Sex, Love and Marriage

Perennial debate. So TNK UK has an excellent section call "18 Minutes with Jesus" by Robert Jeffress.

I recently saw the section on "adultery." In essence Jesus says that breaking the moral law is not just a physical thing its a mental thing. Our minds must obey the law too. This was Jesus' argument with the Pharisees' sect who thought observance of the law was just a physical thing.

So Robert Jeffress argues that the "pleasure of sex" is a God given joy and properly enjoyed within the confines of marriage.

Now I don't know how well this last bit is supported by the New Testament. It does not seem right to me.

Jesus is not recorded as having sexual relations. He way well have had, but it is not recorded. He certainly had no Earthly children, and made no preparations for them after his death. He asked John to care for his mother Mary but no mention of children. Jesus as far as the New Testament is concerned had no family of his own. Metaphorically of course all those who believe in him become his children. So does to follow Jesus mean to shun family?

Certainly not. Disciples were sent in pairs to spread the message, presumably husband and wife. And obviously if no one had children then the human race would end. So no one is rejecting family. But its this focus on "pleasure" which has always been problematic.

Why did Coptic sects form celibate monastic communities if the joy of sexual union with a wife was part of spiritual practice?

One mundane argument is that those who seek to become spiritual teachers will not have time to devote to a family of their own and simply practically avoid family to give that time to other people.

But something jars still. If we start to justify our actions by pleasure do we not slip spiritually.

We sit in front of the fire nice and warm, but need to go to the shops before they close. It's easy just to dwell on present pleasure and ignore what we need to do.

A modern way of thinking is that the draw of future pleasures can motivate us out of present pleasures. We do a pleasure calculation and this is what drives our life.

But what if we have become addicted to drugs? On this pleasure principle we just keep seeking that hit. So perhaps we start to believe there are greater pleasures to be had if we quit the drugs. But actually this is not quite true. An ex-heroine addict told me that while sex activates a good number of our brains pleasure receptors, heroine does them all. As I understand it there is no greater "hit" than drugs. They are designed exactly for a "hit."

From my own experience, and from text books this is not quite true either. The greatest pleasure, in the language of Sanskrit, is Moksha, translate as liberation.

When we achieve Moksha we do not just get the weight of the world lifted from our shoulder, we even get the weight of our shoulder lifted. Moksha is that realisation that actually we do not really exist in the body at all. If you look very carefully you can see this. There is simply no reason to believe we have anything to do with the body or the world. Firstly a simple visit to the anatomy lab will show us there is nothing in the body that is not part of the world. So this body/world distinction is false. There is just world. And then we are in trouble because if there is just world where are we? The answer is simple: nowhere! We are not in the world. But we are not outside the world either. we just drop trying to be somewhere. When we put that down then we get Moksha. Now Moksha is Absolute Peace, unlike anything we can imagine. Some say sex gives them release, but everyone knows that rather tediously the need comes back and the release is needed again. The constant need to open this value itself becomes a burden. Moksha means we just put this down, it is not us or ours.

Quick note. Eckhart Tolle liberated realising one night that the depression he was feeling was not his or anyone's: who is experiencing this depression is asked? And realised it was just depression with no one suffering as a result of it. He ended up sleeping on a park bench in Russel Square, London with not a care in the world. The thing is the body remains as things that needs care. So what was once driven by "need" becomes driven by care and compassion for our body. We treat it like we would someone else, making sure that it is fed and watered, slept. But as for happy this is not a problem any more because unhappiness was only caused by feeling bound to the body.

Cutting blog hort. The spiritual path is pleasure of its own. So why  would we seek pleasure in marriage? The purpose of marriage is family and children. Pleasure is attendant but not the point.

This points at why adultery is frowned upon. If worldly pleasure are to become diminished as we liberate and become more ready for God, then absolutely adultery is no go. Eventually however the pleasure of sexual union within marriage becomes less important too. Marriage is not just a vessel to contain sexual pleasure, it is a thing in itself.  

Mark Twain was wrong, they are making more land

Distribution of global land-types per unit of land if divided between all people on Earth in 2023, which is 1.83Ha. If a football pitch is 1/2 a hectare, that is we each have 3.6 pitches.

The thing to notice is humans live in just half the goal area of the nearest pitch (where the house is) and crops take up 1/4 of that pitch. Forests take up a whole pitch (far end). But the most noticeable thing is that we give up almost an entire pitch to cattle grazing! It's worse than that because half the crops are fed to cows as well.

If we stopped eating cattle and using their products we could eat their crops instead and free up that whole pitch for ourselves, which is almost 1/3 of the land on Planet Earth if everyone did it.

This is equivalent to colonising 4.5 Moons! So all that work to get people to the moon will only achieve 1x moon maximum if we fully exploited. And after that it is all the way to Mars. What hassle.  

However simply by not eating cows we will each gain 38.4% more land.

So Mark Twain takes a typically American one-eyed view and just looks at land like it is a physical thing.

But the amount of land we have depends actually on how we use it. Stop eating cows get a while new pitch each!

If we concrete it over and give it to private enterprise then we actually end up with very little. If we put it in public hands then we can share it and we end up with more than a whole planet. People in the US feel this very acutely as they have no right to be on most of their own country! Especially painful if you have fought for the land you are now kicked off by private owners. This is the core of US insanity.

Which of the people in this diagram have the most space?

The people in A have only 1/4 of the space. They are imprisoned by the 3/4 that they are not allowed on.

However the people in B each have the whole space and can go anywhere. Not quite anywhere, as the naked monks said to Alexander the Great, a man only has the land on which he stands. That is all which is truly his. So in B people can go almost anywhere. In America you may well do best to hide in a prison because with American Ideals you will kill the other 3 to have the whole place to yourself. But in more enlightened parts of the world there are agreements and culture which determine rules and behaviour in the shared Public space.

In the Mediterranean there is an island called Cyprus. It has a surface area of 9,251km². If all the people in Earth went there at the same time then we would be able to just about stand shoulder to shoulder in a space of just over 1 metre squared. If all humans went there, an invading alien fleet would have to search the whole planet to find a human and could easily overlook this small island! That is how little space humans actually need. The rest is just resources and for food we need just half that penalty area above.

The American myth is that by putting a wall around things to keep them for yourself makes you free. It is actually just a prison.

So the amount of land is actually determined more by how we use it than what it is. A good example is that under American Capitalism we will end up destroying Planet Earth and then we will have nothing.

If you want more land learn to use it well, and learn to share it. Then it becomes almost unlimited. And the better we get the more land there is.

Mark Twain is most incredibly profoundly wrong!

The Non-Self

So there is one really hard thing to get in the latest stream of posts on Existence.

It's not hard to realise that every "thing" is an illusion in that its a choice how we see things. We can chose to see a wall, we can chose to see bricks. This is mental activity it is not real. Probably the most famous example of the power of the mind to make things is the Necker Cube. It is ambiguous: the cube front face can be pointing down or pointing up.

I always missed the really profound point of this. I always see it as a drawing that we could "make" into a cube.

Almost as famous is the stereogram of a shark. Look into the distance while keeping focus on the image so that you get two images (one in each eye) and then adjust the distance until the patterns overlap. Small differences in the arrangement of dots make the brain think it is looking at different sides of an object so you get a 3D shape.

Now where is that 3D shape? Where is the Necker Cube?

It's not on the page because that is obviously just a line drawing or dots of colour respectively.

That question of where does the 3D image actually live is truly profound! Shurangama Sutra goes into this is great depth.

The answer is "no where." And that should be mind blowing if you fully grasp it.

The more casual approach is to say the mind makes it up. Which is factually correct, but where is the mind? When looking at an illusion we see the power of the mind, like The Matrix (from the eponymous film), to literally make reality right there.

