European Holocaust had roots in Africa, now Namibia is suing Germany

There is no self beyond self image?
A High and Mighty Proclamation Norman!
Is such a belief not also the basis from which a death-cult Lords it over the living?
Because to such a belief – there is no love but only the Narcissus of its own fantasy gratification and a sense of dissonant interference to be shut out – and no Creation but what power MAKES so, and thus no joy extending as the reflected meaning of All That Is.

So what is that which sees self image?
It IS no object. Nor in truth is it subject and so is truly Sovereign. there is no ‘other’ because the extensions of God are one in all and all in one.
Lies may seem to add to reality – but who would say that what they add is true but the wish to live what they give.

Indeed you cannot ever get outside the source of awareness of your existence.
But the belief you are a split off thought is a lens through which to experience as not self, but thing.
And the belief you can (be) split off from the Mind is ‘body’ serving the purpose given it by mind.
This is ‘attack’ on your own awareness of true and so its reflection AS your subjection is made true by your own will. Or rather by a wish to which the true will is sacrificed. False wants that deny true desire.

For ‘self’ you can substitute ‘reality’. The split self in image is but an image of reality ‘split’ into parts by which you take part as the idea of limiting total loss as a sense of temporary existence.

To be of God in God and one with God you need do nothing. Your creation is given you, You do not make it. But you are like God a creator and if you create unlike the love that knows you truly – you will make strangers of your brother and and a strange world in which to struggle, suffer and die.
Thinking is creating but miscreative thought is a block to the signal. The ability to block communication is not a new form of communication by which God is dead, but a basis for a thought reversal in which “Everything is BACKWARDS; everything is upside down! Doctors destroy health, Lawyers destroy justice, Universities destroy knowledge, Governments destroy freedom, Major media destroys information, And religions destroy spirituality”. (Michael Ellner).

Because the usurpation of the true is so deeply learned or normalised – it is foolish to take God as self as any claim of self – but wiser to let God be all there is right where you are – and that for me is with you now.
The projection of the ‘lording ego’ onto God, Self, Being (words can only sign ify), is a kind of false flag of victimism by which to escape, or dissociate from awareness of consequence by assigning it to another or external cause. This ‘sacrifice’ is the basis from which the ‘justification’ for attack is claimed – such that the blind or loveless act is sanctioned by a sense of self righteous vindication.

“Your image is as close to yourself as you can be in conceptual terms”
From your own mouth, Norman.
Concept, curtains, carpets and blinds – is actually a shop in Aylsham – but is also true.
You cannot get nearer or further from yourself in concept – (but you can think so).
Our concept of self can be transparent or opaque to the truly felt knowing of being.

Thus the whole idea of self in concept is a ‘Self-forgetting’ development of dissociative thought – excepting that an unreal purpose can only serve the true, unknowingly. (ie God is not mocked) and the realignment of learned abilities to true purpose (joy will do) is their transformation from private properties to true service.

“the ‘self as it is in-itself’ can never coincide with the ‘self as imagined by the self,’ no matter how hard anyone tries.”

The ONLY way you can be out of alignment with your self is by trying to either get it back or get there.
Synchronity is a Given – but a negative synchronicity is a hidden – in that it presents as a sense of denial or deprivation to be restored from a past or attained in a future. This belief is the trial of a need-driven self instead of the alignment in true need-fulfilment or desire. You don’t have to try to be yourself – but if you have deep habits of trying under the conviction that its you alone that has to manage your reality – then a ‘you alone’ will try to take over what comes naturally to align and unfold your need. And before you quote horror stories to witness against love as the true of life, not the deep habits of fear are not in one mind alone – but an entanglement of shadows given power and attacked.

The nature of awakening is not the getting there, so much as the recognition one never left. This is the basis for living from the ‘Well’ of being rather than in a desert seeking possession of scarce resource.

The zero-point of which the positive and negative charge embody the forms of charge relations.
The zero-point is not a nothing so much as the unified nature in Stillness of Everything. But to a mutually polarised exclusivity the other is a see saw opposition of attraction and repulsion that as you say is always moving as if to rest in completion but never can. The light of stillness is the ‘zero point’ that is not the negation of being, but its source, nature and condition. Be still and know, is the willing relinquishment of ‘thought control’ to an Already Movement within being (not within time) – that you simply are and in which you recognize yourself perfectly . Love extends by its own nature to give as it is receiving. Just don’t get in your own way or ‘do nothing’ to either grasp or recoil from all that is , as it is.

Aspiration to the ego is getting for itself – to become more than it is by getting from others and getting one up on others.
But aspiration as the uncovering and sharing in truth and beauty is of a different order and there is no communication between them. To choose one is to let the other go. But truth can only be covered over. Untruth has no power but by denying the very source of its power – or rather, by inducing you to do so.
The horror of guilt is a fixation in sin. You may think you ‘know’ better than God (as we all do in presuming to know a world of our own judgement as reality itself and acting as if that is true), but the ego (thinking about) does not know anything, being the condition in which knowledge is made a private possession. This is running off with a copy and believing both the Prodigal (or Promethean) possession – and the wretchedness (or the torture) of guilt.

The willingness to be still, is the point of recognizing true from false. There is no need to work on the false or change it or love and understand it – just attend or align in what truly moves you.
I do align in an aspirational culture and I do not join with the race to the bottom. Love or awareness of the nature of being comes only to the willingness to share it. Love is (like God) a corrupted word, by thought substitutions of masking and mimicry. Love is the capacity to be with what is and recognize what is Real.
The extension of a true recognition is not our doing but it may of course be the undoing of what we thought we were or had become or been done to.

Fixating in hate and conflict is feeding it. I see we have to look upon terror when we are ready, so as to raise our eyes from slavery of fear’s subjection and look past it. Beneath the denied and suppressed fear is a ‘wellspring’ of spontaneity and joy of being. One might say that terror symbols guard the treasure – or an Angel with a flaming sword. You/ we are quite right not to trust y/ourself to create while in a state of split purpose. Limitation is appropriate to a harmful intent no matter how well intentioned.

