Liu
Well-Known Member
"Self" is awareness, it's just another word for it.
"I" is an abstraction of certain things that self is aware of. Mind (the thinking capabilities) creates it and normally identifies with it.
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[LHP] Why am I afraid?
- Thread starter Deidre
- Start date
"I" is an abstraction of certain things that self is aware of. Mind (the thinking capabilities) creates it and normally identifies with it.
godnotgod
Thou art That
If awareness equates to self, do insects possess self? For that matter, it is now thought that even atoms are conscious. Do they possess a self? How about plants?
In the case of humans, we can either think about what we see, (ie conceptualize), or we can see, without thought, what is, via conscious awareness. You say self and this awareness are one and the same, but awareness, unlike self, cannot be encapsulated via mind; it is not a finite thing or entity like self is thought to be. So what I am saying is that pure awareness without thought is not YOUR awareness; it is not confined to an individual self as mind and thought are when they come together in a personal view. What we think of as 'my awareness' is impersonal, though we sculpt it into 'I' with mind. IOW, it is universal consciousness, not personal consciousness.
OK, so you agree that 'I' is a concoction of the thinking mind that it identifies with, a condition formally called 'Identification'.
EtuMalku
Abn Iblis ابن إبليس
"The ego is the center of consciousness, whereas the Self is the center of the total personality, which includes consciousness, the unconscious, and the ego. The Self is both the whole and the center. While the ego is a self-contained little circle off the center contained within the whole, the Self can be understood as the greater circle."
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Carl Jung
Ego, in and of itself is the balance between Id (reptilian/animal/instinctual) Self and the Superego (inflated, megalomania, a delusion of grandeur) Self. A balanced, contained Ego is desired. Where the Ego can fail is when it is not Individuated (not individualized as I've read here a number of times, these two terms are different). It then becomes the reflection of our false self and not our true Self, a projection of our desires and our shadows (the non-individuated self). The WLHP is not to give up on or surrender the Ego, also not to overly focus on Ego, but to synchronize, synthesize, and expand Ego to reflect our Greater Self/GodSelf.
"Ultimate Self / Psyche / Soul: the locus of conscious being, a unique singularity that can only be identified and realized - not in defined terms of anything external. It is ethereal and distinct / apart from not just the objective universe, but even its own subjective universes."
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MIndStar - Dr. Lt. Col. Michael Aquino
_____________________
Carl Jung
Ego, in and of itself is the balance between Id (reptilian/animal/instinctual) Self and the Superego (inflated, megalomania, a delusion of grandeur) Self. A balanced, contained Ego is desired. Where the Ego can fail is when it is not Individuated (not individualized as I've read here a number of times, these two terms are different). It then becomes the reflection of our false self and not our true Self, a projection of our desires and our shadows (the non-individuated self). The WLHP is not to give up on or surrender the Ego, also not to overly focus on Ego, but to synchronize, synthesize, and expand Ego to reflect our Greater Self/GodSelf.
"Ultimate Self / Psyche / Soul: the locus of conscious being, a unique singularity that can only be identified and realized - not in defined terms of anything external. It is ethereal and distinct / apart from not just the objective universe, but even its own subjective universes."
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MIndStar - Dr. Lt. Col. Michael Aquino
the ego of Jung ect is different from the ego of Hindu theology in some important ways.
However Aquino's statements there about it are roughly similar to Trika's view of Anu's relation with Shakti and Shiva. It's the same general idea although some details are different. The "Aham" as a focus, and the LHP Kaula school of Trika, both focus on worldly, self/ego pursuits as means towards Shivagama.
Lol no, it isn't.
You are using double speak. I don't know what a "universal view of the self" is supposed to be here. Of course people have beliefs about anything even the self. we don't need to make it "universal" to accommodate every possible view or else there is no more beliefs just everyone nodding to each other and shrugging.
But of course the "as it actually is" is your view? Nah I'm done with the preaching.
I don't think I've ever claimed it provides a "universal view of the self".
Then stop arguing that yours are. You can spin it any way you want, but you are not arguing for "science" and if you are you shouldn't be doing it in a LHP only debate thread. You are arguing your belief system.