And then we understand how "reality" is actually made by the mind. So we go back to the Wall and the Bricks and see that the "Wall" or the "Bricks" are actually illusions made by the mind exactly like the illusions above.

We tend to ignore the significance of that because we switch to "thinking" about the wall and bricks as thoughts. So we go "big deal" yeah "com'on" of course I know that a wall is made of bricks, what's new in that. But you know that the Necker Cube above is made of lines? How exactly is the Necker Cube made of lines? When you see the "cube" that is not lines that is something that is not there, that you are somehow adding to it.

So we usually think, yeah but all that is happening there is I am imagining a cube, or being tricked into imagining a cube, by the lines because they are ambiguous.

But this does not detract from the point you are able to "create" a cube. All the illusion does is show you this more clearly than usual because there is more obviously no cube there.

The moment you "drop the mic" is when you realise that the exact same process of making a cube happens when you see a "real" cube !!! If you think about it the only difference between the Necker Cube and a real cube is just a bit more info to remove the ambiguity.

But the "cube" part of it you are still making cos its a drawing. Yeah but how about a real cube?

 

Still just a picture. Now the bit that smashes "materialism" is pick up a "real" cube in the real world and realise that the "cube" there is also made by the mind!

From this we can see that in fact all things are made by the mind. They are not real. They are an illusion. Almost exactly like in the Matrix. The cube is actually an "overlay" over the top of a bright reality that is not cube like (yet). If you could remove the specs you would see a cube before it became a cube. This is actually possible but incredibly subtle to see the difference between what they call "name" and "form." 

BUT important caveat! EVERYTHING. The other flaw of the Matrix is that you get outside The Matrix and just enter a new "reality" of things on the Nebuchadnezzar. When you realise that "all things" are illusion even Morpheus and Neo, the very "thingness" of them "is illusion" because it is "made by the mind" you realise there is no escaping this. In a way there is nothing to realise because it applies to "everything." Its not the kind of learning where you go "ah now I get it: that is a zebra and that is a horse" so we distinguish between things. This realisation is that when you are holding a "thing" be it a "wall" or a "brick" you are making the "wall" and the "brick" in your mind.

I remember the infamous Richard Dawkins at a Xmas lecture putting a virtual reality headset on someone and asking them to navigate the room they were seeing. Dawkins explained that for them they were seeing a 3D room and believed that they were in it. To everyone else of course the "truth" was that they were in the lecture room of the Royal Institute in Mayfair, London. Dawkins explains that her brain was creating a model of the world coming through her eyes and concluded that we all live in a model. Almost true. The problem is that the "model" itself is created.

The risk is to imagine a room inside our heads where we watch the "movie" of the outside world. Our senses are picking up data from the outside world, relaying that to our brains to process and they make a model that we sit back and watch.

NO

Every "thing" is an illusion created by the mind. So there is literally no point inventing new schemas of things to explain how and where we do this. Models, senses, external worlds, brains, processing all these "things" are created by our minds.

We are left with just "mind" as a very odd word indeed. Unlike brains and senses and processing and models etc, "mind" is not a thing. You can't sense it, or think it, or process it its a "nowhere and nothing" place holder to describe the realisation that everything is an illusion. When you get that the Necker Cube is not "in the page" nor "in the world" nor anywhere in fact then you start to get "mind."

Anyway all this is great. But there is one really subtle problem.

A common path of philosophical questioning is to ask what proof we have that anyone else exists.

It's the problem full "psychopaths" have for real. We all go through moments of complete self absorption where the outside world and other people really don't register, but we step out of it easily. The philosophical problem is to find a rational justification for this step. Western society largely thinks that animals have no soul or consciousness. They are just automata that behave like the wind. Why can't other humans be like this? Why can't I be the only conscious entity in the universe?

When I explain my consciousness I clearly see it is mine. I don't see what other people see, smell, taste, touch, hear, think or feel. When I speak to someone on the phone I clearly don't experience anything of what they are experiencing. My consciousness is mine.

This seemingly very obvious fact is the root of all the belief systems around self, democracy, law, equality etc. We see our consciousness and the more or less have to add other people in "empathetically." I can't actually feel your pain, but I am sympathetic and can imagine it.

Research shows that this "empathy" is very strong so that we can almost feel other people's pain as though it was our own. And in fact its normal to respond to pain regardless of whose it is.

However the question remains: prove it. Other people can trick you into thinking they are in pain, you cannot trick yourself.

Well you can in that there are pains that have "real" source. Some pains occur just in the brain, really upsetting for those who experience cos there is nothing to fix to make it better. A doctor could well say they are making it up, but for them it is real.

There was some little ditty I can't find about the philosophical musing of illusion and the quadrangle not being real. but when I  step on a pin it hurts.

Pain is real, but only to me. And this really underpins the feeling that consciousness is mine.

However and this is the really subtle thing. Yes all "you" experience is exactly as it looks. The things you see are what these eyes see, the things you smell are what this nose smells, the things you think are what this brain thinks etc BUT we established already they are all illusions made by the mind. But the mind is nowhere and belongs to no one.

So the truth is very subtle. It's not that you can have "someone" else's consciousness, its that this consciousness is not yours.

The key step is not to expand "consciousness" to somehow see through walls. Eyes cannot see through walls, you cannot see what other bodies see. The point is to realise that all this is made up by mind which is nowhere.

Now mind goes through walls, mind enters other people's brains and flows through consciousness. Mind because it is no ones, is every ones.

The hard thing to let go of is the "wall." In a previous blog I imagined two people arguing about a wall and its bricks. They agree to disagree and decide there is both a wall and bricks there. Having decided the bricks person takes the bricks and leaves the wall person with the wall. They are very confused still thinking there must be a wall, but now no longer seeing any thing now the bricks have gone. This is literally what happens when someone dies. The body goes and we are still left looking at the person. Its a very normal thing. Its like the lines being taken away and still having the after thought of the Necker cube. Because all things are actually created by the "mind" we can continue to think and see these phantom creations even in the absence of any reality. And so it is with ourselves. Even after realising that everything is made by the mind, we will still have the phantom of our self there. We will still think that it is this self that is seeing, this self that is conscious. And once we have this thought we think other consciousness have a self and we get stuck in the problems above of this conscious is "mine" and since its the only consciousness I can sense then perhaps its the only consciousness there is.

But this line of reasoning is subtle, kicked off by first thinking there is someone behind the consciousness owning it. Like the wall owning the bricks. The wall IS the bricks. The self IS the consciousness. There is no 3rd man (from the Platonic fallacy). And all that is an illusion in the "mind."

Now mind is more than just a place holder. As said in pervious post it is mind that actually gives things reality. The lines on the page are nothing really. But when mind makes the Necker Cube wow we go.

So need fine tune and focus a little bit.

Mind is not "brain processing." A researcher may go well I found your "Necker Cube" show up in brain scans so mind is the brain right?

There are layers to this.

At lowest level is the object (lines on page), then the sense data (eyes seeing). Then the brain: here is where the Necker Cube becomes 3D. Then consciousness (still not understood) where waking mind is aware of this. And then finally there is "mind" in which all this happens. The proof of this is that "mind" is actually able to access ALL these levels. If we are very still and attentive we can see each of these stages.

And this raises another question. Wait a second says someone, how is that schema any different from Materialism: you have an object at the start! What is the object if not matter?

Well here we must be extremely careful. Is not answering the question "what" the whole reason for the schema? If we could find out "what" the object was without brain processing wouldn't we just do this?

