I like the 5th way like style but…. well guess I want to figure it out. This is something that appeals me major ” The only way to function in life is to present that you are doing something” (Hale on a retreat.

Still don’t know what my next thought is going to be, and I do like the intellectual justification that wanting to control is futile…

Love Barb

bon voyage

Its interesting how similar certain aspects of Revelations are to Ch 11 of the Bhagavad Gita. Its worthwhile noting the changed form too.

But none of this is to say we won’t get a swift one in the behind anyway. God works in mysterious ways.

Well – we’re still on random thoughts but rather outside the 18. (laughs)

Davidya’s last blog post..The One Truth

Mark’s last blog post..Justa enjoying the ride

I guess I’m a doubting Thomas. I need a physical appearance and a spear wound that I can stick my finger in.

You know, Jesus is so hard to nail down. We have the 4 canonical gospels, which paint a certain picture. But then you toss in the other dozen or so “gospels” and you get a different picture. I love reading about Jesus and Jesus scholarship, but I’m afraid that we may never have a clue what they guy really was about. That’s why I get into the more mystical interpretations of his words. I find that they support the whole awakening process quite nicely.

No matter how you slice it, Jesus was surely “an awake dude” as a spiritual teacher put it to me. Everything about him makes more “sense” when I simply focus on him as an awaken dude.

Some channels are valid in the sense of not just being the conduit talking. But it has several issues. For one, its typically hard on the conduit. Secondly, there is no way of confirming they are who they say they are. And thirdly, there is too often an agenda. Why take over – why not just a conversation? Messy, in my books. Iffy is a great word for it.

Davidya’s last blog post..What is the sub-conscious?

Evan’s last blog post..Three Steps to a New Life

None of that is to say that it IS the words of Jesus. Ironically, the book has incredible internal consistency with the author speaking as Jesus, and not just in an abstract way. But so what, is my response. Channeling is too incredibly iffy for my taste. I have no idea if a “dead” Jesus could channel a book. Or if anything can be channeled. Who knows? Nonetheless, ACIM is a cool book, IMHO.

Because our consciousness is the foundation of our perceptions and interpretation of the world, I refer to this as Perspective. Levels of consciousness is the more tradition term but that also implies other things.

“The movement of perception”. I like that. Conciousness flows within itself and perceives…

Davidya’s last blog post..What is the sub-conscious?

We have to be careful. If one’s perception of reality has changed, what has changed? One might say, “the perception.” But is that change? Perceptions come and go, just as thoughts come and go, but what does any of it mean?

This movement of perception may or may not be a fact, but that does not mean that the thing the movement perceives is the fact. This is assuming we are using the word perception to mean an interpreted seeing on the part of the seer.

One doesn’t dispute that this movement takes place, but is reality created by the movement, or is it apart from the interpreted seeings of the seer?

Clearly we use the word reality in a different way, and there is nothing wrong with that. Just be careful that the term is used in the moment by moment exploration, and not as a solidified crutch for one to lean on.

Great discussion, everyone.

Takuin Minamoto’s last blog post..Sitting #2

And, thanks for the “compliment” of sorts. I do get it. It seems, well, obvious now that I’m aware of it. In a sense, all awakening and even life is just awareness becoming more aware of itself. Endlessly “investigating” itself via its expressions, whether as stars or humans or crazy thoughts or whatever. I am in awe.

Consciousness can fully see itself, in Itself. Through individual expressions (us), only an aspect of wholeness can be known. We can reflect greater degrees of that as we open but there is always more possible. It is only in Totality that Totality can be known.

Davidya’s last blog post..What is the sub-conscious?

What of the person who sees themselves as standing in an ocean of love, surrounded by a plethora of life most other people don’t see? And the person who sees all of the world taking place inside themselves. When they touch an apple, its like touching their cheek. Or the person who walks under the heavy thumb of darkness, numbed to all feelings except pain? And what if these were all the same person, at different times in their life?

Yes, all of those are about form but in each case, their relationship with the formless is also different.