See I'm not trying to prove my religion is true, I'm only defending it against your attempts to discredit it by claiming that it leads to a conclusion that it has very well doesn't when all of the doctrine is accounted for.
Sorry I'm not going to answer nonsense questions like this.
It's telling that you quoted the portion that the Commentaries was contrasting as being unlike itself. You are still failing to grasp the fundamentals of my religion becuase the lower case self and upper case self are inherently one in the same. The Aham is not fake, it is real in Trika.
Not really so in Trika. the "Self" we could say is Shiva, the "self" we could say is Anu. Anu finds union with Shiva thrugh Shakti.
Trika - Wikipedia ( Anu, Shiva Shakti triad)
If you have any honest bone in your body you will be able to take that and maybe it will finally click what the Commentaries were getting at.
I'm sorry, but i can't continue this. You repeatably haven't really listened to anything I said. You don't have to agree with me but when you keep insisting on something about a religion mine or not that I've addressed a million times and keep failing to gain any better of an understanding of that belief system, you've lost your credibility with me. I'm sorry but I hate seeing a notification or email and then just a brickwall constantly responding back.
I'm just done, so done with all of this. I hate religious or political "debates" and I almost never post in them as it always becomes stuff like this. I didn't know this topic would get moved to the debates or I wouldn't of ever posted on it. I don't know how to turn off notifications for only when specific people quote me so please don't, I've already unfollowed the thread.
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godnotgod
Thou art That
LOL, yes, it is.
Everything arises from the Unified Field. Everything arises from Brahman, the Ground of All Being. Brahman is often referred to as Pure Consciousness; The Unified Field is now seen by many as Pure Abstract Intelligence. Brahman is the source of maya, the world; in fact, Brahman IS the world; The Unified Field is the source of all so-called 'material' reality. We now know that all such 'material' particles are in reality standing waves.appearing as material particles. The Universe is none other than Brahman, as seen through the glass of Time, Space and Causation; IOW, 'maya'.
To use the metaphor once again of the snowflake, water is the universal substance that all apparent snowflakes are made of. That each self takes on a unique pattern, would be it's Identification. Yes, there is a view transcendent of all beliefs. It is that view which sees things as they are. Not seeing things as they are is to mistake forms for 'things'. As regards to 'self', we make the mistake of seeing the mind-form we call 'self' as a real 'something'; an entity. The self is just a temporal manifestation of the underlying Reality of universal consciousness.
No, no shrugging, just instant recognition that we all see the same Reality. Why should it be any different?
If what I am saying about the self being an illusion, then how can seeing things as they actually are be a personal view? We either see things as they are, or as they are not. As long as we maintain personal views and belief systems, we cannot see things as they are. I mean, seeing things as they are is the goal of all endeavor to higher states of consciousness, is it not? We don't spend years meditating only to arrive at more beliefs about the true nature of Reality. No. If we are doing it correctly, we actually shed beliefs, opinions, concepts, etc. In Hindu terms, if the individual self realizes his true nature as being Brahman, and if Brahman is Pure (ie 'clear') Consciousness, then that equates to seeing things as they are. Seeing things as they are is to see into the nature of maya, and therefore to be free from it's spell, and that includes the illusion of self. We become free because there is no self to be free from. There is only the pure seeing of things as they are.
Uh, yes, you did. Do I have to go back and hunt it down?
Oh? I'm arguing a belief system? Which one is that? I SEE that the self is an illusion. Is that a belief? Beliefs are the product of thought. Seeing is an activity without thought. So where is the belief? Where is the doctrine?
I am simply saying that you are putting forth a view of the self as determined by your beliefs, which you make no bones about. Once again, I am not interested in your beliefs about the self; the interest here is to get to what the nature of the self actually is, employing unconditioned conscious awareness.
No, because it would put you in a position where you would have to admit that which your belief system won't allow you to admit.
Yes, the lower case self in Identification is none other than the upper case Self, but it has not yet realized it's true nature as Brahman, the Supreme Self. The lower case self is just a play of Brahman.
Bye!