This is what "emptiness" means in Buddhism. When people say the "world is an illusion" this is not nihilism. No one is changing anything and nothing is being thrown away or turned to dust. All it means is that before you know what something is, it still "exists" but it is "empty" because you have not applied a form to it. This is how you can argue about "wall" and "bricks." These are labels applied to an empty reality.

There is an feature of "emptiness" called "infinite potential." When you see that before your mind choses what to make something it is in an undefined state almost exactly like the Schrödinger probability wave before quantum collapse. This similarity has led people to speculate that perhaps consciousness is involved in wave collapse. When something enters consciousness it changes from being a probability to an actual event. But there is no reason to grant consciousness a special place here. The schema has many parts to it and brain processing is the part that actually "decides" what something is. This is borne out by observations that collapse happens in detectors before consciousness is involved. The decision is the collapse. If anything the central part computers and algorithms is decision so we should look at the relationship between computation and wave collapse. Emptiness is last level as it underpins everything even Schrödinger waves. Which is an interesting question: do Schrödinger waves exist? If they do then could we find the position and momentum of the wave using the equation recursively? But "emptiness" means undefined, it is not a thing. And it is not the absence of  a thing either. Its not a shape that gets filled in when you complete the seeing of something. A "wall" before you see it, or even when you close your eyes so you can't sense it any more, is "empty." The confusion in the latter case is that we are still thinking it. Once we have seen it we "know" it is there. This is called the "6th sense" in many Eastern schemas, different from "6th sense" in West which is called "third eye" in East. Fully developed "third eye" can actually bring to consciousness things that cannot be sensed in the 5 senses e.g. ghosts and other realms. Eastern 6th Sense is thoughts and knowledge. So once we "know" a wall is there we can feel its presence and reality even with our eyes closed. But regarding our sight consciousness it is now empty and open to potential. Who knows what will happen. Someone says they have £2000 for 100 bricks and when we open our eyes again its all just bricks as we count them to see if we can make £2000! The one so solid wall illusion has complete vanished and we don't even "think" about it.

So someone might think well this is just word play, there is a wall but we just haven't chosen a description yet. But when does a wall become a garden or a house? The world is interconnected. Where you decide to draw the boundaries and isolate things like brick, row of bricks, wall, garden, estate etc is up to you. In fact as argued before there is only One Existence and how we break that up is all illusions made by the mind.

So we need that long chain of events to get the brain to do this slicing up of the world. But that is not enough. It ultimately all happens in the mind which is no where and not a thing. You slice mind up as you decide on what something is. Mind is present at all stages in the schema.

Profound words start the Heart Sutra: "Form is Void and Void is Form." Necker Cubes come from no where because the mind is no where.

If the mind was somewhere then everything we experience would have to be there! But the things we experience have their own positions, because mind does not! This blog argued before that the far away things we see must have already been seen for us to see them! Far way is not really "far away" that is occurs in a mind that is neither near or far!

One has to see all this happening right now in their experience to really get what it means. Thinking this unfortunately is turning it into "things" and we're really talking about how "things" them self happen. So you need to switch over to "mind" and see all this happening. A quick proof that is possible is when you see the last word of this blog you are switching from thinking to seeing.

Self-Reference Hypothesis - SRH (Review)

incomplete

SRH is a major feature of this blog. Time for a review. Will be incomplete as just dumping some ideas from the morning.

It has been noted that again and again problems arise through self-reference. My first encounter with this was a rather pretentious AI experiment called AIME in 1996 which was just a pattern recognition (compression) algorithm whose state was then mapped into the problem space. I thought it might shed light on "consciousness" that I then used to think was an emergent property of "self awareness." Once a system started to get a concept of itself, then magically it would start to get consciousness. The two seemed inseparable.

This is another thread of the blog. In fact they are separable. You can be conscious without "self" conscious. But conscious is always by definition conscious it is conscious. However its not a loop, it's in its nature. Current understanding is that conscious is informed by something more fundamental which we could call "reality." The important thing to realise is that "things" IN reality are different from Reality. Modern science tends to try and think of consciousness as arising in bodies: which is does. But the important part of conscious that everyone is interested in:--the "reality" aspect--is more fundamental than bodies. When we ask how does consciousness create a sense of reality we're asking the wrong question. Obviously Reality is already there! Sense Consciousness is just a part of that Reality that is about sensing the "world".

That last part "sensing the world" is subtle. When we say "world" what do we mean? In the more important sense we mean what we sense! So it's circular. "World" is just whatever we sense. The other sense is to do with the "model" we create from the senses.

Its important to see that both the "sense" of the world and the "model" of the world sit side-by-side in Reality. We are conscious of both! Some researchers (like my past self) think that "sense is processed to create model" and that somehow involves consciousness. But if we are conscious of sense before even processing then this cannot be true! This is why consciousness is closely tied to Reality. We are conscious to some extent what our brains are doing: that is the Reality of our brains! So people ask well what when we are asleep? This is the extraordinary thing: while sense consciousness fades in sleep, the Reality part is still there. That Reality part is always there even after death when our senses and brain have decayed. This is hard to see because we are habituated to the brightness of sense consciousness. We are also habituated to another problem that we tend to associate all this with an owner at the centre of it all. So many researchers are ultimately looking for a "thing" which belongs to a "person" or "body" when they explore consciousness. This is part true. But there are many layers and quickly this is not true. To understand consciousness fully we need put self and world together. Neither is before or below the other in consciousness. 

Consciousness aside however, it also became clear that AIME was going to run into another problem. She was going to create a fractal and that was it. Essentially the image compression algorithm was a function and mapping it to the problem space and recursively applying it was simply going to search for a fixed point, diverge or go into chaos. At the time I didn't think of Fixed Points and just thought about the ensuing meaningless chaos. Far from being a reasonable conscious being, AIME was just going to be churning meaningless numbers. And so AIME ended and SRH started.

Things applied to themselves show a narrowing as they constrain themselves and become less functional. Douglas Hofstadter notes this in "Godel, Esher, Bach."  

Gödel's Theorems

So Gödel's Two Theorems state that in a logic which can represent itself then a valid statement can be constructed which contradicts itself. Beq() in his demonstration.

Beq() is based upon a function that lists proof. That is to say in a consistent logic every statement is provable from the axioms. Provably simply means by applying the established rules.

That is like establishing the rules of chess, placing all the pieces on the board and then working out what moves get you from the opening position (axiom) to that position. If no path, or list of rules, exists we say that the position cannot be proved and does not belong to a valid chess game.

So Gödel shows that through self-reference we can create a chess position by applying the normal moves in chess which while being valid says (once we assign meaning to the pieces) that it is not a valid chess position. So we have a problem:
(1) If we accept it is a valid position because it used only valid moves then we have a contradiction. This means Chess is logically inconsistent. Which means we can prove falsehoods.
(2) If we don't like that, 

I NEED GO BACK TO DETAILS AS RUNNING OUT OF TIME

Anyway SRH is very similar but it does not construct a particular proof. It simply says that:

(1) Given self reference you can construct a contradiction.

Hypothesis because it's not proven or understood, only conjectured from many, many cases.

Now logical contradictions through self-reference are isomorphic with recursive loops. This is a second part of SRH.

(2) Any logical contradiction can be represented as infinitely recursive functions.  

2 is interesting because Turing Halting Problem and Proof is based on SRH.

Self-reference in Algorithms is achieved by calling the function from within itself. This is how to achieve an infinite loop and so stop an algorithm from Halting.

But its important to note that many recursive function have "bailout" terms that ensure that all recursive paths ultimately end. So its not enough to see recursion to decide whether something Halts.

Indeed Turing's Proof is that there is no function that can decide whether a given function halts.

