time and change

[GateKeeper]

Originally Posted by Rabiaa

Thanks for your reply. I can see that the nature of form is change. But in my understanding, form is an illusion because of change. Since things appear and disappear, thus they are not real. But this does not imply necessarily that change is unreal. I feel like change is not limited to form. I don't really understand why the formless is changeless.

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I deleted this message, was irrelevant

[Miss Hepburn]

Originally Posted by Uday_Advaita

Yes.... For we poor human objects, we have no choice but to appear in the phenomenal world of duality.

Fortunate or unfortunate .... is inevitable....
But to give it to you ... as rightly said .....just the way it "is" (the non-dual moment of truth), which needs no qualification....
Namaskar

The Buddhists really have this non-duality thing down!Those that are locked into, 'things su*k thinking', and just can not imagine
what we mean by, "flowing and being detached"...
I give them an example
of the 2 cars found dented in the parking lot....one average guy screams and rants bloody murder and while the Buddhist guy looks up and
says, "What a beautiful day."

I find examples of alternative reactions opens the closed mind to other possibilities...
(My therapist, 25 years ago would use that trick..."Next time he does this, try reacting this way, Miss H., see what happens..."
I used to over-react big-time)

(Not that you did, just my little story.)

If we are awareness, then it is the forms that we are aware of. If there were no forms, then what would we be aware of? If there were nothing to be aware of, then what is awareness? If no forms ever changed, then how would we experience time? If time did not exist, then against what would change occur? Without form, time, and change, can there be experience at all? How would we know that experience, without contrasting it against that which it changes into?
Can we say nothingness truly exists, while somethingness does not? If there were no form, then what is formlessness? Without duality, doesn't nonduality become nonsense?

When I started reading about Harry Potter he was only 11 years old. When I finished, he was 17. I have memories of him over the 6 intervening years. I know that all 6 years exist simultaneously in the books on the shelf, but as long as I read them one at “a time”, in sequence, then the flow of time, though it be an illusion, is a real experience to me. If I could read all 7 books in the same instant of time, every event happening at the same time, what, if anything, would I experience? Is Hogwarts not “real” because I constructed it in my mind while reading the books? What have I ever experienced in life without first constructing it in my mind? Space, time, and matter, may be seen as illusions created by and within my own consciousness, but perhaps the experiences they make possible are as real as anything else.

We may set ourselves a goal of seeing through the illusion to experience what is “real”, but what if the illusion is what there is to experience? What might we be missing if we are too quick to look past and dismiss something because we believe it is an illusion and we are too busy searching for truth. Both form and time, from one perspective, may be seen as illusion, yet without them I am not sure I could experience anything, even my own existence, at all. Is it perhaps the separability of all these things (or even of all things) that is an illusion as well?