My goodness! I didn't know such a simple inquiry into the nature of the self that most just either assume is real or attempt to qualify it's 'reality' via imposing the 'authority' of their belief system could be so unnerving.
But my question remains: If the self is an illusion, then who, or what is it that is afraid? The answer seems so simple to me that even a caveman.....
Liu
Well-Known Member
If they are conscious then they possess a self by definition in the terminology I use.
For the most part you still don't seem to have understood that it's merely a matter of terminology.
But regarding the point of universal consciousness:
Even what you call pure awareness is not universal as this awareness still only perceives those things that the body-mind-complex to which it is attached perceives, and even only parts of those (namely not those things that are subconscious).
There might be a unified universal consciousness on some level that includes all perceptions - that would be what you call Brahman and what Kapalika and me refer to as Satan or Shiva.
But as it is this universal consciousness seems quite segmented into myriads of consciousnesses of their own which all only perceive parts of reality.
Each of these parts still is the universal one but is for the time being confined to a specific body-mind-complex.
Such phenomena as tulpas and severe cases of multiple personality disorder, where more than one consciousness is linked to (parts of) the same body-mind-complex imply that this segmentation of consciousness might not be permanent but further splits (and therefore probably also merges) are possible.
Also paranormal abilities like telepathy (in which a consciousness perceives things outside its own body-mind-complex), and especially mystic experiences of oneness with all imply the same. But they are quite difficult to achieve and to verify.
godnotgod
Thou art That
So if even atoms are aware, that is to say via your definition, that they have self-nature, then that awareness must, by definition, be a universal awareness, since all things are composed of atoms. IOW, what we are talking about here is universal consciousness manifesting itself as all the various forms of the universe. You see that I have turned the imagery around. But in one sense you would be correct: atoms are none other than awareness itself, appearing as atoms, ie 'the material world'. I would agree with you in that respect. However now, Quantum Physics is telling us that what we call 'particle' is a function of the field, hence, 'field theory' is the new physics. From a scientific POV as well as a mystical POV, 'material particles' only 'exist' as a function of a common source. Science calls that source 'The Unified Field'; mystics refer to it as 'the ground of all being', Sunyata, Tao, etc. But in reality, these 'particles' are actually energy fluctuations generated by the field.
I think we are projecting our own illusion of self to say that atoms have a self-nature. In fact, no individual entity or 'thing' is conscious by itself;* any consciousness it exhibits is a universal consciousness projecting itself as individual consciousness, in much the same way that the field is projecting the particle. This is what Quantum Physics calls a 'superposition of possibilities'.
The following excerpt is from an interview of Sam Harris by Gary Gutting:
G.G.: You deny the existence of the self, understood as “an inner subject thinking our thoughts and experiencing our experiences.” You say, further, that the experience of meditation (as practiced, for example, in Buddhism) shows that there is no self. But you also admit that we all “feel like an internal self at almost every waking moment.” Why should a relatively rare — and deliberately cultivated — experience of no-self trump this almost constant feeling of a self?
S.H.: Because what does not survive scrutiny cannot be real. Perhaps you can see the same effect in this perceptual illusion:
It certainly looks like there is a white square in the center of this figure, but when we study the image, it becomes clear that there are only four partial circles. The square has been imposed by our visual system, whose edge detectors have been fooled. Can we know that the black shapes are more real than the white one? Yes, because the square doesn’t survive our efforts to locate it — its edges literally disappear. A little investigation and we see that its form has been merely implied.
What could we say to a skeptic who insisted that the white square is just as real as the three-quarter circles and that its disappearance is nothing more than, as you say, “a relatively rare — and deliberately cultivated — experience”? All we could do is urge him to look more closely.
The same is true about the conventional sense of self — the feeling of being a subject inside your head, a locus of consciousness behind your eyes, a thinker in addition to the flow of thoughts. This form of subjectivity does not survive scrutiny. If you really look for what you are calling “I,” this feeling will disappear. In fact, it is easier to experience consciousness without the feeling of self than it is to banish the white square in the above image.