It is more than feasible to me that humanity is winding itself up in a paralysis or living death under the ruse of false power. Recognising our choice is the freedom to make another. I remind you that we are beings of choice by living my own and honouring yours as the power of choice even if I don’t join with or agree in it. I see this as the only way to wake up. Give only what you would in truth receive.
Why the ‘in truth’? Because a sense of lack of worth will project to everyone else, see an unworthy world and give it hell. But as I hope is clear, I hold our true worth is an Inherence of being and not a personal attribute in a hierarchy of better and worse, higher and lower, along the measuring stick of judgement.

The voice for the feeling and knowing of being undoes the mind of its own spin. Not destructively, but as a willingness to wholeness of being. I am not talking politics but of an intimacy that aligns us differently in our capacity to relate – not least to recognise another as our self. Concept does not know love, being a substitution for it.

How extraordinary to call Sartre to bolster an argument.
The non existence of the self as a thing-in-itsef is not merely an idea to believe but a direct realisation that cannot be meaningfully described as it is pure experience and not ‘happening to anyone’ and so it is not an experience of anything else. Far from being an absence or lack of self, it is extension of self – even as idea is extension of mind through which self-awareness is – but not ‘separate’ thoughts’ to a ‘separate or split off self-sense’

The separate self sense or self imaged identity confusion is (the basis of) the capacity to conceive and perceive separated things and beings as if conflicting forces and meanings. But the capacity to believe and perceive something is not the establishing of its truth so much as telling a story and living in it. Truth is already true and so is given and not determined. However what you give out (self definition) is what you get back (experience) and so you are free to open perspectives of the already true (or the More of what and who you are) as your gift to yourself AND to the whole.

The seeming Silence, or peace of yielded or release to being is infinitely rich (I was going to say pregnant) – but like the beauty quote in the Curtis fiction article is a terror to the separate self sense.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry
of a darkened sobbing.

This describes the dilemma of a separated sense of self that IS undone in the presence of truth and hence is at war with truth to survive in its own terms. This embodies as the world experience of ‘the separate ones’ who are not in fact separate but are identified in image, symbol, thought and emotional result of such thought.

All thinking of the separate self sense is predicated on the body, the world and its use for separation (private agenda – albeit masked in public concern). Hence Jesus persisted in ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’ – which no one understood and thought it another world or an after death world rather than a healed perception of a perceptual distortion of the Only Thing Going On.

So I am not in any desire to prove what is evident by its fruits except so much as let it fruit through me as an expression of the qualities of being. The lie and the father of it is evident by its fruits. J says – and I hold true – that a house divided cannot stand. And so a unified consciousness reintegrated the separate self conflict.

If early Man posited Gods in immanent, and pervasive terms it was as the activation and development of the subjective consciousness – from which emerged a shift from the Mythic experience of archetypal structuring in ‘order and chaos’
to the more abstracted philosophical and historical sense of self as the inheritor of a world from which the Gods had departed, faded or become transcendent and abstract – although ritual forms persisted long after any sense of their origins – and still do.

The structure of consciousness in physical (out there in here) terms is not created so much as conditioned by trauma – from which we haven’t healed and are still reenacting upon ourself, our world and each other. This of course is biological embodiment or incarnation into what seems fixed and irrevocable conditions – that have corresponding fixed and irrevocable beliefs or indeed denials whose very nature is to be denied.

I write because I am alive with it – and life’s shares its qualities by simply being who you are and doing what is your joy or fulfilment to be doing. No one in the framework of the world as believed can make sense of this and yet no one really is IN the world. Mind or Consciousness is not IN the world. That is the reversal. But I am not talking about the split of subjective sense of ‘me’. That is our grown and learned construct through which to have such a conversation – and every other experience of relating as if through bodies, in symbolic and coded languages that nevertheless CAN be a vehicle of recognition in shared being – because when the separateness or armouring falls off – all that stands forth as the Obvious is shared being – call it what you want – or leave it unnamed.

The development of the ‘self’ and its abilities and cultural expressions is not unlike the patter of Saul’s (St Paul’s) life – in that all the abilities grown under a blind and yet zealous loyalty to an external authority became repurposed to serve a revealed Intimacy rising from the undoing of ‘self’ in direct revelation as the extension and recognition of true being
and not as idolised symbols, concepts or ritual observances.

Every movement of the Spirit into the defended illusion of a conflicted self seeking to project the conflict OUT and away that takes form as a movement, will be distorted by the weaponising and marketizing mind-set of the world. Ofter subverted into a masking by which to use the form for private agenda or getting for oneself at others expense.
hence the development of European culture had and has an underside.

However, I don’t join that such willingness as has been lived is invalidated because it was entangled with heartless wilfulness. Cynicism is itself a form of hatred. Everything in the ‘self’ and its ‘world’ we have made is an alloy of love and fear. The redeeming of our thought is the retaining and purifying of all that is true and the undoing or release of what never truly was. But this is the result of opening our thought (system) to the light of a present awareness, rather than hide our sense of self-possession in the dark. Sufficient unto the day be the evils thereof. That is, what comes up in your day and your life is coming up to be looked at for what its truth is. Then we are living a life aligned in joy that does not hide from the events or situations that seem to violate our peace and trigger conflicted reaction.

I don’t see a need to believe in God so much as to see the true of life in another and honour that. The belief that beliefs can be added is of course masking identity and these are generally seeking to offset hidden and fearful beliefs. Believing is seeing. Because we are collectively unwilling to open our beliefs to change we can only ‘see’ what they show us and so our freedom to open a fresh perspective is blocked while the pressure of increasing dissonance becomes overbearing. Actively believing against is a negative effect of something positively believed. The belief in evil as an act and a subjection is actively undermining of joy in being. is there another way of seeing than mimicking a judgemental god and his wrath? For whatever we act out is the revealer of what belief we actually and actively accept as our truth. Trying to believe is backwards and reveals that you don’t believe it. When you recognize the true of you there is no trying to ‘make it true’ or justify and prove your validity. All of that is just thinking as delay, diversion or procrastination. But once we see that we are free to make a new habit.

Norman, are you taking personally what is – as far as I am concerned a shared considering of ideas that either find merit or not. They do not have to claim exclusive personal rights!
I see a blatant self contradiction in your assertion of self in the asserting that it is only an illusion – albeit ‘supported by ‘authorities’. And I see it not as an invalidation of you but as an illumination of how the world works – or rather fails to work – and by design of a plausible deniability.