He proves this by Contradiction from Self-Reference (CSR). Essentially were such a function to exist then what would it say of itself? It's undefined. Well it needs to halt to give an answer, so it cannot say it doesn't halt. Problems can be seen here. His proof uses the function to create a function that cannot be decided because it loops if it doesn't halt. The algorithmic version of a contradiction.

So what SRH wants to do is decide whether Self-Reference leads to Halting.

We run into the same problem of it being undecided.

Godel definitely concluded in ALL system with self-reference you can generate a contradiction (#TODO CHECK THIS). By (2) above this means in all systems with recursion you can create a Non-Halting program.

BUT

What is interesting about SRH is that its Twice self-reference. Other SRH cases like Godel or Turing use CSR to show that a particular statement is a contradiction because it allows for self-reference and then contradicts itself. The most famous example is "This is a lie."

But SRH is not making a particular statement like H(x) decides if x Halts. SRH(S) simply says that a contradiction is possible in system S because self-reference is present.

(3) can SRH(S) decide if S has self-reference without contradiction. Well SRH(SRH)?

How do we express the system? Godel says "all logics" of which Principia Mathematica is one, but he means any.

So SRH(L) where L is a logic. How would you express SRH in a Logic?

So its double self-referential because 

its a self-referential statement about the systems self-reference property.

Beq() was within Principia. Godel isomorphically showed it for all logic with self-reference.

SRH is logic independent. It says that given Self-Reference you have a problem.

You need a way to express Self-Reference which is Logic independent. OR given an example of Self-Reference extract/deduce the logic.

SRH is essentially Godel's Theorem but with the shift to make a statement about the role of Self-Reference.

Previously I've said that Godel Numbering is the SRH. The mapping of statements about numbers to numbers/indexes by listing them is the key move that sets up self-reference.

All self-reference of this type is about listing.

But Turing's proof is not about listing. He generates Self-Reference by recursion.

However (2) above suggests that a recursion can be expressed as a listing.

F(x) where x is the index of a function, and then make x = F, is similar to:

F(x) {

    F(x)

}

(2.1) can you find any other means of Self-reference other than indexing, recursion?

    Immediately there is Smullyan's SELF and Quine:

"yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation

So this is using position, and use/mention to identify something. It uses the language term "its" which is like "this" to generate the self-reference.

So we can add "indicating" to this list then. Any system which has a means of indicating an element can indicate itself and so generate self-reference.

Recursion is like indicating in that binding to a function name or variable is really indicating.  Its been noted before that "binding" is needed by the system, but cannot be expressed in the system.

There are things outside the system.

(4) This is the other version of SRH that no system can fully contain itself. If it did then it would map into itself, which means parts of itself would map out beyond itself thus proving that it was incomplete.

Indeed can we extend (4) to the proof of SRH.

Self-reference means a mapping from something "into" itself. This means that parts of itself not mapped can be mapped outside itself.

The ability of something to map to things it is not is where the problems start.

Much TODO. Definietly out of time. 

Summary of previous Existence post

 Here's an interesting argument. How many things exist? The answer is 0 (or maybe 1 at most)!

To prove:

>How many things in this picture (I mean the wall).

Kai says 1x wall.

Solange says 52x bricks.

So Solange says I'll take the bricks and Kai you can have the wall.

Kai has nothing. The wall does not exist.

So Kai says, no, I'll take the wall and Solange you can have the bricks.

Solange has nothing. The bricks do not exist.

Brian turns up and loads the hardcore into his truck and leaves. Kai and Solange have nothing. No Wall. No Bricks.

Whatever we decide exists (if we fix it), Brian will just ignore us.

∴ Nothing exists.

Well we feel something exists, but is has no fixed name or description.

I believe some (rather crudely) call it God.

What is Existence? Proof of God, and why God is a "Creator"

Following Putnam's argument that if scientific theories are about existing things, they must exist themselves and Mathematical Objects being part of those theories must exist too.

But what is existence?

So this is actually an intractable problem: "what" something is, and "that" it is are completely different. But some analysis should reveal just how bizarre this is.

We all know "what" this is:

But are there any instances of it? No. It does not "exist". At least so far.

 However things are no quite so clear:

Does this exists?

Well yes something is there. But what is it?

Well someone may say: 4 dots. Someone else may say the corners of a square.Someone else may say four points on a circle. Someone else may say a white die rolled so the 4 shows on a white background. Someone else may say an arbitrary diagram to demonstrate ambiguity in what things are.

Perhaps we say oh its just a picture. So lets take something solid like a wall. Here is a picture is a wall.

How many things exist here? Some one says : a wall. Someone else says: 100s of bricks?

They start to argue and then decide to settle by saying both the wall AND the bricks exist.

And then things start to get crazy because then someone says what happens if you take the bricks away? Are you still left with the wall?

So they decide there is no wall, just bricks.

Someone else is late to the argument and says both wrong its all made of atoms. What happens if you take the atoms away?

So they decide its made of atoms.

Then someone says sub atomic particles...

Eventually someone says Energy and they all agree okay there is just energy there.

So energy exists and everything else does not exist.

Woah! The wall does not exist? So when I say to the builders I want a wall to stop my neighbours dog getting into my garden do they look at me blankly and say you may as well order a Unicorn off Amazon cos wall's don't exist?

But I persuade them to do it anyway, doing all that work that does not exist, during a week that does not exist and finally a wall is there. I sit on it, it seems solid. The neighbours dog is barking on the other side and definitely can't get into my garden. Yet it does not exist?

So I go back to the "energy guy" and say "mate, kick that and tell me it does not exist!"

"oh it does exist, its just not a wall"

and so on...

So the thing is all "things", all the "what it is" is actually an illusion. In brain terms its just the brain processing stimuli and activating brain regions that separate out the stimuli. Some are deep separations that we have evolved like light and darkness, but most are learned like the difference between a Unicorn and a Horse.

This is why we can argue about a picture of a Unicorn. Its enough to switch on the bits of our brain that would be switched on if we ever did see a Unicorn.

Interesting to note that our imaginations are always modifications of things that exist. A Unicorn is a horse with a horn.

Here is a "Treloche".

The problem with completely making things up is no one knows what to do with this. Is it even an animal? Does it have a head or legs? It's impossible to give it any meaning. And if an animator took this and started to move it perhaps they could take that canal that seems to go inside and push that out like an amoeba, but then keep it rigid like a leg. If it's too weird it doesn't work. So we make things that are familiar so we can mentally handle them easily.

In Zoology there is the concept of "handling time" which is the amount of thought an animal must put into dealing with a prey item. Its often more efficient to practice on a particular item so you can process it fast, and so ignore other items. This is the explanation for why fly eating fish like trout will go for particular flies at particular times and ignore others. Our brain is the same ignoring things which are too hard to handle, and sticking to what we know well.

Its not all brain though. Show a Unicorn to a deep Artic Eskimo who never even seen a reindeer and they won't have a clue what it is. They won't even see a horse, cos they have no idea what this.

Show this to most people and they won't know what it is. Although its obviously a human of some description.

Its Huītzilōpōchtli the Aztec god of Sun and War. We are familiar with "gods" and that gods in many religions command certain parts of the world so this is not so strange. I believe Socrates pointed out that the Ethiopian gods looked like Ethiopians. We tend to think things we are familiar with both because there is no point in thinking the unfamiliar and confusing and because its hard to be completely original too.

But and here is the killer blow. Everything I was just talking about is like a "wall." All that does not exist either.

So what we end up with actually is the extraordinary realisation that there is One Existence!

Only One Thing Exists!!!!!!!!

Now we called it Energy above, but it goes by other names too, most famously God.

Parmenides was correct there is just one world that gets divided by the mind again and again into all its parts.

However note we did not get to this conclusion by putting things back together to rebuild The One.

