointing towards an absolute. if sanity does exist, we have not yet found it. i don't know how one could function in this society if they were not experiencing relativity

Icelander said:

Not only do you not have to but you are unable to. Sorry, I forgot about you OC.:(

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If it weren't for my iron lung and daily dialysis...

Icelander said:

EternalCowabunga said:

I'm glad you agree. On the other hand I am hopeful that there is a transcendental and completely simple truth which is underlying all this mind business, a reality which operates on it's own principles separate from the mind. However, experience tells me that the only constant is change. Eternity need not be proof of an implicit order but simply the dissociation from the construct of man made time.

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I'm also hoping for an aware and conscious universe. Even if there is one the personality construct I call me may never know.

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Why shouldn't everything be left just as it is? Just because small-mind thinks it can contain and "know" emptiness, does it follow that emptiness is not the source of small-mind?

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I have no problem with leaving everything as it is, as everything just is what it is. Yet I say this while at the same time knowing that my mind continues to indulge in illusion and I am not able to simply "be" at all moments. Those who are able to leave everything as it is do not know the source of themselves, but they are aware of the paradox of being a self-reflective consciousness. If you ask yourself what you really mean when you say that emptiness is the source of small mind, then your mind will come up with an answer to what emptiness is. If you asked me to accept that the Universe is emptiness, it would be my mind accepting and imagining this. This is because I still largely controlled by my mind, and you are not talking to the part of me that would have to realize that - and in realizing that, truly, I would have to cease to be. What would be left over? It would still be awareness of an experience of being a personality. There is always awareness of something and then we die and we don't really know what happens then.

I think awareness is awesome and I think the reality we created isn't so bad, though we surely could be doing a lot better.

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Ever since I was little I wondered why most people in society seemed to act in similar ways and believed in the same things. I believe as children we are all "unsane" and are then become sane as we are socialized - some of us are more resistant to this process or more accepting of the programming. As I child I believe I intuited that this programming I was being fed was toxic and so I resisted it fairly strongly at first. I quickly realized I would need to start understanding "the way things worked" if I was going to survive in society.

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I agree with you that children are magic and amazing.
And that they have something that seems to sparkle beyond anything.
But somehow I can't help to wonder if it is really intuition or the way a child is grown that makes him reluctant to those ideas.
The more I think about it, the more I think it must be something that comes from the parent's attitude that's pushing some fight back buttons in the child.
I think that from all that you evoked about your family situation until now, I can say that our situations are similar to some extent.
And I took a LOT of time to analyze the way I grew up because I needed to solve a lot of issues that were pulling me back and kept me in fear and confusion.
Like you, I was a child that always had the tendency to dream, to be in my own world and to dislike the way I was being addressed to. I spent time alone, not necessarily lonely. Where I am getting at is that I realized that most of my behavior was a normal psychological reaction to what I saw around. Children are NOT stupid, that's for sure, and they can tell if something comes from fear or not. I say fear because I think it's the first thing any living and conscious thing can recognize it since it's linked to survival and the need for protection. And it is known that children rely on protection and the feeling of safety.
I think that this is something that I lacked of, I never felt safe near the apparent image of certainty my parents were trying to hard to emanate.
I guess that this is exactly what made me fight back to what I was bring said all the time, and for a long while I believed that I had the capacity to somehow be above that magically see their flaws.
More and more I am brought to the belief that you can only do that through reasoning.
That also goes for my notion of "insanity" - "The lack of reason produces monsters."

EternalCowabunga said:

Yes, that makes a lot of sense MushroomTrip. You are pretty much dead on with your assessment Especially about not feeling safe and dreaming alot.

I've started going to a psychiatrist for the first time in my life and hopefully I will gain a lot of insight into my childhood. Fear and confusion is still a large part of my life, as much as I have tried to convince myself and others that I've figured everything out

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Don't worry about it, we're all in the same situation.
The good side of understanding what's generating your fears is that you learn to reason with them instead of instinctively fighting.
Our instincts are our greatest enemies sometimes, because even if they deal with basic stuff, where we don't shed any light in there, things might look very distorted and therefore scary.
I am still on the way to figuring it out and think that this road will never stop. But I begin to like it like that. The advantage of such a situation is that you're constantly finding new pieces and your anxiety becomes diffracted into small and playful confusions.
And this can be easily translated into curiosity if you look from the right angle. And from there the possibilities are unlimited.

A psychiatrist might help to some extent, as long as you keep in mind that YOU will ultimately deal with your issues and take everything they say with a little grain of salt.
After all, you're the only person that knows yourself the best.

MushroomTrip said:

Quote:

Ever since I was little I wondered why most people in society seemed to act in similar ways and believed in the same things. I believe as children we are all "unsane" and are then become sane as we are socialized - some of us are more resistant to this process or more accepting of the programming. As I child I believe I intuited that this programming I was being fed was toxic and so I resisted it fairly strongly at first. I quickly realized I would need to start understanding "the way things worked" if I was going to survive in society.

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I agree with you that children are magic and amazing.
And that they have something that seems to sparkle beyond anything.
But somehow I can't help to wonder if it is really intuition or the way a child is grown that makes him reluctant to those ideas.
The more I think about it, the more I think it must be something that comes from the parent's attitude that's pushing some fight back buttons in the child.
I think that from all that you evoked about your family situation until now, I can say that our situations are similar to some extent.
And I took a LOT of time to analyze the way I grew up because I needed to solve a lot of issues that were pulling me back and kept me in fear and confusion.
Like you, I was a child that always had the tendency to dream, to be in my own world and to dislike the way I was being addressed to. I spent time alone, not necessarily lonely. Where I am getting at is that I realized that most of my behavior was a normal psychological reaction to what I saw around. Children are NOT stupid, that's for sure, and they can tell if something comes from fear or not. I say fear because I think it's the first thing any living and conscious thing can recognize it since it's linked to survival and the need for protection. And it is known that children rely on protection and the feeling of safety.
I think that this is something that I lacked of, I never felt safe near the apparent image of certainty my parents were trying to hard to emanate.
I guess that this is exactly what made me fight back to what I was bring said all the time, and for a long while I believed that I had the capacity to somehow be above that magically see their flaws.
More and more I am brought to the belief that you can only do that through reasoning.
That also goes for my notion of "insanity" - "The lack of reason produces monsters."

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