My interest is not in being the one to call another a self illusion so much as attracting and sharing ideas that reflect the nature of directly observed experience and recognition. This is my desire (hence the attraction) – but it need not be anyone else’s.

Words can be used to mean almost anything in different contexts and so for communication to occur there has to be a joining of minds in shared purpose. The conflicting purposes of conflicted and conflicting minds are effectively blocking a deeper quality of communication and so before I reread your post I feel to say that I share felt qualites that to be said must wear inadequate clothes – because verbal linear concept is inadequate to represent a wholeness that is greater than its parts.

Because there is only one ‘territory’ with infinite ways of mapping, seeing or choosing not to see it – or seeing something else instead. Our differences are not in ‘Fact’ but in approach. So no problem on my part if we do not find a resonance within which to share ideas together as an illumination of the actual territory – whatever we call it and however it is framed.

I’m an inside out approach. My sense of self/reality have been undone many times in many ways such that I care not to make life in my own image but open to life moving me, so I don’t engage in thinking about life so much as letting life think me. As with making music, the creative is the art of allowing what truly moves to find a clearer expression by getting out of my own way.

Selflessness by my witness, opens to direct experience of selfulness, that once accepted instead of the interjection of ‘control’, naturally extends or radiates as joy and the acts of inspired being rather than the justifications of a sense of grievance and lack. At the level of my person I am always a beginner – because from any moment of recognition that I have identified ‘personally’ – that is in reaction, I am in the journey of willingness from selfishness to self-fulness – which by the way is always a shared state of being.

I will read properly what you read later. I respect your person because of who made it and yet I only join with what I find and accept true so as not to strengthen the false in myself or you.

Ok I read your response.
‘My’ self says and that it. End of communication.
My Dad used to have that sort of idea of a discussion. I would say something and after a bit he would say his bit and then shut down – and no actual communication was allowed beyond that.

I hold that what we are has and is the capacity to accept beliefs of self definition relative to any other idea, quality of existence or symbolic modelling of world, by acting as if they are true and having a the experience of self reinforcement resulting from that ‘choice’. But having done what we accept will determine our experience until we change our mind. This does not have to be via death. The beliefs we accept about our mind can in effect lock us into an incapacity to see or know anything outside the chosen limitations of a self-reinforcing experience – until we change our mind about our mind. The word ‘choice’ here is a truth that is only uncovered by a recognition of the current set – as a choice – albeit running as a default or habit from learned response that unexpectedly arose from unwatched or ‘idle’ thinking. Choices can include madness and death as a strategy of evasion, escape or denial. Both effectively abnegate the will.

It is said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing – but that is in terms of the framing of the possession and use of knowledge for private agenda. Knowledge in the spiritual sense is total, without degree or range – because nothing is withheld or hidden from what you are but by our own framing of life in terms of defended identity.
The idea of knowledge as a way to gain private possession of, and power over is the split into FORMS taken from the ‘Knowing’ that are re-contextualised to serve such agenda. Hence knowledge in the world of such contest is not freely shared.

In rejecting part of wholeness, one rejects ALL of it, and this is not recognized in a world of conflicting bodies – each assigned and assigning a personality to each other.
All the Kings whatever can never put Humpty together again – and that is the intent – to abide in perpetual war under failure by design as the condition of gaining funding (support) for the false promise of answers that perpetuate the belief in conflicted separation.

The practical result of noticing and owning this is the abandon futility now.

I used Stillness as a term for a light in and of which all illusion of motion occurs. The still point of the turning world.
You have no problem in relating through the computer screen metaphors, as if you actually ‘go to a site’ or open a folder or drag a file – because the whole experience is created for you AS an interface to machine translations. Within a virtual reality all such screen interactive shortcuts become ‘natural’ language and thought – as if we actually are IN the machine given framework of inputs and outputs.

Perhaps our difference is that my sense of self/world is a limitation constructed within a higher or more Inclusive Consciousness – while yours is a sense of evolving from inanimate interactions of ‘random’ happenstance over billions of years that provides the prequel for your self/world to operate without a divine intent – and thus moral integrity is replaced by management of the personal identity – and that is the world we have co created by wanting it true.

To want to be different from what you are is to hold a different intent from the Only or Divine intent that Mind unalterably is as the revealing of the visibility and tangibility of You.. If you are not beholding it Good – is it because you have gone forth and multiplied ideas of conflict and division that effectively limit your capacity to recognize your Self – anywhere?

The considering of ideas – or indeed what anything is – is always determined by the active desire and intent. The idea of discernment is of the extending of true meeting a resonant match.

I see the machine or the personality structure or the body or the world as a vehicle THROUGH which communication occurs – with the nature of communion as the core quality of the exchange. I also see the development of the structure of such a self/world as the result of a breakdown in communication that is experienced as a physical separation and limitation because of what the body is used FOR.

How can anyone notice what they use the body FOR when they live under the dictate of such a wish fulfilled?

You are never unconscious. It is simply that whenever you resume your focus in the physical sense, none of the More of who and what you are is translatable to such terms or acceptable to the maintaining of a solid sense of self and world – which is called sanity but is really a stability of focus relative to the current needs of balancing with the whole.
Stability and reliability are not necessarily validity. The resort to a ‘static’ or frozen sense of self in defence against feared change is the building up of dissonance as crises that will bring down the whole ‘worldview’ regardless how reliably the belief operated up to that point.

My reference to ‘Stillness’ is as the inherent quality from which all things arise new. This is the gift of the ‘living now’ in place of a persistence in time as the carrot and stick of a tyrannous mind.
Stillness can only ‘speak your true name’ because it is Source nature of all that is true of you.
The nature of Stillness is in every loving thought as the disposition of radiance and gratitude for being.
The Timeless is without parallel in a world of time and so cannot be conceived but only accepted BY extending it.
Now is the closest approximation in this world to Eternity and our experience of time can be an edgeless now or flow of relational being in act. From a different premise we may feel we have no time at all because now has been sacrificed to deadlines and dictates of dissociative (subjective) thinking. Restoring the mind to unified purpose is the way to find the time you need for what you most need. Playing out conflicted drama is the dogged persistence in both wilfulness and obstruction (they are the same thing).

