What I find confusing is what 'self' we're talking about, because to me there is only one self and the Ahamkara isn't a self. From that perspective we're talking about two very different things as far as I'm concerned. I can talk in terms of philosophy or psychology but I tend to use recognised terms instead of my own, otherwise there's less common ground. If I talk about the self then I'm talking about the Jungian self because he's the expert. I'll use the term 'Ahamkara' for the same reasons. It's not that I don't like it, it's that anything else is less clear. If you use the word 'self' then I think you're talking about the Jungian self, when you could be talking about Ahamkara. Both Jung and Spirituality make that distinction clear for the reasons of understanding. I don't have a negative perception of "Spiritual people" because I don't think in those terms, and Spiritual people are just the same as every other person that makes themselves different from 'regular' people.

The supraliminal priming word is neurological programming, and that's an external source, something that was used in WWII and often in marketing these days.

What I was talking about are the unconscious processes that "Spiritual people" don't seem to want to hear about. What you become conscious of - what bubbles up from the unconscious - is only the 'result' of what's going on in your unconscious. My point in all this is that the less you understand what's going on in your unconscious the more you become an unwitting 'victim' of it, because what you are conscious of is only the tip of the iceberg. What you believe in has an unconscious 'framework' and what you become conscious of - even though it's in meditation - is the 'result' of that framework.

Jung based the ego on the Ahamkara and the self on the Atman. If you go Googling Ahamkara and dig deep enough you'll find cognitive dissonance and cognitive behaviour, only the ancients didn't use those terms. If you have a look through the Eightfold Path that's replete with references to psychology if you can draw the parallels.

You'd be surprised how much the ancients knew about psychology.
[quote=JustASimpleGuy]All that being said and getting back to the heart of the problem: Without a second. That's my core interest. Either It's "knowable" or It's not. If It's not "knowable" then this entire conversation is unproductive. If It is "knowable" than in some way, shape or form It has to be related to experience, common to all and unique to none. I only see one candidate. [/quote[ Not the one candidate, but something so far beyond that it would blow your cotton socks off. When you know what is mind, unconscious and all the constructs you can then go past those constructs. When you do some neti-neti and understand what 'this' is then you can venture into very different territory.

How you experience is 'coloured' by so many things in he unconscious, and likely including your childhood experiences. Experiences are a response to external stimuli and that response is 'filtered' by your unconscious initially. In neuroscience your Limbic System or so-called 'lizard brain' is responsible for survival and as far as Spirituality and beliefs are concerned 'survival' also includes denial of what conflicts with currently-held beliefs and/or thought processes. The word 'knowable' also has connotations with the brain/mind , so "Change the word, change the paradigm."

So in neti-neti and it's not brain/mind-based experience then what can it be? What's left after that?

Did you know that Spirituality and schizophrenia light up the same areas of the brain? Did you also know that when people decide they are no longer 'regular' people but they are Spiritual people, that they can become dissociative of themselves in varying degrees? That's not Spiritually or psychologically clever. Did you also know that cognitive dissonance means that you accept or reject information according to its compatibility with your thought processes? Often information that people reject - such as psychology and how it affects their Spirituality - happens on an unconscious level and they have no control over it?

I could go on, but my point is that when you eliminate as much of the 'human' there can only be more Spirit remaining - and not destructive cognitive behaviour posing as Spirit and ego/Ahamkara posing as self/Atman.