To what degree can we weed out our delusions on reality?

[Kunga]

One Universal Consciousness, can't be proven either.
Face it....it's not possible to know the truth.
It's all what you be(lie)ve.

[jupiviv]

A person can only at best know their own experience of reality

When the experience of reality is perfect, i.e, delusion-free, or to the degree it is perfect, the person automatically knows every other experience of reality as well.

We have to clarify first what exactly is meant by "delusion-free". Even a delusion-free person can become deluded at a later time in his life, but it is conceivable that a particular experience of reality can be 100% perfect.

[Pincho Paxton]

This is called 'The Game Of Life', take a look at it, and have a play with it...

http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/

The important part of that program is that it builds itself from little parts. It doesn't work all that well, but the idea of a Universe building itself is very slightly manifested in that program. My own program was intended to improve 'The Game Of Life' and allow a simulation to build the Universe properly. Then if I have got all of the early parts right (and they should be very simple), then the program should create everything.

The point is that somebody, some day can just replicate the Universe using this method. A self building copy of a self building Universe. This then becomes its own proof of how the Universe began. So it is possible to prove how the Universe began. And you can do all that without purposely programming anything. Let the program build itself.

[Jamesh]

Funny enough - on the train this morning I read the following by Brain Eno

The Limits Of Intuition
We sometimes tend to think that ideas and feelings arising from our intuitions are intrinsically superior to those achieved by reason and logic. Intuition—the 'gut'—becomes deified as the Noble Savage of the mind, fearlessly cutting through the pedantry of reason. Artists, working from intuition much of the time, are especially prone to this belief. A couple of experiences have made me more sceptical.

The first is a question that Wittgenstein used to pose to his students. It goes like this: you have a ribbon which you want to tie round the centre of the Earth (let's assume it to be a perfect sphere). Unfortunately you've tied the ribbon a bit too loose: it's a meter too long. The question is this: if you could distribute the resulting slack—the extra meter—evenly round the planet so the ribbon hovered just above the surface, how far above the surface would it be?

Most people's intuitions lead them to an answer in the region of a minute fraction of a millimeter. The actual answer is almost 16 cms. In my experience only two sorts of people intuitively get close to this: mathematicians and dressmakers. I still find it rather astonishing: in fact when I heard it as an art student I spent most of one evening calculating and recalculating it because my intuition was screaming incredulity.
Not many years later, at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, I had another shock-to-the-intuition. I saw for the first time a computer demonstration of John Conway's Life. For those of you who don't know it, it's a simple grid with dots that are acted on according to an equally simple, and totally deterministic, set of rules. The rules decide which dots will live, die or be born in the next step. There are no tricks, no creative stuff, just the rules. The whole system is so transparent that there should be no surprises at all, but in fact there are plenty: the complexity and 'organic-ness' of the evolution of the dot-patterns completely beggars prediction. You change the position of one dot at the start, and the whole story turns out wildly differently. You tweak one of the rules a tiny bit, and there's an explosion of growth or instant armageddon. You just have no (intuitive) way of guessing which it's going to be.

These two examples elegantly demonstrate the following to me:
a) 'Deterministic' doesn't mean 'predictable',
b) we aren't good at intuiting the interaction of simple rules with initial conditions (and the bigger point here is that the human brain may be intrinsically limited in its ability to intuit certain things—like quantum physics and probability, for example), and
c) intuition is not a quasi-mystical voice from outside ourselves speaking through us, but a sort of quick-and-dirty processing of our prior experience (which is why dressmakers get it when the rest of us don't). That processing tool sometimes produces incredibly impressive results at astonishing speed, but it's worth reminding ourselves now and again that it can also be totally wrong.

[Dan Rowden]

A person can only at best know their own experience of reality

When the experience of reality is perfect, i.e, delusion-free, or to the degree it is perfect, the person automatically knows every other experience of reality as well.

I assume you don't mean that to include the specifics of empirical experience. A perfect Buddha may not know what a Walrus fart smells like, for example. If you mean they understand the essential, basic nature of every possible experience, then sure, that's true.

We have to clarify first what exactly is meant by "delusion-free". Even a delusion-free person can become deluded at a later time in his life, but it is conceivable that a particular experience of reality can be 100% perfect.

Yes, a brain injury or too much day-time TV could have that consequence. Mind you, that's kind of tautological.

[Unidian]

Indeed. I was in the nuthouse all week and saw way too much TV... the shows were crazier than the patients.

