All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
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I M OCEAN - LET WAVE COME AND GO- ASHTAVAKRA GITA
BRTH DTH RICHES POVERTY SUCCESS FAILR WILL NOT INCR OR DIMINISH ME
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AVG CHAPTER 7
Janaka:
1 It is in the infinite ocean of myself that the world bark wanders here and there, driven by its own inner wind. I am not upset by that.
2 Let the world wave rise or vanish of its own nature in the infinite ocean of myself. There is no increase or diminution to me from it.
3 It is in the infinite ocean of myself that the imagination called the world takes place. I am supremely peaceful and formless, and as such I remain.
4 My true nature is not contained in objects, nor does any object exist in it, for it is infinite and spotless. So it is unattached, desireless and at peace, and as such I remain.
5 Truly I am but pure consciousness, and the world is like a conjuror's show, so how could I imagine there is anything there to take up or reject?
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AVG GREATEST ARMOUR AGNST WORLD SUFFERINGS
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GAUDAPADA
WAKING AND DREAMING IS DREAMING BOTH SAME
LYF IS LIKE DREAM LIKE
PRE COVID LYF HAS BECOME DREAM LIKE
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Common sense tells us that only living things have an inner life. Rabbits and tigers and mice have feelings, sensations and experiences; tables and rocks and molecules do not. Panpsychists deny this datum of common sense. According to panpsychism, the smallest bits of matter – things such as electrons and quarks – have very basic kinds of experience; an electron has an inner life.
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The proposal of the panpsychist is to put consciousness in that hole. Consciousness, for the panpsychist, is the intrinsic nature of matter. There’s just matter, on this view, nothing supernatural or spiritual. But matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter “from the outside,” in terms of its behavior. But matter “from the inside”—i.e., in terms of its intrinsic nature—is constituted of forms of consciousness.
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A key moment in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s declaration that mathematics was to be the language of the new science, that the new science was to have a purely quantitative vocabulary. But Galileo realized that you can’t capture consciousness in these terms, as consciousness is an essentially quality-involving phenomenon. Think about the redness of a red experiences or the smell of flowers or the taste of mint. You can’t capture these kinds of qualities in the purely quantitative vocabulary of physical science. So Galileo decided that we have to put consciousness outside of the domain of science; after we’d done that, everything else could be captured in mathematics.
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################## OBE V NDE
Is ‘out of body’ anything similar to the ‘near-death’ experience?
A: They are quite dissimilar. Subjectively, the near-death experience is
transformative due to the power of the presence of Divine Love. The
person’s calibrated level of consciousness is thereby advanced and
characterized by the loss of the fear of death. Paradoxically, the out-ofbody experience does not result in a change in consciousness level. This
would imply that the awareness that the self is nonphysical is already
known at a certain level but forgotten in ordinary life.
If we pose the question using consciousness research techniques, the
answer that calibrates as true is that the knowledge that we are not a
body but a spirit is already known but merely forgotten as a
consequence of incarnation. Thus, the sense of self is independent of the
body but associated with the sense of being a localized identity rather
than a physicality.
It is entertaining to go “out of body” or even to travel considerable
distances, but the experience does not appear to be of any significant
long-term benefit to the advancement of the level of consciousness
itself. It is a relatively frequent occurrence during surgery (well-known
to surgeons) and also after severe accidents. Nurses and doctors have
learned (often rather ruefully) that their conversations while the patient
was supposedly asleep and presumably unconscious were ‘hea
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Detachment from the world is correlated with detachment from the
body as well?
A: They go hand in hand in that their perception gives them value. When
individuals have an out-of-body experience, the sense of ‘me’ floats up
in space also. One then looks down at the body disinterestedly. It is
perceived as almost foreign to one’s sense of reality. Return to the body
is done only reluctantly, or it happens spontaneously with a sudden
jarring sensation. It is not really possible to identify with the body or
value it when one is not ‘in’ it. People who have learned how to leave
the body in trained altered states of consciousness often have to be
trained in how to return to the body on a given command.
