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Old 24-12-2016, 12:28 AM
FallingLeaves FallingLeaves is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2014
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Quote:
Originally Posted by A human Being
'Pure consciousness' is an interesting expression - my initial reaction is to think, 'Well, consciousness is always pure, isn't it?' It may seem that it's tainted by anger, sadness, regret, guilt, etc., (etc., etc...), but in truth it's eternally untouched by all of its manifestations - all forms are subject to birth and death, but consciousness alone remains.

Though I still consider myself to be a bit of a noob when it comes to non-duality, even though I've been chewing it over for at least a couple of years. Still kinda baffles me, tbh, because it appears that there is duality - the creator and the created, the permanent and the impermanent. I think (well, I hope) that it's slowly starting to sink in that true understanding doesn't happen on the level of conceptual thinking, though I don't mean to suggest that it's wrong to attempt to conceptualise this understanding, to try to communicate it to others by way of conceptual thinking. It's just important to recognise its limits, I feel.

while there may be a creator and a created, a permanent and an impermanent... the map you draw of it is something you create, in your own mind. It is a part of your perception. For you, whether you perceive the difference between things depends on whether you have a map that describes the difference between things. That is to say, to be dualistic you just draw a line in the sand and say 'this is one thing and this is another'. Then you have something akin to a map, with some terrain indicated on it.

Sometimes, at that point you will also be engaged in choosing one side over the other in some ways, for example most people would think a creator 'superior' to the created, or the permanent 'superior' to the impermanent.
you might also start thinking that 'up and down' were opposites, for example.

But if you didn't have a map that indicated the two things were different to begin with, you also wouldn't need to start annotating it with choices about how you like or dislike each of the two things relative to the other, and then starting to go to the effort of learning how to attract the one you like and get rid of the one you don't.

So anyway in my mind, if you wanted to be nondualistic it isn't a matter of nondualism being a learned behavior, you simply unlearn the idea of drawing lines in the sand.
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