I write perhaps to those who alight in a resonance of their own interest and not specifically as a personal engagement with you Norman. You can very clearly describe the problem in the world – but I do not see the problem is really IN the world but in how we see ourselves in relation to our world and each other. Of course let common sense prevail while enquiring more directly of our thinking – because we cannot relate to anyone else BUT through our self – excepting of course as a self illusion.

Hello Norman – I went to reply to your last one and the page didn’t offer any options to reply so I thought you’d been assigned the final judgement 😉

I cant need anyone else to accept anything they are not already open or opening to. Nor can I need not to be misunderstood . It goes with the territory (human experience).
I don’t have the option to believe the physical version of existence that you operate under. Nor the right or the power or the wish to change anyone’s mind – although of course in a world of change everything is already changing (even if to replicate itself to seem the same).

The difference is you posit consciousness in the body as an effect of the body and I hold the body to be a stepped down translation consciousness through physical symbol – that is backed by extreme emotional charge by the way.
The power of terror to divide and rule in the world you are aware of. I have witnessed and travelled some of the territory of this within or beneath what I took to be myself and world. Hence I see our ‘beliefs’ as being essentially psychic emotional defences or strategies of survival – under an extreme but masked over and hidden sense of threat. Otherwise we would simply be psychotic or perhaps driven to question everything including the self and body we take to be our very life.

So I experience consciousness as a communication through the body. In that sense we are channels that can be open as the flow of relational experience or closed in the private struggle played out upon relationships as a sense of getting from them or trying to get away from them or get them out of my world etc.

The simple metaphor is the tv set. I don’t see the people on tv as IN the tv.
The tuning is the determiner of the channel you align in as your current experience.
Fear thinking (which can of course mask in forms of caring or concern) seeks and finds the witnesses to its case.
Love’s thinking – which is transparent to the giving and receiving of honour and worthiness to the truth of others and our world, are shared thoughts. The desire to be helpful one day as a result of suffering something one cant overcome will suddenly shift focus from the body and its trapped self to a relational integrative appreciation for being. This is an immediate change of channel and the symptoms of the ‘problem’ may likewise fall away quickly or slowly or be experience as a peripheral or purely practical matter instead of suffering as if besieged by them.

But I embrace the physical experience as no less spiritual and as a vehicle of a more inclusive Consciousness that is aware THROUGH its extension and reflection of experienced idea. Just as your thinking reflects who you currently hold yourself to be as your experience or perspective upon existence.
So I see the mind IN the body idea as the failure to fully incarnate in collapse and contraction upon itself in a clench whose dissociation of a subjective mind defends against re-living the trauma of a loss of support and capacity to abide an overwhelmingly negative experience.
To notice the use (accepted purpose) of the body from body-as-separator, body as symbol for frail and limited consciousness, body as dumping ground for unresolved conflict, etc and shift to body as communication device – across the whole spectrum of its perceptual range – is the opposite of the so called broad spectrum dominance that seeks to shut down our chakras, block out all higher communications and set causation in reversal as the physical subjection of its own maker. Ie; As control over life rather than allow life to communicate the flowing balance points within wholeness for the purpose you are focused in. The anti-life or evil that we witness and experience (and have participance in) is the logical result of accepted premise. All logic operates on some metaphysical assumption or acceptance and as they say – garbage in, garbage out. So to that point if we have garbage in, the call is to ‘reverse engineer’ the experience to identify the nature of the garbage in. (Or incomplete understanding running as if whole truth and defended against new inputs – ie; not hearing or seeing anything except what the beliefs that they they act from, allow.

If you frame it all differently and that works for you – then we both meet in a willingness to be of service to the whole in honouring the person regardless of agreement and have some intersect of ‘circles’ through which something alive occurs! In the measuring mind some effects are considered significant and others not so – but sharing life Is significance and is the context in which and through which we may arrive at honourable outcomes instead of loss of humanity to manipulative deceit that then manifest in such madness as the title of the page here.
What we bring to our relations is our currency however we find our own way to support living it. Therefore we do not have to agree or even seek agreement to share purpose and grow in living it. This is not the unity of getting everyone to be or do or conform or comply to the same anything. And I see that it is covered over by fear and the manipulation of fear.
Not just in the world, but as the nature of my own sense of consciousness. Humanity is generally not truly conscious but all presume to be – (except when you are asleep 😉 Divide and rule is effected against those who are already divided and ruled – what does that suggest as an awakening self responsibility to be unavailable to deceit?
Question more is a start, but a desire to truly know – rather than be deceived, is a willingness to question everything. This is a spirit of science that can no less be brought to our daily lives; the desire to uncover that which is already true – in place of sitting on the fence as if there is a fence.

If I write too much at a time. just alight in any portion in willingness, and leave it if its becomes a chore. Struggle is sign of doing what you do not want. My sense is, if we are to do something, find a way to consciously do it – or wear our life away under tax of burdens that need not be. I don’t know it matters if the sudden recognition of being on purpose instead of conflicted purposes is a result of a ‘higher communication’ finding a way in or the synergy of your life force lining up those neurons… or course, both.

So . . . you believe in God. Check. I don’t.

You believe that I don’t have a Soul, but am a Soul. Check. I don’t.

I believe that I am a flesh and blood human endowed with a continuously changing consciousness, one that is in its movement, or qualities, or patterns of activity, determined or shaped by matters of inheritance (i.e., biological replication, you know, that I had parents and that I am their offspring and that much about my person derives from that) and the social contexts of my upbringing and current living, as well as by my personal strivings or intentions

Question: what is the status of the human body or ‘material’ world in relation to both the Soul and God? Does the one depend upon the other for its existence? Is there something like a separation of realms? Are they to some degree independent from one another? Is there a difference between ‘materiality’ and ‘spirituality,’ between Souls-and-God and ‘matter?’ My sense is that you hold to some kind of dualism, as pertains ‘matter’ and ‘Spirit.’ Do you or don’t you, Binra? A simple yes or a no would suffice. For me, the answer is no. For me, there is no consciousness, no mind effect, without ‘body,’ so that the one is an aspect of the other, both amounting to a single indissoluble process, which is itself embedded in and an expression of other processes that together comprise the whole of the universe at a given instant, in the now, the eternal present.

