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Originally Posted by sky123
If mindstream is moment to moment then it changes from one moment to the next, like the flame of a candle.
Fallen angels..... don't know much about them as they don't interest me. I was taught the soul is immortal, never changing, never dying or decaying etc: .
I surpose it's like everything, different interpretations from different schools  |
Flame does not change, the candles do. That's what that metaphor was about anyway. The flame in that metaphor was consciousness or the perceiver. The candles represented different bodies. You can take the flame from one candle and move it to another. Actually that metaphor is also about God or the source as that is the source of all flame. Flame has the attributes of it's source, all flame is the "same" where as the "candles" or physical bodies with their minds have their own unique physical attributes. So flames that are free of human conditioning and the human mind are all the same in their attributes, though I would say unconditioned conscious energy has both an independent reality as well as awareness of the source simultaneously. So the uniqueness does not go away even with awareness of the source.
One can abstract the soul or mind stream to be something other than you, but it is you, consciousness. I guess you are not understanding what I am trying to explain but consciousness has to be conscious of something. What a consciousness is conscious of determines what that consciousness is as experience and experience is not conceptual so it is always present Consciousness is an experience of something. If there was no experience, there would be no consciousness. Consciousness is awareness and here again, if there was no awareness, there would be no consciousness. It's like a movie screen. What that screen is, as far as experience, is determined by what is on it. What movie is playing? Maybe it is a horror movie, maybe a comedy, maybe a wonderful nature movie. Look at it this way. Let's say you are a perceiver and there is nothing to perceive. Now by nothing I mean nothing. That means there can't be emptiness, darkness, etc because these are all somethings. I am saying to imagine nothing is there to be perceived. If you can get what I am saying, you see if there really is absolutely nothing to be perceived, the perceiver ceases to be as well. It no longer exists.
All these religious paths are about the same thing, changing what is on the movie screen or changing what awareness is aware of. Changing what is before your consciousness as the perceived. Changing what is perceived changes the perceiver as the perceiver is experience. A perceiver cannot exist without something to perceive and perceiving something is always an experience which has awareness as a component of it.