Just remember that all of the things you listed with a capital are ideas. Ideas that represent experiences. Experiences change, even the experience of the formless. And any idea about the formless is not formless.

As long as you are taking a position on truth, you are denying all other truths. Wouldn’t want you to get stuck, as Adya warns (laughs)

Davidya’s last blog post..What is the sub-conscious?

Davidya’s last blog post..What is the sub-conscious?

If by reality you mean “everything else,” then I completely agree. Reality as in “what I experience” or what the entire universe experiences. Seems like we are talking about the world of form.

I would see it as: formless = no change. form = change

Are molecules real? I would suggest yes but not in the models we were taught in school. More as energy nodes in the subtle structure of intention. But there’s hardly the space to explore that here. (laughs)

What it comes down to is that once you know who you are, nothing else matters. Then we see it as the game and can have fun and see where it goes.

On the subconscious, I see your point. Perhaps we fall into semantics here a bit. There is a great deal of reality that is outside our conscious awareness. This is partly due to what Buckminster Fuller called Special Case – the mind focuses on one thing at a time. As soon as it does that, it has chosen all the other things its not on. Tolle comments on this too. There are experiential values that are inclusive of everything, but even within infinity, if we focus at all, we are moving across infinity selectively.

Habit forms or conditioning (and memories) are stored as structures in the mind field. How we relate to that – as sub-conscious, as the akashic records, as the matrix, as illusion, is up to us. One thing seen many ways. As it is outside the individual it can seem spontaneous. As it appears programmed, it seems otherwise. Like many ideas about ‘how it is’, our understanding is probably wrong. (laughs)

Interesting comment about your mother. My father died when i was quite young. In my mid-30’s in dawned on me that my ‘memories’ of him were all constructs based on family stories and photos I had seen. For example, he was only black and white. It was an interesting discovery and illustrates how we build ‘reality’ well. Given that most thoughts arise in relationship to other thoughts (ie: are associative – they arise in fields after all), even a spontaneous thought will associate itself with existing patterns/ memories. Really the answer to where they arise is ‘it depends’. In that sense philosophers on both sides of the fence are correct. For a given perspective.

My western Philosophy Prof. felt you had to take a position so was very irritated by this – this ties into comments over on ‘Practical side’ – there is no need to take a position. Not knowing is one way to be positionless. Taking a view that includes all positions is another.

Davidya’s last blog post..Stop, Look, Listen

So, Shadowduck and everyone, is there a subconscious? I don’t really know. It is a really good theory, and explains a lot. But remember, a theory is always speculative. If we remember that, then we can have fun. If we start to believe it is really true, well, then we get problems, don’t we? Namaste my friends.

There is stuff that we have learnt that is now habit (walking, talking, ways of expressing emotion and all the rest of it. Even our facial expressions: compare the facial expressions of a person born blind to those of sighted people.) In this sense much of what we do is sub- or un- conscious.

There are also physical substances – hormones and stuff. We didn’t consciously decide to become sexually aware – our hormones did it for us.

There are also the attempts we make to suppress parts of ourselves (desires we have, actions we’ve done) that we don’t like and/or are ashamed of.

In these senses there is a sub- or un- conscious. More than this it seems to me is just shrinks and others saying that, “I know you better than you do.” They may be right but I’d prefer the statement to be made to me directly, rather than phrased as some thing called a sub- or un- conscious.

Evan’s last blog post..Add Joy to Your Life by Playing

Equally, I appreciate Tom’s view that the existance of the subconscious cannot be proven, so it can only be viewed as conceptual. Fair enough, but given that we are “living in the dream” isn’t this true of everything else also? If your memory of your mother is spontaneously created and there is no little subconscious box labelled “Tom’s memories”, how would it matter if the past you’re remembering is unreal? Any memory which entered your head and declared itself to be a memory of your mother would be equally valid, even if one was quite different from the next. Does that make sense?

I must admit, until now I’d never considered the possibility of having no subconscious; the concept is drilled into us from the beginning and it never occured to me to challenge it. I find the idea strangely liberating, for some reason!