Question: how do you establish your certitude of the existence of God as the creator of all, when all you have to go on is, on the one hand, the world of phenomenal appearance, and, on the other hand, your very fallible and limited human capacities for thought and reasoning?

How do you know that your ‘belief’ in God and the human Soul, as integral and unified existents, is not a mistaken ‘belief,’ Binra? I mean, you do spend a lot of time emphasizing the difference between ‘belief,’ which may be mistaken, and ‘truth,’ which pertains to reality as it is in-itself, that is, as distinct from what anyone may ‘believe’ to be the case. So how do you establish the “fact” that your belief about God and human Souls is ‘true,’ while mine is ‘false?’ What is the touchstone of true belief when it comes to ascertaining the existence of God, Binra? Is your certitude more than a circumscribed human belief? Or has God revealed Himself directly to you?

You twist and turn and evade, Binra.

Belief informs experience, and it does. And belief can lead astray, can be in its very inception astray on the basis of its founding premises or metaphors. We both agree.

But you assert the existence of God, Whom you are not and Who created and creates the whole of ‘reality’ as it discloses itself to human awareness, to your awareness, a whole not embraceable in all of its myriad and concrete details by a mind circumscribed in ‘perspectives of beliefs’ and in the midst of which such a mind struggles to maintain itself in existence, but a whole which is nevertheless ascertained by a process of deduction to exist.

So either you affirm God’s existence as a unitary being, or you do not. There is no in between: it’s ‘yes,’ He exists, and is a reality onto Himself and apart from the object that is His creation, or it’s ‘no,’ He does not exist (not that I know of), and the world is the ground of its own being and I myself, as all other organisms, am a manifestation of that being and of that ground.

The sum is either God AND reality, a duality, or reality WITHOUT God, a unity comprised of imbricated and interpenetrating processes, many of which are accessible to human discernment, manifesting varying degrees of ‘freedoms’ or ‘existential coherences,’ some of which humans have or can potentially objectify as though they were self-subsistent and unitary ‘things,’ as for example, that there is an ‘I’ that is not ‘you,’ and thus to some extent ‘evolves’ or ‘behaves’ in ways that are “independent” from the course of your own evolution or behavior, ways that are unaffected by some of the effects you concretely induce in the world that we both inhabit.

You write:

“The mainstream mafia frame their targets with ‘simple yes and no’ in order to reinforce their framing as the mind of the viewer.”

Really?

So what? Yes, God exists? But, no, He also does not exist? Or He sort of exists but not really? He sort of creates the world and all creatures in the world, but not exactly?

Or is it that you affirm and disaffirm the existence of God at the same time, Binra? Perhaps you do, and you are content with this mode of “reasoning.”

To me, as a member of the so-called mainstream mafia, something cannot both “be the case” and “not be the case.” Either God does or does not exist.

Yes, He exists. Or no, He does not exist. One or the other, Binra, but not both, objectively speaking, eh? Though it may be difficult to formulate in words what we take the nature of that existence to be, or not to be.

Otherwise, you waffle, are undecided, do not know in your own mind what you believe. Which is just fine. But then the situation comes down to these possibilities: God exists; God does not exist; I don’t know that He does or not, and so it remains an open question for me; or, I don’t know that He exists, can’t see how I could know that He does, therefore I do not affirm His existence, which is tantamount to disaffirming it, or saying, “no, I do not believe that He exists and thus live my life as if, to all intents and purposes, He does not exist.”

You write:

“There is no thing-in-itself but only a concept taken out of context that is given power AS IF it speaks for who we are!”

I agree. But there is a reality that exists independently of what I may imagine that reality to be, and whatever it is, it isn’t a world populated by self-subsistent entities in interaction with one another, but ‘processes’ that roughly cohere to a degree that permits us to metaphorically represent these seemingly distinct processes to ourselves in conceptual models, as poetic metaphors, as intergrated structures or unitary entities, as things-in-themselves, providing we keep in mind that the ‘things’ we ‘objectify’ conceptually as things-in-themselves are no such ‘things,’ though ‘conceptualizing in this fashion,’ as we model the world to ourselves in our attempts to comprehend it or aspects of it, is the mode of human thought.

So we agree, then, after all, that the ‘self,’ as an in-itself, as an object, as a ‘thing,’ is in reality no such ‘thing,’ but as such, as ‘experienced,’ is an ‘illusion?’

“So we agree, then, after all, that the ‘self,’ as an in-itself, as an object, as a ‘thing,’ is in reality no such ‘thing,’ but as such, as ‘experienced,’ is an ‘illusion?’”

All experience is ‘illusion’ but illusions can reflect the extension of true or the blocking of the extension of true. Experience can be incoherent and dissonant or transparent to its source and nature – for underneath every experience is the definitional context of which it is an effect or result.
An awareness of thought at any level is witness to the creative nature OF thought as our own. We are no less ‘thought’ than our own creations. We are not self-existing awareness somehow encapsulated in a non-thinking universe, world or body. But a sense of private or hidden thought is implicitly part of generating such a hiding place.

An illusion is not a thing-in-itself but the result of mind or projector of non physical qualities to tangible and visible quantities. The representation is NEVER the true of what is being represented but can reflect is such that truth awakens from split identification in imaged forms to acceptance and expression of wholeness. In this sense mind is a mirror that holds no intent but functions as reflection. Creation prior to manifestation in psycho-physical terms is non physical and timeless and takes no time at all. But experience or feeling-knowing perspective of and within Creation is a Universal construct or Idea through which to create structure through all of which a total experience is shared through many interactive and complementary facets under one purpose of creating.

The capacity to experience opposition is a world of choice not unlike the story of Job and Jesus. It isn’t that Job was punished (any more than Jesus), but that the persistence through the temptation to self-illusion became a conscious choice and consciousness opening a direct awareness at a higher or more inclusive and embracing (non physical) Order, within which the sense of world as a separate thing from the Heavens above (symbol for non-physical) is undone and fades to an intimacy of being in which even ‘attackers’ are seen as thoughts that know not what they do. But Jesus did not lay down the body as a mere illusion, but undid the illusion of its capacity to pass off as if true from the bottom up. And the releasing of any sense of separate ‘will’ in the context of relational being, culminated in release of the body and the concerns of the body as a symbol of a cup given back to the source of its filling.