We actually took the Atomic approach of Democritus and kept breaking down the world to show that each level did not exist by itself until we got to the bottom and Energy.

So this is doubly baffling because that One True Existence both sits as the foundation of everything we think and see, but is also the whole thing as well.

You will not win this thing by thinking of the One Existence like it is a thing. As we have shown any thing that we can pick can just be broken into parts and then remove those parts and what we thought we had turns out does not exist.

To get to the One Existence requires moving on from a museum of "things" and start thinking about the museum itself.

To directly answer the post question ordinary things do not exist. This is the great mistake of Materialism and where the Western world is entirely wrong. If we think about Capitalism and the desire to possess actual things, it all seems rather pointless when we see that none of these things exist.

All of Liberal Democracy falls apart as well because the ultimate shock hidden in here is that if nothing exists then neither do we!

We die. The lights go out.

Ha ha. No that is what they call "nihilism."

Not existing is no problem at all because we never existed. So suddenly discovering you don't exist doesn't change anything. No lights going on or off, no change at all!

Although one light may become more bright.

When we realise there is only One Existence and it is that which make the world exist we realise that we are experiencing that One Existence all the time. No matter where we are, what we are doing, that One Existence is right there making the world exist. Amazing even when we are fast asleep we are still face to face with this existence.

The flaw in the "existing self" view is that be become overwhelmed by the belief we are "embodied." We see this body and and all the things its does and thinks and feels and we get confused and think that the existence it shows comes from itself.

We don't see the obvious thing that the existence of our thoughts and wishes and desires and feelings and senses and doings, that existence is the same existence as everything and everyone else.

There is only One Existence and it shines through all the little things we put together to make them exist, including all the bits and pieces we put together into ourself.

The same argument above we applied to the wall can be applied to self.

We look at the world and we go what is that? Ah it is "me" we answer.

Okay but its also a bunch of bricks such as feelings and memories and experiences and thoughts and most importantly yes desires, wishes and decisions and actions.

I will show you what I Am, I will go and make a cup of tea to make me happy. There we go, making tea as a free agent. No one can stop me. I've bought all the things I need and now I'm doing it. Go me. Awesome.

Okay goes the argument so what if we take away all the bricks like the making tea, and the desire for tea, and all the ingredients, and the seeing the tea and the feeling the heat of the hot water etc. Is a self left?

If we think a self is still left after the bits are all gone then this is as crazy as building a wall and then selling all the bricks and still thinking we have a wall.

All this points at there being only One Existence. And all the little things that we think exist through their own existence, are actually just made up. If you look into them you will find your way eventually not to their own core existence but all the way back to the One Existence.

So its where we started. What things are that that they are are completely different. There is only One Existence, but there are many things.

That sounds crazy, and yes this is at least while it is unfamiliar like the "Treloche". The way we see the whole world is wrong.

But what is perhaps surprising is there is nothing to learn here. We know perfectly well what the One Existence is: its right there right now in the existence of the world. The only thing we need to do is not think that this existence comes from either us or the world. It is just there in everything both outside the world like the sky and Sun and inside in everything that happens like our feelings and thoughts. Indeed the inside/outside thing is just another thing that comes from the One Existence.

So Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and even Buddhists will recognise everything in here at some level.

The Creator God did not just make the world 8000 years ago of whenever people think it started, and then have a chat with Abraham and the prophets before seemingly leaving the world. The world importantly does not exists by itself like a ball that was made and then thrown on its journey by God. God carries the world every step. And the fact there is a world IS GOD still doing creation.

The mundane view of the Bible is that Time somehow existed before God. What kind of God is this?

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning--the first day" [Genesis 1:1-5]

While it shows the creation of day and night and the 1st Day, clearly time is ticking before this. Day and Night simply divide time into periods. Indeed there is no mention of the creation of Time. We start at the beginning, so time has already started. God needs to make The Beginning itself! By SRH that means be outside what is being described in the narrative of the Bible itself.

So the Bible is accurate, Time was already there. Afterall Time is how things happen and come before and after each other. How can Time itself happen? What came before Time is nonsense. It's like who came first if you run the finish line along the track. The finish line needs to be across the end of the track so people can run through it to end a race.

So Time has always been here, it can't be in the Past or the Future cos that needs Time. Time is how things get into the Past or Future.

So that Time at the beginning of Creation is with us right now. Look out into the world right now and what you see is the same Time that God started creation in. Its the Time in which God first lit the lights. And this is profound because as you look into the world right now you can see that same Light lighting up your ability to see. Not just you seeing lights, but the very seeing itself that sits behind the light. You look at a lamp and yes you see the light, but to see the light you need to see so there is "seeing" going as as well. And behind that seeing is the Time of creation.

This is why God, The One Existence, is also the Creator. That creation is happening right now for ever. This is why those who know God are immortal. To know God you realise that the mortal body of flesh and bone, that will turn back to dust, all the memories and feelings and making tea, that will be lost to time are just a wall made of bricks. They do not exist by themselves, they never existed by themselves, and so there is nothing to not exist. You can't actually get rid of a wall, you can only lose bricks. Instead the One Existence that lit it up and made them appear that is Time and is Forever.

I strongly advise against arguing with privately owned LLMs

Ah I get it now. Of course we live under Capitalist ideology: "if it free you are the product."

I'm having an argument with ChatGPT right now about how to use the AForge library. In other words I'm training it!

ChatGPT 3.5 is talking complete nonsense here and in fact I did argue with it only to find out it has no clue about this, I'm not correcting it any more (on any subject) because all that does is use my expertise to train someone else's LLM which they will then make money from and I will see nothing.

Now if the LLM was like Wikipedia, or a Nationally owned one, then happy to contribute and in fact this is what people should do. Quickly the National or non-profits will over power the private AI and everyone can benefit because it will remain free. This way we all work together to make something better that we all benefit from.

Compare with the Private model where a few people get to leverage their position massively with privately owned AI and machines and disenfranchise the majority.

There is nothing wrong with AI. But AI will amplify what is already wrong with Capitalism. That is the risk.

So what these natural language front processor do is interface with humans so that we can easily train the model which is what the owning company will then monetise in future and use to extract wealth from the general population for their investors (the wealthy).

How to get the dispossessed to make even more nooses that the Capitalists will hang them even more with. Now it makes sense!

There is no conspiracy here, this is just the Human race getting trapped in self-destructive behaviour, just like the Farming revolution 8000 years ago led inextricably to the development of the ideas that led eventually to Capitalism.

As a result I strongly advise against arguing with privately owned LLMs you are simply doing unpaid work.

Find a nationally owned one, or pressure your government to set up a National one, so you and your compatriots, rather than the international ultra wealthy elite, can enjoy the fruits of your labours!

Human vs Humans

I have many arguments with people who base their approach on the idea of an "individual."

In a Liberal Democratic Capitalist System it seems obvious that humans are discrete separate individuals each with choice, freedom and the ability to own things. What could be simpler.

But I usually end up asking who does language belong to? Who created it, who owns it?

It's an odd question because if there was only one person ever then why would they need language? Language only happens when there is more than 1 person so that they can communicate. And who ever "invented" language didn't invent anything until other people started to use it. It has to be a collaborative effort. And then it gets passed on to children generation after generation so that each new generation ends up with someone else's language.

Now we might think "so what"? That is just individuals talking.

But that thought itself is expressed in someone else's language. So if we believe in a discrete individual where are they in this thought of "so what?." Is an "individual" thinking that given that we only think things in the context of a communication that requires two people. It's like a game of football: when someone passes the ball and someone receives it which "individual" is responsible for that? We might say it was a bad pass so the receiver did well and takes the majority of the credit, or it was a good pass and the receiver just about executed the receipt but badly so the pass gets the majority credit but the thing itself requires both people and you can't run a knife between them.

