[davidsun]

Originally Posted by JustASimpleGuy

I'm not hocus-pocusing anything. It's standard non-dual Vedanta. Have you ever asked yourself, deeply and honestly asked yourself, what about that philosophy so disturbs you?

I have already stated (in other threads) that I think that what you call 'standard' Non-Dual Vedanta distorts the thruth about and leads people to deny the reality and abdicating their response-abilities, and consequently, their soul-growth potentials in the context of incarnational Life. I am not 'disturbed' that some choose that route. As in the case of 'standard' Christianity, however, my spirit (of Life) impels me to speak out in ways which aim to expose such Life-betrayal when I and as others propound it as being the way to full soul-realization (in my treatise I reference it such growth/development process) as a soul-maturation). Why? For the same reasons that proponents and teachers of greater awareness/consciousness are moved to expose 'false' advertising and educate naive novices (in terms of Truth pertaining to Life) so they are as susceptible to 'falling for' such pitches.

Originally Posted by JustASimpleGuy

Here's something interesting. Non-dual Vedanta says you and me aren't real and in the sense that you and me are ephemeral and somewhere deep down is the reality of our being that isn't ephemeral.

That's what many 'flag-waving' (self-proclaimed) 'Non-Dualists' like you believe and say, but that doesn't make what they believe and say the truth about Life, any more than what 'flag-waving' (self-proclaimed) 'Christians', 'Muslims', 'Buddhists', etc. believe and say is the truth about Life.

To (hopefully) expose the falsity of such claim, in this thread I have quoted The Bhagavad Gita as clearly saying: "This phenomenal creation [referencing the reality of our Creation] ... is both ephemeral and eternal, is like a tree, but having its seed above in the Highest and its ramifications on this earth below…. When the Supreme Lord enters a body or leaves it, He gathers [the] senses together and travels on with them, as the wind gathers perfume while passing through the flowers. He is the perception of the ear, the eye, the touch, the taste and the smell, yea and of the mind also; and the enjoyment of the things which they perceive is also His. The ignorant do not see that it is He Who is [really!] present in life and Who departs at death.” The Bhagavad Gita, 15:1-10.) [Note: This quote is from the translation, downloadable here, by Shri Purohit Swami.

You have chosen and continue to choose not to relate to the significance of said quote, continuing to dualistically (illegitimately! IMO) split 'the ephemeral' from 'the eternal' and relegate the former to insignificance. Paul Simon's exquisite lyric come to mind in this regard: "Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest" (from the song, The Boxer) is the only comment I wish to make in this regard.

Originally Posted by JustASimpleGuy

Material reductionists also say you and me, as far as consciousness, ego and free will are concerned, aren't real. It's all illusion and they do have some laboratory experiments seemingly backing up the claim about free will being illusory.

This is some of what I say pertaining to 'materialists' in my treatise:

"Every aspect of Life (i.e. of Being-n-Doing) is an emanation of Life’s omnipresent Essence (d/b/a Source) that, by virtue of Its Power, is endowed with (1) the capacity to be conscious to some degree, which consciousness, or presence of ‘mind’, enables ‘it’ to ex·peer·ience whatever vibrations (occurrences, data-packets, etc.) ‘it’ is therefore capable of perceiving (i.e. registering) and so possibly responding to, and (2) the motive‧ation, or ‘spirit’, to ex·press ‘itself’ by way of causing, (generating, transmitting, propagating, etc.) whatever vibrations (occurrences, data-packets, etc.) ‘it’ is thereby motivated to ‘make’ in response thereto. In full‑zoom perspective, every nodal and multi-nodal feature of Life may be ‘seen’ to be a subsidiary soul, or gestalt of Life, which is facultatively imbued with ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ by, and consequently both experiences and expresses ‘itself’ in relationship to and with other nodes of Life ‘in’* the matrixial framework of, a (supranodal!) Soul, which is the Mind-n-Spirit constellation (which many regard and relate to as having personal attributes, though all personal attributes actually derive from It**) of That which is All That Is.

[Footnotes:
* “In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28)
** As channel-spoken and recorded in Ch.10 of The Bhagavad Gita: “I am the Seed of all being, … no creature moving or unmoving can live without Me.”]

Orthodox materialists dismiss such idea as being no more than an example of wishful‑thinking because they believe that consciousness (i.e. ‘mind’), and motivation (i.e. intention, will, or ‘spirit’), are just epiphenomena which derive from the electro-chemical activity of molecular-chain linked ‘neural’ circuits, and that any differential discernment and directional movement must therefore simply be the result of innately unconscious and involitional matter-energy configurations (such as photons, atomic particles, molecules, DNA gene sequences and amalgams thereof) all just auto‑mechanistically responding to the influence of equally mindless [like you think 'you' really are, maybe?]and innately purposeless tempero-spatial (nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational) power-‘fields’. They therefore ‘see’ what we know as Life as being no more than the composite cause‑effect result of everything and everyone in the Universe just ‘acting out’ essentially soulless, theoretically completely mathematically delineable scripts. Embedded in the above-articulated soulfull☺ model of Life, however, is the possibility that, when and as the fantastically complex aggregation of associated beings which constitute the vehicular platform for one’s earthly experience and expression eventually disintegrates (in other words, when one’s body ‘dies’), the gestalt of one’s mind-n-spirit characterized soul-constellation may nevertheless continue to function as a disembodied psychospiritual entity which ‘lives on’ in the ‘bosom’ (idiomatically speaking☺) of the superordinate, eternally-ongoing because supraphysical (i.e. not temperospatial) Mind-n-Spirit composed Matrix of All That Is. This is the logic that gives rise to otherwise nonsensical scriptural exhortations such as “Labor not for the ‘meat’ which perisheth, but for that ‘meat’ which endureth unto everlasting life” (John 6:27), for instance.

Originally Posted by JustASimpleGuy

Physicists have some proofs the reality we experience isn't real. One example is electromagnetism and the nuclear weak force aren't fundamental forces though we think of them as such. Crank up the energy and they merged into the electroweak force. Beyond that GUT and TOE are hypothesized and TOE is the Unified Field.

The little wave has too much invested in its own identity and will not realize or even consider its true nature - Water.

That's what you believe. I would say that physicists have only 'proved' that nothing is solid (I point to this in my book) but the 'spirits' of thangs and people are all REAL and though ever-changing (i.e. evolving) eternally ongoing as (sub)'entities'.

It is my sincere hope that what I have said here serves to help some previously closed-minded readers to open themselves up to genuinely considering the implications of this.