The many mansions of being are multidimensional relative to the physical dimension of a linear time space experience and any attempt to define them necessarily renders them in physical terms such as the light body or etheric body. These maps are maps, but they are pointers to a tangibility of existence at higher vibratory rates than our consciousness is generally or currently able to integrate. Higher is not ‘better than’ as if there is somewhere else to be or become or get to or away from. Contra to such beliefs it is by being exactly where and who you are now that your ‘vibration’ shifts to a more integrated and aligned expression of who you truly are – (which is inseparable from all that truly is). Learning to pay attention to the quality of our conscious appreciation is part of reclaiming the freedom to be and share in it. Relational being is the nature of self – there is no self outside or without relationship – even if the experience is of denying true relation by the intent or attempt to get something from them believed lacking in ourself.

“That we may be condemned to retain a self we no longer have an evolutionary utility for: and we ‘scientifically’ know is an imaginal illusion is illogical. Just as it is illogical for the Cartesian materialist ‘scientist’ to undermine their entire training and embrace the logic of freedom.”

Indeed. Although in qualitative terms, we may be unable to substantially modify the pre-conceptual aspects of perception, that is, the manner of integrated sense perceptions as such, which may be, so to speak, hard wired into us, nevertheless, the cultural reflexive overlay that also and indubitably conditions the seeming ‘transparency’ of what appears to us to be the “direct revelation of reality” inherent to our perceptions can certainly be changed and deliberately so, as psycho-linguistic interpretation is accessible to ‘relfection’ and ‘critique’ and, therefore, to intentional cultural modification. In other words, self-consciousness, the experience of “me” and “I,” as “we” experience it under the influence of our cultures’ dominant ontologies and metaphysics is in fact modifiable to the degree that concepts or beliefs inform that experience. In other words, as Sam Harris and others aver, the subjective experience of humans is tunable on a scale that extends from hyper-egocentrism to a sensibility shorn the ego, of the “me,” of the “I.” And if that is in fact true and that these sensibilities are products of enculturation, then we can strive to educate ourselves into one or another kind of sensibility settling somewhere on this scale of possibilities.

More grist for the discussion so far:

The idea of unity has been centred upon a self set over and against not only others, but as a narrative continuity over its own minority reports. I refer to the rhyme of Humpty Dumpty as the idea of kings putting order over chaos.
That the identification of such a self set in reaction against a feared or unrecognised ‘otherself’ is already the loss of unified awareness to an attempt to unify an experience of chaos FROM unrecognised result of identifying in the illusion of power, and thereby forgetting the power of illusion.

The always already true is hidden by programming of reactions that operate so automatically as to seem beyond our power to challenge. Such a mapped out sense of ‘self’ survival becomes the human condition. Only the insane would question it… except the result of such ‘self-survival’ programming is an insane and insanely destructive world – that likewise seems overwhelming and ‘done to us’.

But all experience OF anything physical or of the physical sense is necessarily polarities of expression.
The recognition that this experience is within and of the Consciousness that beholds it, is the balancing of poles within the wholeness of a centred and expanded or embracing perspective.

And so the awakening or re-awakening to Consciousness in place of developing a segregative and coercive and conflicted consciousness, is the flip to a reintegrative movement of being.

Thinking how things are can be prompted and aligned to the desire of truth be known – and so any enquiry or endeavour of discovery can be a vehicle of opening to accept true and align in it by acting from what is recognised. But thinking how things are can also be directed and dictated by a wish to define, predict and control BORN of a fear of loss in lack (of power).

If Science looked at its active purpose instead of presuming to a be a ‘self’ outside and above and therefore a capacity to leverage and manipulate it mapped out life, it may see that much of what passes as ‘science’ is a scientism under technologism – owned and directed by the will to power over life and the world it sees as defining life. Human subjective thinking is our first ‘technology’ and is itself reinforced and developed by the tools of its expression.

True thinking is not a private agenda – but while we experience a capacity for private agenda we have created choice as to which purpose we are accepting by acting from alignment in. Until there is even the capacity to pause reaction and question as to what the act embodies the beliefs of – there is nothing but a living tool – which is another term for slave in terms of Plato’s cave.

The identification in the known is not what you/we think, and the abiding in the unknown is where self-revelation arises without or before a thought about it.

The clinging to the devil we know is the too big to fail, because our investment in it is a fundamentalism.
The choosing of evils instead of the ‘unknown’ is the projection of our deepest (and therefore unconscious) fears set against a sacrifice that hateful as it is, ‘protects’ from total loss – in the framing of the thinking of the devil we know. There’s the rub!

[This comment was previously posted 01/09/18: this is a reply to Norm].

Thomas Metzinger frames the key question: “Will we be able to navigate through this, between cynical materialism and fundamentalism?” In the earlier video, he frames another key question: “Whose will is it anyway?” His conceptual thinking seems to come from very much inside the authoritarian Cartesian materialist ‘box’ …a ‘box’ or ‘container’ (conceptual structural framework) that a more radical interpretation of the same data set evaporates away.

He mentions Buddhism, but is clearly not a Buddhist: yet neither are the core teachings of Buddhism the sole intellectual property of the Buddha and Buddhists [that is a Western Cartesian capitalist ‘property rights’ categorisation] – they constitute and contribute to a universal humanitarian knowledge that cannot be ‘boxed’, still less ‘contained’ …or even less ‘controlled’. They offer a radically altered conceptual structural framework to interpret the same data set …from self to selflessness.

This brings me back to my key contention: do we allow a rigid scientific or philosophical determination of a potentially selfless humanitarian consciousness into something that may be alterable from the outside – a technochratic scientifically-designed Huxleyian dystopia – or do we take upon ourselves the (hallucinated) agency of our own potentially selfless-determination?

