Self and Other, Thoughts on our reality (mystic, followers, hell)

[Somkid]

There is what we know and call mind.
There is what we call experience.
We understand this experience to be a mind and sense experience ie. subject- mind, object-body.
This mind and body, together are understood to experience “the world”.
That the world can only be known through the body/mind, points to something extremely significant; the ‘world’ is also an experience, understood and interpreted by body and mind.
Whether there is any objective reality to ‘world’ or ‘body’, or even to ‘mind’, is a speculation. But, we speculate about everything. All experience is speculation, or otherwise said, “we give meaning to all experience, in order to create order, to make sense of our senses”.
Yet, we do not own our own ordering, rather, we fabricate a reality upon a mere fabrication, then, we believe it. Amazing.
How we think and sense with our human faculties is how we know our experience, and how we claim knowledge to be fact. If I know it with my own eyes it must be true.
But the fact is, “there are no facts”, only our fabrications or perceptions. We discriminate ‘up’, as opposed to down. We create the idea of ‘far or near’, hot or cold, good or bad, pain or pleasure, and of course ‘I or other. We discriminate all dualistic reality. That is our reality, our world, we have created the whole concept.
This concept is our world, what the Buddhists term “Samsara”, the cycle of endless suffering. We do suffer, it is easy to see, but not so easy to see why we suffer. The real "why". It is not a matter of ethics, it is not a matter of a "God" punishing us, but it is a matter of our own culpability. However; though we are culpable, we remain ignorant of why we are. There is no fault attached to our culpability, praise and blame are of our own making, yet another dualistic formulation that causes us suffering.
I reiterate; it is not a matter of deserving our suffering, it is not a matter of blame, of flagellating ourselves for our sins. For we are innocent, innocent and ignorant. We do not know our true nature, the world’s true nature, in our dualistic reality we are ignorant of how it really is.

We grasp to a “Self’ and therefore all else is other, we are forever separated from our reality through a solid pane of the senses and our own ignorance, and we suffer terribly. The consequences of our ‘not knowing’ are evident, wherever we look outside ourselves and whenever we look inside ourself there is pain, difficulty, all the turmoil of emotion, endlessly. It is not always so dramatic. Often and perhaps very often we live in relative peace, nothing too bad, no real difficulties, but if we were to be able to look with more subtlety, as with a meditative mind, then we would see that all mind is set for grasping or pushing away, any thing or thought or feeling, we like or we do not like and occasionally it is so subtle that we cannot discern which of these dual responses we have chosen.

Your thoughts...

[koan]

I think this should have been posted in the general Buddhist forum. I think in a nutshell, the answer is the 12 link chain of dependent origination.

[doppelgänger]

Originally Posted by Somkid

“we give meaning to all experience, in order to create order, to make sense of our senses”.

I like that very much. I use the idea that reality is a transaction between sensory data and memory. I think it points in the same direction.

Originally Posted by Somkid

Yet, we do not own our own ordering, rather, we fabricate a reality upon a mere fabrication, then, we believe it. Amazing.

Artists and scientists (mystics and magicians) engage in their own limited ordering. Their followers come along and "believe" in the work product.

Originally Posted by Somkid

But the fact is, “there are no facts”, only our fabrications or perceptions. We discriminate ‘up’, as opposed to down. We create the idea of ‘far or near’, hot or cold, good or bad, pain or pleasure, and of course ‘I or other. We discriminate all dualistic reality. That is our reality, our world, we have created the whole concept.

But both are reality. They are a complimentarity. The more one looks at the world of things composed in thought out of bits of information, the less one may see that there is also no things. One is real only because the other is also real. Put another way, there is no non-dualism, because the "non-" part is dualistic.

Originally Posted by Somkid

The consequences of our ‘not knowing’ are evident, wherever we look outside ourselves and whenever we look inside ourself there is pain, difficulty, all the turmoil of emotion, endlessly.

Perhaps it is a consequence of "knowing" rather than "not knowing." Or perhaps a consequence of the flickering dance between the experiences of knowing and not knowing that is being/not-being. How does one unknow reality once it is known? And then who is it that has unkown it?

[Willamena]

Originally Posted by Somkid

Yet, we do not own our own ordering, rather, we fabricate a reality upon a mere fabrication, then, we believe it. Amazing.

Me thinks he's catching on. Now... just to realise that the reality we fabricate is actually reality...

Originally Posted by Somkid

How we think and sense with our human faculties is how we know our experience, and how we claim knowledge to be fact. If I know it with my own eyes it must be true.

Yeah.

Originally Posted by Somkid

But the fact is, “there are no facts”, only our fabrications or perceptions.

Noooo... wrong conclusion. Invert that...

[doppelgänger]

I've rolled the following puzzle around for several years now. It might be pertinent to the topic.

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness . . . Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state to another.

- Helen Keller, 1908

[Willamena]

Originally Posted by doppelgänger

I've rolled the following puzzle around for several years now. It might be pertinent to the topic.

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness . . . Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state to another.

- Helen Keller, 1908

You being one of my 'teachers,' Brendan, it does ring a bell.

[zenzero]

Frined Somkid,
Body / mind are just the two ends of the same aspect. Body is the gross and mind is the subtle aspect.
Once we drop this only then can we understand the true nature of things including body / mind.
What are percieved by the mind is illusion / maya and never true.
Truth is not by perception but by living it.
love & rgds

[Willamena]

Originally Posted by zenzero

Frined Somkid,
Body / mind are just the two ends of the same aspect. Body is the gross and mind is the subtle aspect.
Once we drop this only then can we understand the true nature of things including body / mind.

I concurr. Realizing reality realizes them both as one.

Originally Posted by zenzero

What are percieved by the mind is illusion / maya and never true.

Depends on which "aspect" you are allocating truth. I would rather allocate truth to the reality in the line you said above.

The illusion is truly an illusion.

Originally Posted by zenzero

Truth is not by perception but by living it.
love & rgds

Perception is also "lived."

[Rolling_Stone]

I've never known an eye capable of seeing itself. An eye knows itself by the seeing, not the seen.