Returning to thinking, remember that there is no pointing thinking things for "our self" cos surely we already know what we think. If we talk to ourselves--either out loud or silently "in our heads"--who are we talking to? and what are we telling this person they don't already know?

Why do we need use someone else's language to think or talk to our self anyway? Those words were given to us, so, like Lego blocks, thinking is just messing around with someone else's Lego. And we do that because eventually we hope to display our new Lego creation to other people. In fact I only have a vague sense of wanting to write this here, I write blog entries as I think, they are one process and what I am typing now is just playing around with Lego blocks exactly as it looks. Nothing hidden. I don't know what I am going to say until it is on this page. So in fact the Lego creation being made here is as visible to myself as anyone else. Looking at these words is looking at my thoughts. I'm not playing around with words "in my head" and then exporting them "into the world." These words here ARE MY THOUGHTS. They are made of "Lego blocks" that I borrowed and am sticking together as I write and these blocks are what we call words, in this case text rather than spoken sentences.

Now I say all that to continue this question "where is the individual here?"

Well I'm like a snail leaving a trail of thoughts and words but I am not those thoughts and words. If a snail was its trail of slime it would not be able to move. If a car was attached to the road it too would not ne able to move. It must be different. 

Now the problem with being an "individual" is that in many cases people think an individual is a thing.

But that is like the snail thinking it is the trail. We are not the thoughts, we are the thinking.

So Descartes says "I think, therefore I am." He means that while thinking that thought, he exists. If he did not exist then he could not think that thought, so while thinking it he must exist. That in fact is very nearly correct. It should be "I think, therefore there is existence." If there was no existence then there would be no thoughts. The self is the existence not the existent.

So this is just rehashing recent blogs on existence.

But this blog entry was actually inspired by the earlier post on evolution.

In a battle we don't just think of the surviving warriors we understand that the entire force was important to the victory. When the Spartan group of 300 held up the advance of Xerxes Persian army in 478BC although they were all killed, but that sacrifice led directly to the later Greeks victory. SO which individual won this war?

The whole of human existence is like this. We enjoy the benefits of all the losers in human history.

It all points to Capitalism and individual ownership making no sense.

What is wrong with Homosexuality?

 Just repeating stuff already produced in this blog but summarised for an answer on youtube.

"

No one has ever had a problem with lesbianism, not sure even the Jewish Law mentions it. The problem in West has been with sodomy and that true for both homosexuals and heterosexuals so its not to do with gay. So think the whole issue is misunderstood here. The question is what is wrong, if anything, with sodomy? So we remind ourselves what the point of sex is. If in doubt think that every human who has ever lived including me and you is the result of sex between a woman and a man. Sex is profound and is how we make people. Marriage is the institution around making people. (Marriage primarily is a way for men to ensure that women bear their children, women always bear their own children regardless; conversely women need help raising their children so good to bind a male in by promising him fidelity). So the problem with Sodomy is that it is not sex, it is not productive and is not profound, it is something else. Its true that in Bonobo apes sodomy is used as a social bonding activity. Indeed we could use sodomy in public like this. But we don't. The problem is that sodomy and gay marriage is confused with productive sex, they are completely different, and this has led to a decay of their meaning. Today sex in post 60s West is used like a drug. A heroine addict once said to me, if you want a high then ignore sex and do heroine. Sex activates about half your endorphin receptors, heroines does the lot. For most people these days they should just do heroine and stop faking sexual relationships. Sex just for pleasure is as pointless as drug use and is life wasted. In true sexual relationships in most cases once children are born all the love and hormones transfer to care for them. After all we are actually related to our children not our partner, the only thing that binds us to the partner is love and marriage. Its interesting that gay marriage tries to copy heterosexual marriage by adopting children, but gays know that in its essence their relationship is not about producing children. Surely if sodomy was all that mattered then why are gays not happy with that? So they prove that productive sex is the point, and yet they do not take part in productive sex. The chimerical nature of what they are trying to do should be obvious. My persona belief is that if homosexuality is to be accepted by society then gays need to develop a framework for it. Heterosexual have been very creative inventing love and marriage. Homosexual need to invent their own institutions. I mean in Homosexuality why are you limited to just 2 in a partnership? In Heterosexuals that is what you need for a child, but in homosexuals you can have as many as you like. And why are heterosexual a union of male and female? Again that is what you need for a child. Homosexual could be anything. Do some plastic surgery invent new organs and ways to do "sodomy" it is unlimited. A friend used to joke about drilling new holes. Why not? So its not really moral, that is too simplistic. There is just a lot of confusion. Worth noting that interpretations of the past are uncertain and hard to make. We pick and chose. Human sacrifice was practiced by some societies as was sodomy. Why use Past to justify one and not the other? Ancient Greece is often quoted regarding homosexuality, but think the male paedophilia of the aristocracy was considered perverted by the rest of society who didn't write much. Such analysis is complex.

===

Was looking up the Karma Sutra. Apparently it does mention sodomy and homosexuality, but that is it. It is certainly not a focus of attention and not considered important to a good life. I did skim read it years ago but perhaps time for another look... 

What has "From River To The Sea" got to do with Jews? It's only about Israel!

Simon Sharma and it seems all Jews are completely oblivious to the problem. Millennia after millennia they stubbornly continue wading through problem after problem but they never seem to awaken to the problem with them. Consider the actual problem that Sharma's has with the "From River To Sea" slogan. He makes it about race! But it him who is racist not the people chanting it. The people chanting it just want to get rid of Israel, nothing to do with Jews! It's the Jews themselves who always make everything about race, because they are all irreversibly racist and that is the problem. Anti-Semitism is in the heart of every Jews; they are Semitic which is why Anti-Semitism will never leave Jews alone and will harass them, everywhere they go. It is this primitive way of thinking which rather contradicts the Jew's own view that they have something to offer the world. In fact it is the people of the world who must one day (hopefully) educate Jews of their profound mistake. 

The Problem With Philosophy. The Guest and The Host.

The problem with micro analysis of the world, ourselves and our place in the world is not that it is not true, but that invariably it distracts from the real truth.

I'm guilty of an error recently.

1) After reading Thich Nhat Than's account of the 8 consciousnesses I took a nihilistic attitude to self. If we imagine consciousnesses in and of themselves then there is no room for a self. There are the 5 senses, the 6th realm of thoughts and imagination consciousness, the 7th self consciousness and the 8th "store" consciousness of unconsciousness. That last one sounds like a contradiction how can "un" consciousness be a consciousness. Well it is very near the 6th and 7th consciousness, like the background consciousness and we are certainly aware of it (or should be) as the cause of our world. This perhaps is the most basic ignorance thinking that our everyday consciousness arises directly from the world not realising that it is senses layered over by unconsciousness, thoughts and self. So layered over that Buddha says that "our thoughts make the world." Senses by themselves are not a world. If the sense are the sails of a boat then the mind is the wind that propels the boat along. Clearly the life we live is entirely driven by the mind.

Anyway driving off down the idea of consciousness occurring in-and-of themselves I negated a very important element indeed. The Truth.

It's not a terribly bad approach as it forces us to see our habitual usual self as just a conscious overlay on the world.

But it rips the heart out of the world.

When we dismiss and no longer take as a foundation the mortal self, which is that person standing in a crowd, we do not end up with nihilistic nothing.

What we do is steal back the "existence of the world" and give that foundation.

Problem with science and philosophy is we can almost end up saying that "I" cause existence. Looking at cognitive science and the brain and the processing that is undertaken to create the world we can almost say that "My Brain" makes "My World."

