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Go Back   Spiritual Forums > Spirituality & Beliefs > General Beliefs

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  #221  
Old 23-02-2021, 09:55 AM
Greenslade
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by JustASimpleGuy
I'm keenly aware how easily mind can deceive itself so I scrutinize its more outrageous ramblings and interpretations, however there are some experiential data points I can no longer ignore or dismiss. Suffice to say I'm convinced beyond a shadow of doubt.
If you don't know how cognitive dissonance 'operates', if you don't know how cognitive behaviour affects your reality how do you know you are beyond it? If you don't understand the frameworks that constructs your reality - which are more than those of the mind - how can you tell if you are no longer influenced by them? Not understanding cognitive behaviour then telling yourself you are over it is destructive cognitive behaviour. It's on a par with making up a definition of the ego then tyrying to convince others you don't have one. With respect JASG, I've heard things like this before from Spiritual people who are only aware of the tip of the iceberg. Unless you are conscious of what you are not conscious of then there are things that create your reality that are beyond your ken. That much I do know because I've been there.

You are the source of your experiences, they are not apart from you. You created them so what you are witnessing are your own creations. Your experiences are a response to what's going on around you, and since you used the example of driving and music, what you're responding to there is the music, the car, the road you're driving on, the motion...... The experiencer and the experienced is the differentiated consciousness of the ego/Ahamkara, and within Ahamkara your experiences are 'invented things' because they are created by your response to outside influences. If you're going to use na-eti na-eti/neti-neti then you should take that into the equation too.

The Eightfold Path needs to come in here too, because without Right Thinking (AKA constructive cognitive behaviour) neti-neti is just the getting rid of what what doesn't suit you, the stuff that your cognitive dissonance filters through but should be a part of your thinking process anyway.

Where does your experiences come from and what creates them? What happens when there is nothing to experience?

The ego/Ahamkara is differentiated consciousness and that's what decides what is 'I' or is not 'I', it is also the ego/Ahamkara that superimposes onto the self - as both the religion/philosophy and psychology will tell you. That's how duality is created. The self is undifferentiated consciousness and in undifferentiated consciousness there is no distinction between the experiencer and the experienced - and you also make the unconscious conscious. The self doesn't superimpose on the Atman because the self IS Atman. The ego/Ahamkara is not conscious of the unconscious that the undifferentiated conscious of the self is conscious of. That's the big difference. If you are not conscious of the unconscious then you are operating in the differentiated conscious of the ego/Ahamkara - if you think that what you are conscious of is all that there is to be conscious of. neti-neti also means getting out of your own way.

There is a knowing beyond knowing that goes beyond the mind, beyond intuition and beyond conviction. There is no question of it being effable or ineffable, there is no question of it being eternal or not. It just IS, 'you' just ARE and the knowing is no longer knowing, it's the knowing of the knowing that you ARE.

Nassim Haramein said it best - "Spirituality is the "What?" and science is the "How?" but I'd add psychology as the framework for the "How?" How we 'process' is just as important as what we process - and like it or not we do process it. He also said that we are in a consciousness loop with the Universe, and that's observable and can be reproduced. I've often wondered if God was an expert in quantum mechanics but then if you're God then how could you not be? Maybe the knowing beyond knowing is the quantum tubules in our noggins chuntering away at full power.

"If you are Spiritual you are God playing at being not-God."
Alan Watts

I'm not an Alan Watts geek but that one stuck in my mind for a few reasons. Thing is, when there is nothing to be conscious of consciousness isn't very much after all. It's like being in a dark room with no floors, no ceiling, no walls and only your consciousness to be conscious of - and that's not so easy. Maybe it's what God experienced before he had the biggest bang in the Universe.
  #222  
Old 23-02-2021, 12:32 PM
JustASimpleGuy
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greenslade
The ego/Ahamkara is differentiated consciousness and that's what decides what is 'I' or is not 'I', it is also the ego/Ahamkara that superimposes onto the self - as both the religion/philosophy and psychology will tell you.

I'm using "the self" to refer to ego/Ahamkara vs. Self to refer to Atman/Consciousness. And yes, I'm aware of conscious vs. unconscious perception as demonstrated by word lists followed by either a subliminal or supraliminal priming word and then a target word, and how the supraliminal priming word can be more easily corrected for vs. the subliminal priming word.