Metzinger seems well aware of the military or authoritarian capture of consciousness control (the consequences of which are unconscionable and need no further contemplation): but seems unaware that the seeds of a permanent solution to authoritarian capture – a universal humanity in a federated community of equals – are also predicated by the radical re-interpretation of the same facts. So, whose will is it anyway?

I cannot answer without referring to the core teaching of the Buddha – pratitya samutpada – as presented in the Mulamadhyamakakarika by Nagarjuna. The Folk metaphysic is that the object of my present consciousness is independently existing (en-soi or in-itself) and ‘my’ (pour-soi) consciousness represents both the object and my reflexive self-awareness back to me (Husserl’s ‘reflective arc’). Pratitya samutpada says object and consciousness are “co-dependently arising”. Cognitive neuroscience, at least when the likes of Francisco Varela interpreted it, agrees.

The philosophical implications are enormous: seemingly way beyond the ken of Metzinger …if followed through – there is no authoritarian box left to contain our common humanity. The absolutised structural framework of the hierarchical self-cage ceases to have its authoritarian rigidity; and loses its ontological containment possibility. Pratitya samutpada shows us that all ‘independent’ and Kantian ‘in-itself’ (en-soi) phenomena are in fact interdependent, inter-penetrative, and co-mutually existent. Which of course, includes Being – which Thich Nhat Hanh has beautifully reframed as ‘interbeing’ …I am that you are (and dialectically vice versa).

Expand from this foundation and we have the core philosophy of mutual aid and interdependence …a universal humanity and will to the people to end all categories of identitarian sectarianism, authoritarianism, and the instrumental agency over Nature: all the ultimate manifestations of the ‘hallucinated’ Cartesian will.

This is the briefest sketch of radical humanitarian interpretation of what the neuroscience seems to be confirming (to be clear, it does not matter whether science does or does not confirm Buddhist phenomenology – which is, in effect, a liberational heuristic conceptual system, that has stood the test of time with or without the scientific verification). To consider the interpretation from inside our common consensual Cartesian box – the capitalist recapture and recuperation, if you will: I must look at Metzinger’s key contention that the will (an aspect of the self) is “hallucinated” and therefore an ”illusion”.

I wish you had not picked a German, because other psychologist/philosopher’s are saying this (Hood and Harris’ interpretation alludes; Dennet’s, Pinker’s, Dawkin’s and Peterson’s are more explicit) …but here is a potential emergence of nascent consciousness eugenicism. To prevent this: we need to reclaim the language. We need to separate the conventional from the prajnaparamita perfection of wisdom: where the self is indeed illusory and ‘hallucinated’ experiential gestalt. Human will and agency can be said to ‘exist’ as part of our experiential wisdom: whether that is ultimately metaphoric or not.

To construct a conceptual framework of ‘no-self’, or the ‘self-illusion’, or still worse: the ‘self-hallucination’ – is dangerous beyond the extreme. It is the greatest tool power could ever create: which is why we need the humanitarian approach …an approach which Buddhism is founded on: which could be the transcendent (selfless) humanitarian cultural lens the neuroscience should be interpreted through?

In Cartesian semantics: the very nature of the language is binary – one polar concept is given meaning only by its binary opposite. The concept of ‘no-self’, for instance, is not the negation of ‘self’: but its perpetuation (Absolutisation)…certainly in the conceptualisation of Metzinger, Harris, and Hook et al. This is the same trap that phenomenology, philosophy, and science have been falling into for around a century now. To use one of Bruce Hook’s concepts: we realise we have come to the “neural edge” of our self-imposed limits of knowledge: an imaginal boundary our very way of conceptualising cannot cross. We rebound back into the Cartesian Absolute: and even contend that we are stuck with the concept of self we cannot seem to shed. Or worse, consign it to hallucinatory annihilation.

To evolve beyond the Cartesian ‘neural edge’ of our own self-limiting conceptualisation: Nagarjuna proposes the middle way …to free our universal humanity from the tyranny of polar absolutes. He proposes an alterity of consciousness that neither affirms nor denies the self: and recognises that it is neither fully objective, nor fully subjective (oppositional binary absolutism) but fully sunyata (‘empty’ or ‘selfless’), humanitarian and experiential. A true ‘self’ that is equally informed by its own subjectivity and relative objectivity – the experiential ‘selfless-self’ (though I must be incredibly circumspect in trying to define the non-conceptual and nondual …in this respect, ontology becomes absolutising metaphysical mythology).

From the secular point of view: Lakoff and Johnson have done the legwork in “Philosophy in the Flesh” …where they propose an ’embodied realism’ that uses the self as a conventional metaphor. This is a secular psycho-linguistic ‘middle way’. It makes little sense to say “I am you” and our realities are inter-penetrative and inter-dependent …even though that might be closer to the truth. Or to posit that there is neither time nor distance between us: true, but time and distance are damn good metaphors to explain your lack of proximity to ‘me’! The philosophical question is: “Do we control the language, or do we let the language control and define us”?

As for will: if not to the illusory self, whose will is it? A humanitarian interpretation would be that it is the peoples …if we ever develop a communal community consensus reality? If not the will to self: rather than treat it as ‘hallucinatory’ (with all the negative ramifications that entails) …the will to selflessness becomes the will to the community of mutual aid. Humanity inherits its own autonomous agency? It does not potentially ‘hallucinate’ it away (the potential ideological re-interpretation inherent in Metzinger’s viewpoint. To be clear, I am not saying that Metzinger himself is such an ideologue …but it is not hard to see how his views could be spun?)

Does that mean that ‘my’ identity is subsumed and ‘I’ am ‘lost’as part of the ‘Borg collective’: or am ‘I’ just socially conscious and radically responsible? If all experience is interdependent: just whose experience is it anyway …is it not in reality already shared and communal? It needs only to be interpreted in that way: not framed into nihilistic non-existence by the Cartesian Absolutist dictatorship of the scientific machine-mind?

As to the degree of ‘my’ autonomy: that rather depends on the collective community autonomy and self-determination and my participatory democratic rights within it? Do ‘I’ have ‘my’ full say? In this light, we’ve seen what cynical materialism can do; we know what totalitarian fundamentalism can do; but we have no real idea what mutual aid and collective communal social responsibility can do …yet? Given the ‘humanitarian bottleneck’, with which I fully concur with Metzinger we are already facing: it’s selfless mutual aid or barbarism.