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he classic approach to detachment from identification of self with the
body is to detach from the sensory dependence on physicality for
pleasure and gratification. These have to do with desire and the
searching for pleasure as an external acquisition. Asceticism decreases
the sovereignty of the illusion that the source of happiness, pleasure,
and gratification is external, for even if its locus is external, the sense of
pleasure and gratification is an internal function. The body is a
functional utility mechanism, and pleasure is not the consequence of
bodily function but the gratification of desire itself. Similar gratification
can be obtained in a hypnotic state wherein the body itself is not given a
reward but only the image is suggested. The body is therefore a
mechanism and not a source.
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As you read this page, you are having a visual experience of black letters against
a white background. You can probably hear background noises: traffic, distant
conversation, or the faint hum of a computer. You may be experiencing strong
smells or tastes: the smell of coffee, the taste of mint as you chew a fresh piece
of gum. Maybe you feel some emotions: a feeling of excitement, or sadness, or
maybe you just feel a bit tired or distracted. If you pay attention, you will notice
more subtle kinds of experience: the tactile sensation of the chair against your
body, perhaps sensations of itchiness or throbbing in a knee or an arm. These are
all forms of conscious experience. They are states that characterize your
subjective inner life. These feelings and experiences make up what it’s like to be
you.
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Now imagine that a limb has been lost in an accident. The person still
calls the body ‘me’. This continues even if more physical attributes are
lost—limbs, facial characteristics, or sensory loss (e.g., Helen Keller).
Thus, the ‘body’ as ‘me’ is a mentalization. There is the fictional story
of Donovan’s Brain in which only his brain survives and is kept alive
via artificial means. Relentlessly, the ‘brain’ kept right on with its ego
positions, such as the desire to control others and survive. Helen Keller,
on the other hand—deaf, mute, and blind—calibrated in the high 500s.
Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man,” so-called due to severe facial
disfigurement, calibrated at the level of a high saint (590).
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Nothing is more certain than consciousness, and yet nothing is harder to
incorporate into our scientific picture of the world. We now know a great deal
about the brain, much of it discovered in the last eighty years. We understand
how neurons—the basic cells of the brain—work in terms of their underlying
chemistry. We know the function of many regions of the brain, in terms of
processing information and negotiating sensory inputs and behavioral outputs.
But none of this has shed any light on how the brain produces consciousness.
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It is true that many traditional spiritual practices and teachings often
start with and emphasize the body as well as attempts to control the
energies of the chakra system. However, their meaning, importance, and
value are the consequence of mental/emotional processes by the ego. It
seems to be of greater pragmatic value to emphasize the deconstruction
of the ego/self to begin with.
The body itself is actually not experienced; instead, only the
sensations of the body are experienced. For example, one experiences
the whereabouts, position, comfort, etc., of the arm but not the arm
itself. This is easily verified if sensation is prevented by the cutting of a
nerve. Therefore, awareness of the body is merely composite sensation
by which the somatic sensory area of the brain records input, and by
neuronal function, replicates the body image. The ‘phantom limb’
phenomenon that is sometimes seen clinically is a neurological anomaly
whereby the brain produces, out of habit, a false image of a nonexistent
limb that has been lost due to amputation. This is classified as a sensory
hallucination.
During sleep, sensory input is discontinued and the body passes out of
conscious subjective awareness. Thus, the experience of the body is
conditional.
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yet everything is accomplished."
~Lao Tzu
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And yet our increased
understanding of the electrochemical processes of the brain has failed to yield
insight into how those processes give rise to a subjective inner world
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Traditionally, many serious spiritual devotees renounce the world and
withdraw from it by retreat to environments that have low sensory input and
do not require specific activity.
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But it could equally be that the “Darwin of
consciousness” will come along and solve the problem of consciousness in a
satisfying way. In opposition to Seth, I will try to show not only that there is
good reason for taking the problem of consciousness seriously, but also that
there are already the makings of a theoretical framework that could bring about
progress.
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The ego/mind is attracted to novelty and therefore searches frantically
for interesting form and sensation. This can be refused and replaced by
interest in the silent, formless substrate that is always present and merely
has to be noticed. It is comparable to the silent background without which
sound could not be discerned.
The phenomenal world is like a giant Rorschach card—the figure
‘means’ whatever one wishes it to.
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Adopt the pace of Nature : her secret is patience." . . . ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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