I'm also familiar with what experience is. Think Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (phenomenon vs noumenon) or philosophy of mind (qualia) and how neuroscience and psychology tie in, at least loosely speaking and from a layman's perspective. Beyond that I've been a keen observer of my own mind operating in real-time, observing what bubbles up from the subconscious. It's what I've been doing since 2008 with consciousness studies and meditation.

Here's something for your consideration. Is it at all possible you have a negative perception/cognition of "Spiritual people" bouncing around in your subconscious and that's priming your reactions to what I post? I ask because it seems to me much of what we posted across the last several posts have much more convergence than divergence but since I'm not framing it in the language you are comfortable with you seemingly dismiss it.

I'm not concerned with the system or language used. I'm interested in the underlying concepts and understandings and looking for symmetries.

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.
  #223  
Old 24-02-2021, 09:21 AM
Greenslade
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by winter light
Thanks for the reminder about the importance of cognitive behavior. I know have a habit of imbalanced overreach into the dissonance. I think because oddly for me it gives temporary release from the boxes I feel trapped in. But the dissonance can become a disruption and is not sustainable. So it needs to be balanced with cognitive organization or healthy psychological well being.

I tried to get the nature of that process across in my prior postings. Which may have come across biased as dire or defensive. Which I am a lot of the time. It is to some degree a matter of temperament. And then accepting myself as myself. In the same way that people are people, as you say.

With some balancing of self-acceptance, it is ok to have order within one's self as a foundation, then I would expect the stress and need to defend would become a non-issue. So trying to find that balance as I work through this. I guess that is why we are here together. To offer a space for one another to allow for this to happen. So I appreciate that space.
It's not so easy to sustain these things over long periods but baby steps and one at a time. After a while neuroplasticity comes in and you don't have yo work so hard, but in the meantime forgive yourself for being human after all. Sometimes being human is the most Spiritual thing we can do. One of the things that often happens is that 'balanced' becomes polarised and people usually mean preferable vs non-preferable. That only adds to the conflict. When it is what it is at the time there is no polarisation and you don't feel as though your head is bouncing off walls.

The need to defend is your perception but underlying all perception is how we think of ourselves, defence implies the perception of attack or vulnerability. Underneath that again are the reasons you think it's attack or what creates the perception of being vulnerable, and its when you go to those depths that you understand so much more about yourself. What comes next is what you find and how you deal with it.

It's OK to have chaos as one's foundation too, because there is a part of us that can be still amidst the chaos. But the trick is being able to turn things to your advantage, and all you have to do is ask yourself "How can this serve me?".
  #224  
Old 24-02-2021, 10:20 AM
Greenslade
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by JustASimpleGuy
I'm using "the self" to refer to ego/Ahamkara vs. Self to refer to Atman/Consciousness. And yes, I'm aware of conscious vs. unconscious perception as demonstrated by word lists followed by either a subliminal or supraliminal priming word and then a target word, and how the supraliminal priming word can be more easily corrected for vs. the subliminal priming word.
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.
  #225  
Old 24-02-2021, 12:34 PM
JustASimpleGuy
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greenslade
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. ]

Correct me if I'm wrong but you seem to be saying unless one understands psychology and especially Jung in a Western sense and the way you do and undergoes some form of cognitive behavioral therapy one has a greatly diminished chance of Self-realization. From my perspective that seems a very narrow position and closes a whole lot of doors.

The reason I threw in CBT is like in Advaita there's the understanding and the practice. The prior without the latter is just a nifty philosophy and nothing more.

One thing that attracts me to Advaita and specifically the Ramakrishna order is a broad acceptance of all traditions being valid paths to Self-realization and a conviction the four Yogas can have value for any spiritual tradition, East or West.
  #226  
Old 25-02-2021, 10:03 AM
Greenslade
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by JustASimpleGuy
Correct me if I'm wrong but you seem to be saying unless one understands psychology and especially Jung in a Western sense and the way you do and undergoes some form of cognitive behavioral therapy one has a greatly diminished chance of Self-realization. From my perspective that seems a very narrow position and closes a whole lot of doors.

The reason I threw in CBT is like in Advaita there's the understanding and the practice. The prior without the latter is just a nifty philosophy and nothing more.