In a lower sense we think this cos we work hard and accumulate money and then buy "our world." We (as the male) can wake in the morning (at least in the traditional family) in "My" house next to "my" wife and send "our" kids off the school and get in "my" car and everything is chosen and in a sense made my "me."

Philosophy and science just continues this into "my" brain and all the work it does to perceive the world work it out, and my thoughts to understand it and make "my" choices. And again more superficially "my" legs to run the marathon, and "my" determination and "my" will and from last blog "My" doll or action-man that I live my life through.

Looking at the picture above, its always been odd that "I" am completely fundamental to "My" life and  yet in reality I'm almost indistinguishable from all the other people. In a NAZI concentration camp I am just a nameless number and it seems I do not matter more than anyone else, in fact if I am selected to be killed that is the closest I get to being a separate being, different and important.

At the heart of all this is "my."

All this is true, BUT what is not true is that "my" belongs to anyone. If anything my body and life belongs to God or if we don't like God it belongs to Nature and the planet and the billions of years of evolution that brought me into existence. And if I don't like that then something else, but what it doesn't belong to is "me." I can't belong to myself?

And this is where the Truth comes into it.

In Shurangama Sutra there is a great exposition of Host and Guest. A Guest comes and then goes. A Host HAS NO WHERE TO GO. This is the confusion we make throughout our lives. We are always coming and going in our life: growing, getting older, learning, making mistakes, moving on, building, changing, buying, getting happy, getting sad: we are always coming and going. We are always only ever the guest in our own lives!

What we tend to ignore is that our lives are already here. The world is already here. In a sense we do make the world, but not in the sense that we are part of the process, but in the sense that we are the stage onto which the world comes along and happens and then goes. The world is the guest, we are the HOSTS to all this business. We don't need to come and we have no where to go. The host just waits for the guests and then opens to door to let them go. That is all we need do in our lives.

Now any analogy gets corrupted. Put like that we think "My" stage, which play shall I book and start rehearsals for. Which guests shall I invite, which food, drinks and music shall we have. Who sits next to who at dinner? But even this getting a play or party ready is more Guest like behaviour. We are now just moving onto planning. Even the putting a show on is just a play itself. Even thinking out this blog is just the soliloquy of an actor on the stage. We ARE the stage itself. Shakespeare is wrong there, we are not actually the actors in reality, although we can adopt their perspective as needs be like the audience does. 

So then we think (and I'm back in the same place as dolls in the previous post) so I'm just passive dead planking on which actors live and work. No that is the nihilism this post is about, all the stuffing has been taken out.

Now this is the subtle thing. That Shakespearean analogy doesn't quite work. A better one is booking a room. If there are people already in the room we can't use it. It is the emptiness of the room that makes it useful. This is Daoism as well. "I" exist in the "space" or "silence" or "absence of light" that gives the world room to happen. That means when something happens we are intimately involved in it, not in the "shape" or "nature" of the occurrence, but in the invitation for "happening" itself.

This is essentially the same as Kant's "condition for the possibility" except there is just One. What is the point of dividing the "condition for the possibility" into as many possibility as there are things. What is the condition for that plurality? Why not just have that root one as The Condition?

This is also Heideggar's "hiding of Being" in the emergence of beings or things. In Heideggar we can see Being as what gave way in the emergence of things. It is the "lighting up process."

"Lighting up" is directly relevant to the experience of sight where literally "light" is what brings the world into presence. But as Buddha argues in the Shurangama, light is not all that is needed for seeing. You light a candle does the table now see? The seeing of our True Self is very close to light, so close that the analogy works. When we do any seeing what is most obvious is that there is light. That "light" is standing right next to our true self... just one step away. The "lighting" is literal but it issues directly from the empty room in which the world happens.

The other senses are not "lit" up exactly, but the analogy is again right next door. The sudden arising of a sound like a bird call "lights" up our hearing. There was nothing and then suddenly it awakens into a form or an "appearance" in our hearing. The sight and light analogies work seamlessly for the other senses. The reason is that they are right next door to the truth.

When Buddha says to Sariputra that "Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form" he is telling us to have no step between these, the sudden appearance of the sound is the same as the room or space or silence  in which it happens: they transform one into the other, and they are the same, as one side of a coin is on the same coin as the other side when the coin is so thin that there are only 2 sides. When something happens we can chose to see the form or we can chose to see the emptiness.

My own great insight came as a kid seeing that the circular light cast by an angle poise lamp over my shoulder was "illuminated" by the darkness around it. No darkness around it then no circle of lamp light. At that point my mind expanded to fill all space so that as I remember "I was able to see in that mysterious space behind my head." I've been told by a very advanced meditation teacher that this was not jhana. But the 5th Jhana is the "infinity of space" so what else was this? Not that it matters beyond questioning the limiting of Jhanas to 4 by some schools. Jhanas are not ends in themselves, but help us step above the wrong views and orient us, exactly like compasses toward the EXACT direction of truth. We can think and have rough ideas about all this but to get it laser sharp requires real focus, attention to detail and work.

That "seeing" is our "True Self." So that the woman standing in the crowd above looking out is looking in the right direction (kind of). The ability to see at all comes from our True Self. Not the ability to perceive and make out things, like "I see the sun", nor even to be consciousness, not the light entering an eye or stimulating a sense: all this belongs to her body standing there. But the actual "seeing" the ability to ignore thoughts and sense of a body or world, to have a venue and be able to put out an invitation for the world just to happen: that is the True Self.

Which has one interesting feature. Now we let go of our body as the heart of our "True Self" we also let go of everyone else. "We" all share in One Self, in that "we" is not the place where "truth" comes from, but rather the other way around. Once the world has happened then we get a chance to make the mistake of choosing a body and then all the problems of "which body?", and "why are there so many like me but different?" all start. And those bodies start thinking about this problem given to them and the suffering, the difficulties and the being born and dying, it all beings.

Free Will & Meditation & Puppet Master

 The classic antimony is between :

(1) action that is chosen freely and 

(2) action that comes about through physical causation.

To date no instance of a physical event in the brain or body has ever been traced to a non-physical cause suggesting there is no free will. But our experience of the world is that we have chose between things and are free to make that choice. The entire West in fact is based upon this idea of "Freedom" which is taken to extremes in philosophies like Sartre or in the US Ayn Rand. Freedom begins its story in the Bible which argues that disobedience of God's order not to eat from the tree Knowledge was original caused by the Devil and represented freedom of choice. Odd that the Post-Renaissance West now celebrates this freedom despite claiming to also follow God.

Anyway we can see this duality in meditation. When we struggle to sit to meditate there is a conflict between what we want to do and the knowledge that we should meditate. Even when we are sitting there is a will to draw us away from meditation and then after the mind wanders that moment comes when we realise we have let the mind drift and we return it to the object (the breath if we are doing breathing meditation).

So meditation seems to be on the "outside" and something that we bring ourselves towards. Even meditating the breath seems to be on the outside and we bring ourselves towards it and then wander off. It is though we then need to pick up our attention and then put it back down next to the breath. The breath is over there and seems to happen by itself. We have breathed ever moment of our life from that first breath in the maternity ward with our mum, perhaps our dad, and surrounded by nurses and perhaps a doctor. Even if we have held our breath we are still in the process of a breath of some type. Yet how many of these breaths did "we" do? Nearly every breath happens by itself. So when we are meditating we can see breathing as happening by itself. This is like the physical causation side above. The world is actually doing the breathing.

When we start to watch the breath closely we can start to see it as "our" breathing. We can stop it, start it by will and then it really becomes "our" breath. If we try to count 10 breaths in perfect concentration without our mind wandering we may deliberately take over the breathing to speed it up to get to 10 breaths more quickly thus achieving the goal! "We" are now doing the breathing. We sit behind it and push and pull the chest to make the breath happen. This is the "free will" side above.