G.G.: But it seems to depend on who’s looking. Buddhist schools of philosophy say there is no self, and Buddhist meditators claim that their experiences confirm this. But Hindu schools of philosophy say there is a self, a subject of experience, disagreeing only about its exact nature; and Hindu meditators claim that their experiences confirm this. Why prefer the Buddhist experiences to the Hindu experiences? Similarly, in Western philosophy we have the phenomenological method, an elaborate technique for rigorously describing consciousness. Some phenomenologists find a self and others don’t. With so much disagreement, it’s hard to see how your claim that there’s really no self can be scientifically established.
S.H.: Well, I would challenge your interpretation of the Indian literature. The difference between the claims of Hindu yogis and those of Buddhist meditators largely boil down to differences in terminology. Buddhists tend to emphasize what the mind isn’t — using words like selfless, unborn, unconditioned, empty, and so forth. Hindus tend to describe the experience of self-transcendence in positive terms — using terms such as bliss, wisdom, being, and even “capital-S” Self. However, in a tradition like Advaita Vedanta, they are definitely talking about cutting through the illusion of the self.
The basic claim, common to both traditions, is that we spend our lives lost in thought. The feeling that we call “I”— the sense of being a subject inside the body — is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking. The moment that you truly break the spell of thought, you can notice what consciousness is like between thoughts — that is, prior to the arising of the next one. And consciousness does not feel like a self. It does not feel like “I.” In fact, the feeling of being a self is just another appearance in consciousness (how else could you feel it?).
Sam Harris's Vanishing Self
*The primary problem here is that we mistake 'form' for 'things'. I think this error in logic primarily comes from our Judeo-Christian tradition which is the basis for much thought in Western culture, in which the world is a made 'thing', ie an artifact of a separate agent of creation. We even call that creative force 'The Maker'. So we see the universe as a collection of made 'things', rather than action-forms. For example, we call a wave-form a wave, as if it were a static 'thing'; we call water vapor forms 'clouds'; and frozen water forms 'snowflakes'. Then there is whirling water in the form of a whorl we call a 'whirlpool' and on and on. We say 'a tree is made of wood'. No, a tree is not made of wood; it IS wood. We say 'It is raining, where there is no such 'It' that rains. Once it is seen that forms are not things, a change in vision occurs. The Buddhist Heart Sutra sums up this change in vision as:
'form is emptiness;
emptiness is form'
...that is to say: all phenomena is empty of inherent self-nature.
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EtuMalku
Abn Iblis ابن إبليس
On Concerning Eastern and Western LHP
"In each position....Essentially it is the same as the end result is the deification of the Self. .. The difference is the path one transcends to sovereignty. ....BUT one misunderstood thing is that that true or altruistic God hood achievement is not ..well, altruistic.......since it is a continuous evolution of states of Being, one is just who and what they have become.
So, in the Western LHP, it can be many things.....or approached by many perspectives, thus completely subjective in the WAY in which you Move through it...... It can be rebellious, etc....and all fit where it becomes applicable to the Magician.
On the Eastern, it is the reversal of all orthodoxy. ....since there is no such devil, there is the demon god.....and vampire called Ravan....or named the Rakshas Raj (King of demons)....but even here, this epic story is RHP.....so to enable the LHP in the Eastern, one would look at Shiva as he is the destroyer/purifier simultaneously. ...if you look at the Saugus of India....the assume themselves as Shiva, thus going against all orthodox traditions because they ARE Shiva.....and again...completely subjective on your angle of approach.
A Sadhu states that he IS Shiva, therefore he does what he wants and makes a point by going against traditional hinduism.....that is why they are feared.....on youtube, if you search, there are a few, maybe two that show the life of a saudhu, but the light of the RHP is cast upon it.
Day for me, a Setian.....rather it is the ongoing relationship with the Self by the path of most resistance. .... So I think the difference is altruism of spiritual reversal vs real transcendence through evolutionary means......it is authentic
Personally I use Shiva since there are aspects that resemble Set. Since Set is the headless one, the force integrates into the Self to do Work. Any Setian can use any god/ess to work their Will..."
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A Priestess of the Temple of Set