One thing that attracts me to Advaita and specifically the Ramakrishna order is a broad acceptance of all traditions being valid paths to Self-realization and a conviction the four Yogas can have value for any spiritual tradition, East or West.
One example is the Eightfold Path, which incidentally has a lot of CBT in it by another name - most paths to realisations say something similar. It's also know as Right Thinking, which is the 'equivalent' of constructive cognitive behaviour. Destructive cognitive behaviour isn't going to take you to a realisation but Right Thinking AKA constructive cognitive behaviour will. My point has always been that the ancients knew more about psychology than people want to understand, and if you delve deeper into Ahamkara you'll see that for yourself.

Once you get the human out of the way a far deeper Spirituality emerges all on its own.

So no, no door-closing but isn't psychology as much a part of your self as your Spirituality? Where do your beliefs come from and how are they formed? Those thoughts that arise in you, where do they come from and, if you don't like certain thoughts, how do you change how they are created? Isn't a psychological approach to self-realisation not as valid as a Spiritual one? Because if only Spirituality matters then what? My CBT courses gave me more self-awareness than anything Spirituality ever could have because it went right to the foundations of my thinking.

If you ignore even common sense and you label everything as Spiritual because you don't know the difference, how authentic is your Spirituality? What you call "Working as Witness" I know as a mental health issue, because I've lived with it since I was a child. And CBT takes you into the consciousness of the self, because unless you've made your unconscious conscious you're still working with the differentiated consciousness of the ego/Ahamkara and not the undifferentiated consciousness of the self/Atman.

I don't make a difference between Spirituality and psychology, I just swap dictionaries to suit. So does that mean I put my money where my mouth is and the people who use the word 'ego' when they should be using 'Ahamkara' don't?
  #227  
Old 25-02-2021, 12:15 PM
JustASimpleGuy
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greenslade

Once you get the human out of the way a far deeper Spirituality emerges all on its own.

What do you think Advaita is all about? LOL!

Concerning Work as Witness it serves some of the same purpose as Right Thought in that it's centered around selflessness. Work for God aligns more with the devotional path whereas Work as Witness aligns more with the knowledge and contemplative paths.

It is said Advaita is very similar to Mahayana Buddhism and I'm somewhat familiar with the Eightfold Path and Four Noble Truths and see the parallels.

For instance Karma Yoga is meant to bring about purity of mind and Raja Yoga clarity of mind. That covers right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration and right thought. Right understanding and the Four Noble Truths are largely in the realm of Jnana Yoga.

Here's how I see it coming together in the two traditions. The psychological aspects are within the realms of Karma & Raja Yoga in Advaita and the Eightfold path minus Right Understanding in Buddhism. They are preparatory for the understanding of Jnana Yoga in Advaita and Right Understanding and the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism.

As I see it both are complete systems and both eventually lead beyond mind, beyond the psychological aspects, beyond even the traditions themselves.

https://tricycle.org/magazine/noble-eightfold-path/

RIGHT UNDERSTANDING

Right understanding is the understanding of things as they are, and it is the four noble truths that explain things as they really are. Right understanding therefore is ultimately reduced to the understanding of the four noble truths. This understanding is the highest wisdom which sees the Ultimate Reality. According to Buddhism there are two sorts of understanding. What we generally call “understanding” is knowledge, an accumulated memory, an intellectual grasping of a subject according to certain given data. This is called “knowing accordingly” (anubodha). It is not very deep. Real deep understanding or “penetration” (pativedha) is seeing a thing in its true nature, without name and label. This penetration is possible only when the mind is free from all impurities and is fully developed through meditation.


That last underlined bit sounds like purity and clarity of mind (AKA the psychological components) being only a preparatory step, doesn't it? I understand Jung lifted some of the psychological components from Eastern philosophy but I'm not sure where I see the Ineffable component in Jungian psychology. I think you might be saying it's the unconscious but that doesn't work for me because that's also of mind and the effable. There has to be something I'm missing because I don't see a liberation/realization component in psychology in general or Jungian psychology specifically.

The one possibility is the Theravada tradition which is considered the mind-only school of Buddhism whereas the Mahayana tradition is considered the emptiness school of Buddhism, and as I said Advaita tracks closely with the Mahayana tradition.

Last edited by JustASimpleGuy : 26-02-2021 at 11:13 AM.
  #228  
Old 26-02-2021, 01:31 PM
Scholarly Tarot Scholarly Tarot is offline
Knower
Join Date: Jan 2021
Posts: 136
 
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.