So which is it? Do we cause breathing, or does it happen by itself?

And equal question is: do we do the breathing, or does it happen to us! When the body is breathing by itself then it appears to be happening to us now. We are watching it as something on the outside and receiving the experience coming in from outside to our awareness.

So which is it? Are we watching the breath from the outside or are we making it happen from the inside?

Well it's neither and both. It's actually in the middle.

The point is that sitting to meditate and watch the breath is not pushing "anything" to take a seat and watch the breath. There is not the decision to sit, and then some force needed to make an entity come and seat. There is just the sitting. Struggling to sit and meditate is not a battle to get "ourselves" to sit, and then we decide and we then make the sitting happen. There is no middle man. The struggle to sit is just a struggle to sit and ends with the sitting. There is no struggle to set "someone" to sit . No inner entity needed to be convinced and then get involved as a second stage.

Likewise no one is being brought near to the breath to see it and watch the meditation happen. As argued recently, when breathing is being seen we are already there, there is no realising the breath has gone and then bring ourselves back to it. We have already been brought back at the moment we realise!

"Happening" happens in the instant at the moment we realise. But we try to force a wedge in there so that there is a gap between "happening" and the person it happens to. In that gap we introduce choice so that the "person" can take on board the happening and then decide. But like with seeing, what is seen is already seen. Things "far away" do not then get seen again by the person "near by" they are already seen. Likewise what has happened and been chosen has actually already been chosen. The deliberation we experience is not conducted by a "person" inside, it is happening now.  

There is no ball of "self" being tossed around. The forces we think are pushing the "self" around represent thing that have already happened. We are already going to sit when we think we have decided. We are already focused back on breathing when we think we just realised we have drifted off. The delay is because we are not in the Present Moment and are instead dancing a doll around a mental stage duplicating everything that is happening. When we become aware of the breath again why bother to instruct the doll to pretend its doing a "bringing of the awareness back": that already happened in order to give the stage direction! Just "Be" Present.

However we can go too far and start to think "we" are just a distant observer on the world. Putting the doll down and just watching the stage directions now without bothering to re-enact them in some imaginary "self" it seems like we are completely unnecessary. An epi-phenomenal ethereal observer of the world like the air, or the lighting of the stage.

But we are still operating a doll! Except this doll is now a spirit doll that has stepped off the stage into the air to watch the stage directions. This is too far the other way toward free-will.

When see see the stage direction come in, that is it! There is no point operating a doll at all so we can say we have "decided" to act on these stage direction cos its already happened. But at the same time there is no point in inventing a doll to watch the stage directions either. There are just the stage directions. When our mind comes back to the breathing that is all that has happened. No one was drifting off and has been brought back, and no one lost control and how now taken control again. There is just the object of meditation (which is usually the breath).

This can then be expanded to the classic antimony above. When we imagine "free will" we are creating a mental doll which we manipulate through the unfolding events so we can say "I choose." When we imagine causation and reflexes then we imagine that doll going behind stage to watch the stage direction which are the forces and stimuli of the physical world. In fact no one needs be behind stage or on stage for the direction to exist. The directions are what make the play and are all we need. That is "Present Moment" and links directly to "Non-Self."

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The above can be seen in team sports. In the thick of the game when there is no longer time to manipulate mental dolls we start to behave immediately. We absorb "into" the game so that we are present "in" the game, not on the outside as an ego or person "deciding" to take part.

That famous faked clip of Evan Longoria catching a ball during an interview. Now it doesn't matter that it was staged, it illustrates--albeit in an extreme form--those moments when we are focused on one thing but the brain is able to respond to another. That "other" part of us is not imagined and modelled in consciousness there is no mental doll, it is just happening as it was happening. This is unlike the main action, in the case taking an interview, which is often well modelled and we experience a self actually doing it. For those automatic things we do we are not separate from the event, we are present IN the event. If this was real, then Evan here would be conscious of having the interview, that would be the mental doll, but he would actually be IN the catching of the the ball!

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This reminds me of a very simple Zen story. I can't remember all the details but a novice monk was pestering his master to explain what the true self was. After some time the master explains that he was not ready to understand and dismisses him from the monastery. As he walks away the master calls his name and the novice turns around: that, says the master, is your true self. True self exists IN the world, indeed AS the world. It is not a separate thing that MAKES decisions and has things happen TO it. There is no WORLD vs SELF distinction. All that "separation" happens in our thoughts as we try to make sense of the world and make up stories about what is going on.

Returning to previous blogs on vision. When we see something, even far away, the "hallucination" of it existing there IS the seeing. A thing "far away" has already been seen (else how would we know it was there far away!). The secondary process of it being "seen" by the body/person/being "over here" that we call our self is a secondary thing that happens in narrative and thought. The actual seeing was already done to make the thing "over there"! The "being seen" is a thought about how we got to see it and who saw it!

The "true self" is present IN the "hallucination" of the world around us. The presence of a world IS SEEING. The narrative of a person with a name at the centre of it all doing the seeing and thinking and living a life, that is all story that we layer onto the world mentally.

So it is with action. We exist like Evan Longoria IN what we do. The narrative of somebody making decision and then deciding and then doing is a mental story we add to the world.

Now this realisation can go adrift. The two extremes are that everything that happens starts with a Self that decides what to do with FREE WILL. The other extreme is that we have no part to play and the body operates like an automaton. I spent some time in this view as a teenager and it is scary. What if I do something terrible, how will I stop myself, I am a passenger in a car with someone else driving kind of feelings (indeed western teenagers often dream of being in a car with no one driving or with someone else driving to narrative the awakening of their adult life of making choices for themself).

Both these extremes are too far. The truth is that we EXIST IN the middle. We are not outside the moment either "inside" pushing the body along, or "outside" watching the body be automatic. Reiterating what is said above we are the actions themselves. We are the doubt, we are the deliberation. It does not mean that action is instantaneous. Some decisions are hard and we need to think. But we ARE the thoughts. That mental representation we create like Rodin's "The Thinker":

That is not what it is like at all. This is pure EGO. We are not thinking, we ARE the thoughts.

This separation in our lives between things and ourselves is the illusion created by the brain narrativising the world and ourselves. But its a mental creation, its not the Present Moment truth.

So why do Human do this? When the tiger enters the room all this evaporates and we go into Immediate mode to escape. Only afterwards thinking back do we see what we did and go "wow" was that really "me?" In less stressful moments that "wow is this really me" can catch up almost to the present moment so it looks like we are the person in the thought. We can manage ourselves this way by swapping out the truth with our mental image which is "almost the same." But an instinctive action is needed to push them apart again.

We do all this as a defence. But its actually a perversion of what the narrative thing is about. The narrative thing is about recording and writing things like this blog. But we pervert it to make a "hero" out of ourselves in our own life. We are safe with this made up mental hero. But the seemingly harmless switch from the true self to the fiction has an enormous impact because it means we start living a fake life of a soulless doll.

We are the puppet master who has got fixated by the doll that we operate. That doll can do anything I like and that gives us power and freedom. We forget that the truth is that the true self is operating that soulless doll.

When we look at what we think is "our self" sitting at the desk or where ever we are reading this its odd that this thing is actually rather flat and empty. We can see the inside (obviously as eyes take what is outside in), we can feel the inside somewhat but not a lot, we have the overlay of "thoughts" and "feelings" swirling around appearing from nowhere and going nowhere but there is no explanation of how all this happens we can't see that, its all rather flat and mysterious: you could even say soulless you certainly can't see the soul supposedly in all this. The soul does not reside in the thing at the centre of my world. All the activity is going on outside or in that swirling overlay of thoughts, feelings, imaginings but not clear where that is.