I’d like to say it is the obvious solution: but we have shown little rational behaviour in the last 4,000 years …philosophy has a lot to answer for! At 57 minutes past the eleventh hour: can we evolve a radically humanitarian philosophy? Can militant Cartesian materialists – working in elite special interest classes – exchange dualism for the non-conceptual and nondual? Only if they/we are willing to interpret the neuroscientific data with the (nondual) radical openness that the data itself suggests. This requires a radically new humanitarian science. And a radically new universal humanity.

It is my hope the unconscionable consequences of a continued mechano-materialist-dualist dictatorship of mind will sway the debate toward a new selfless humanitarian Will and Reason …that sweep aside the evolutionary redundant Cartesian machine-age equivalents. From this juncture, it is hard to say that with any real conviction: but where there is the evolutionary universal humanitarian Will …there is a Way …

Descartes said “I think therefore I am.”
I hold this wide open to misinterpretation. Because any who think they are thinking take it as a witness to their existence – while they are effectively blanking their mind of any true presence to maintain a sense of private self – at odds with others and set against the whole. Is this thinking of is it mind-capture by deceit? It is the surface currency of society as illusions of joining that never actually do. Identities of belonging that are framed by what is excluded or focused in exclusive terms.

What is the ‘I’ that believes it ‘thinks’?
Is it in any sense whatsoever separable from the thought?
What is the nature of such ‘thinking’?
Is it in fact a cause of anything or a reinforcing after effect.
Did I type this or am I claiming a power that I do not in fact have alone, believing it and acting as if true?
How much of our lives is under the control we cling to as power or protection, and how much is it in a sense given us.
The mind seeks to maximise its sense of control as a sense of security. Is it in fact real or a demanded illusion.
Is a demanded illusion different from self survival?

The thought we focus in or hold and give or live from is the determiner of the nature of our ‘I’ sense.
the term ‘I’ or self can mean any of many shifting levels of focus and experience.
When enough people get stuck in the same place they call it reality.
Or rather when ideas are mutually reinforced to be a dominant theme it operates as a current reality.

If the term ‘we’ is used with regard to human cultural developments of unfolding trend in to the future, is it a ‘we’ in the sense of a presumption of plurality and of consensus or collective beliefs? How much of current belief has been socially engineered by those who align in and seek to maintain a sense of power over future outcomes?
Does social engineering work past a short term? Or does the manipulation of denied fear bring it to the surface awareness so much that the function given them by those who desire unconsciousness (protected from deeper fears) is no longer being maintained and so more of what was unconscious is being exposed – along with the devices by which it was hidden?

Part of my sense of humanity is that the surface reality is made as a denial of the undercurrent – although the undercurrent remains active , it is effectively denied or suppressed by the intent to enforce order over feared chaos which includes any sense of potential threat to that which aligns in the idea of power and protection against dispossession. No one wants to lose and so many elect to sacrifice some in order not to risk losing all that then becomes a basis for the few to capture the system of collective distribution under state social law enforcement.

As for mutual cooperation, consider loving Life as the Source and Nature of your existence perfectly – that is embrace your existence instead of trying to reject and control part of it as your private or secret life.
And love another as yourself in that as you give so shall you strengthen and grow in yourself, so give only what you would in love receive. If you do not give freedom – how can you have it? If you don’t extend a sense of worth how can you know your own?

To get a sense of worth from others deemed less worthy than yourself or to steal from those considered more worthy than yourself is to worship self illusion while storing up your treasures in ‘hell’.
I see that ‘we’ have been doing so for a few thousand years at least – but not without leaks from a deeper quality of being that can be noticed, honoured and given welcome.
But the healing phase of human development cannot be enacted by unhealed healers who seek to work out their own conflicts upon others or their world.
The dissonance has to be owned and investigated where it truly is – rather than being outsourced or projected away from self and this has to be in a context of shared willingness or indeed a real relationship – instead of the stubborn persistence of an ignorant arrogance in destructive futility. No one else can accept love, FOR me. But of course we can extend what we have accepted – in fact we can only let love in on the basis of willingness to share it – because that is the nature of our being. This is a brick wall to the self-special who can see what is wrong with everyone else at a glance, but have forsaken the ability to see what is ‘right’ and have to relearn what was once a given nature. If they choose to embrace life on Earth rather than choose the power to save themselves alone in fear of losing even the little they have. Choices are mostly lost to habits that run as defaults. If you truly desire something you are also given the means to align in taking steps toward fulfilment.

While much spirituality has focused in the need to free our mind of false desires – this is only preparatory to the movement of truth that is our true will and in which we are identified perfectly and of which perhaps we are more afraid than the terrors that effectively guard it. ‘Many are called but few are chosen should read” all are called but few choose to listen – yet. What is the call to Joy? Is it not your freedom?
Is the world all of the ‘reasons’ why you cannot align in the true of you now and every now of noticing you have a choice?
Are challenging events reason not to look at our own involvement, correspondence or participation?
Is inspiration our responsibility to stay open to and connected with so that dis-inspiring thought can be recognized and no longer given backstage access all areas?
Are we worth opening such a transformative direction f active and persistent willingness?
If we are not – can we then extend that worth to our fellow beings, our children and generations yet to come?
A sense of sanctity for the life of another is also the way to open and allow this in ourselves.
Whatever we in fact accept, act from and thus believe, will find reinforcement in our experience and relations of our world. Would it then be sane to accept and act only from what we would both give AND receive – regardless of priesthoods of ‘expertise’ whose claim to know is your own invalidation and dependency?
Is conviction then a matter of being whole in our decision rather than externally bolstered by ‘authority in the world’.
Standing in what we consciously accept to be aligned with integrity is also a step n which new perspective arises that of course can lead to stepping forth with a refined, revised or even recanted position – but it is not stuck on a fence!
getting something moving instead of feeding a sense of stuckness is not about activism in the ‘morally guilted sense’ but aligning in living presence or joy in being, (including an honest enquiry as to ‘blocks’) as simply but not less than living this day well. No it doesn’t start tomorrow. Nothing starts tomorrow!