ScholarlyTarot
It is knowable, the question is by how much? One cannot see an entire cube without either moving around it ourselves, or moving the cube, twisting it around so we can see the backside. The whole is simply out of our range at this point, but the cube is knowable in part. So, being finite, we can grasp some of the whole would be my supposition. We don't have a birdseye view of even our own solar system, let alone galaxy or the entire universe. True, we see other galaxies now, which is really astonishing and lovely, but as the Hermetic view proposes, as the One reveals it automatically conceals. That is our nature of reality for now. That is how I see it.
  #229  
Old 26-02-2021, 05:31 PM
Zeke55 Zeke55 is offline
Pathfinder
Join Date: Jun 2018
Posts: 61
 
Mortal creates beliefs, when you wake up we laugh at are own blindness because we are immortal.
  #230  
Old 28-02-2021, 09:19 AM
Greenslade
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by JustASimpleGuy


Right understanding is the understanding of things as they are, and it is the four noble truths that explain things as they really are. Right understanding therefore is ultimately reduced to the understanding of the four noble truths. This understanding is the highest wisdom which sees the Ultimate Reality. According to Buddhism there are two sorts of understanding. What we generally call “understanding” is knowledge, an accumulated memory, an intellectual grasping of a subject according to certain given data. This is called “knowing accordingly” (anubodha). It is not very deep. Real deep understanding or “penetration” (pativedha) is seeing a thing in its true nature, without name and label. This penetration is possible only when the mind is free from all impurities and is fully developed through meditation.

To be brutally frank I had no idea that Advaita even existed until you started talking about it. One of the reasons I came to Spirituality was that I wanted to know what made me tick, and at that time I was going through all kinds of weird stuff that I needed to straighten out. There was something pushing me in the inside that needed expression and the Universe itself seemed to be on my side. I've never been much for the 'schoolbook learning' unless it caught my interest, and luckily at the time I found people who could understand what was going on inside my head. Advaita it wasn't, that's for sure.

Right Thought is on a par with constructive cognitive behaviour, and the Yogas are more practices or extensions of the same thing. Cognitive behaviour doesn't include the practice as such, it's more of an opening of the doors to affect a deep unconscious process. It's another 'layer' or two below Right Thought and if it's done right, it can be pretty harrowing and it's like digging into the underwear drawer of your head. What happens with the 'results' of the process is up to the individual but it can lead to right speech/action/livelihood etc.

I'd go so far as to say that cognitive behaviour goes deeper that either of Karma and Raja Yogas but both of those Yogas have a basis in psychology. All three would lead to Right Understanding and the Noble Truths in their own ways. Horses for courses, and it's all complimentary rather than contradictory.

As far as I'm concerned there are no hierarchies and frankly I don't see that much difference between the Spiritual and the psychological, as far as I'm concerned they at least go hand-in-hand. How I think/process Spirituality has nothing to do with Spirituality itself but my cognitive behaviour. If something 'bad' happens to me yes I get ticked, I'm human after all. But I deal with it in a common-sense way, I don't think it's bad karma from a past life brought about by negative energies.

And yes, Right Understanding beyond the accumulation of knowledge but that to me is Gnosis. So while there are realisations with the accumulation of knowledge - and Spiritual knowledge too - there are realisations to be had beyond that. I'd guess the 'penetration' would mean cutting through all the ego/mind stuff? The Gnostics would term that as "knowing beyond knowing" or "Knowing without knowing how you know." From what I can gather so far, there are certainly parallels between Gnosis/Gnosticism and Advaita, but it doesn't surprise me because those two so-called green crescents cross-pollinated each other.

Psychology isn't about realisations it's all about understanding what goes on in your noggin but it does affect your Spirituality. However, it can lead to realisations about yourself and what you do with them after that is your choice. I certainly felt liberated because I was rid of not just things that had been lurking about within my Shadow Self but the frameworks as well. So while that wasn't Spirituality per se it was very Spiritual to me because I've found a far different 'me'. Perhaps Spiritual realisations are what you're looking for but for me, coming to terms with myself in ways I'd never imagined is far more important than realisations.

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
Albert Einstein

Jung was a psychologist and a Westerner to boot, and he understood both the Eastern and Western minds. And he was a scholar of Advaita Vedanta, perhaps on that he could have given you a run for your money.
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