[Dan Rowden]

To my knowledge the QRS never address this issue. Meaning they are uncertain of what infinity means.

Then your knowledge of this is limited. I'm not going to address this in this thread, Jimbo. It's become tangential enough already and that's probably my fault. Maybe we can address it in another thread.

[Dan Rowden]

You may have been looking for more mundane delusions and looking for an actual percentage. I believe that within the parameters earlier set forth, it is possible to be 100% delusion-free. This does not mean that the delusion-free person can always tell when someone is lying to them (although keeping in mind that the person they are talking with could be lying or otherwise presenting a false picture would reduce the chance of being fooled) but they are simply not under the delusion that they can not be fooled.

Just to emphasise and further elucidate this point: being fooled might involve delusion for the one who is delusional, but the fact of being fooled is not in itself a delusion of any kind. Being fooled by a liar falls squarely within the category of the empirical and there's no certainty to be had in that realm. Perfect Buddha's are limited by the natural contingency of empirical experience. Like everyone else, they have to work with probabilities in this respect. Mind you, a Buddha will likely have an advantage given his understanding of things, but it doesn't protect him completely from making the wrong call. He simply won't mind having done so for that very reason, and as Elizabeth said, will not at any point feel as though he is working with anything more than contingency and probability. Unless maybe he's at the dogs, in which case he'll always be on a sure winner. Always bet on black, and all that ...

[jupiviv]

We have to clarify first what exactly is meant by "delusion-free". Even a delusion-free person can become deluded at a later time in his life, but it is conceivable that a particular experience of reality can be 100% perfect.

Yes, a brain injury or too much day-time TV could have that consequence. Mind you, that's kind of tautological.

What I meant was that a person's life, or a person, cannot be called delusion-free, because those are very fluid and complex categories. A person may have delusion-free experiences when he is alone, but not when he is in a busy street. He may be delusion-free while doing math, but not while thinking about his girlfriend, etc.

On the other hand, if you create a category to include only delusion-free experiences, and call it a "person", then you can call that "person" perfectly enlightened.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Perfect Buddha's are limited by the natural contingency of empirical experience. Like everyone else, they have to work with probabilities in this respect. Mind you, a Buddha will likely have an advantage given his understanding of things, but it doesn't protect him completely from making the wrong call.

Are we talking about probabilities of external events or the randomness in how some particular mindset might have formed? And with mindset I mean all the facilities someone would have developed to react specifically on whatever happens. There might be a difference between lack of irrational impulses and the degree one functions as part of a culture as habitual creature, biological product and so on. All of which might be "arational" in the sense that they are not the result of some deliberate thought processing but also not necessarily destroy or maim any occurrence of a clear headed thought (effect of ignorance - blindness).

Perhaps this introduces two different types of ignorance or delusion: the limitation of knowledge or ability of doing the "correct" thing because of the circumstantial on one hand: the whole issue of happenstance, character, neurosis, inclination and so on. At the other hand the ignorance which clouds the correct view on the nature of things and forms a breeding ground of error and multiplication of error. But again a particular kind of error with a particular kind of effect not just caused by the earlier described present forces of randomness and circumstance.

[Dan Rowden]

If a person tells a Buddha there's a piano about to fall on him and crush his skull, and probably the rest of him, that Buddha cannot know if it's a lie or not (assuming he does not have time to test the data). He may be fooled. If he jumps to one side and there's no piano, he had not acted delusionally thereby. That's all I'm saying.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

But that would mean we have to apply a term like "delusion" only to a consistent, repetitive but erroneous understanding. In the example of the piano the delusion would be the case where a person would tell this Buddha that a piano will fall on him anywhere, anytime when he would least expect it. And if Buddha would believe that he would be ducking and running all day long! Now that would classify as delusional belief, also because it manifests as a sustained pattern of behavior or thinking.

And if it would be a sliding scale, then the largest delusion, like the issue of Buddhist ignorance, would be something like the most sustained error applied to the most continuous of our behavior: how our world manifests and the relationship with experiencing. Or something. It seems this definition is important to get right if the topic is "weeding out".

[Pincho Paxton]

I think that skipping past holes, and fillers is delusion. It's the truth, so why skip past it? Anything after holes, and fillers is a delusion, because everything else is a creation made from holes, and fillers.

You have holes.

You have fillers.

Consciousness is 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
.... holes, and fillers.

But the topic is weeding out delusion. You weed it out to...

100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
.... holes, and fillers.

You are not weeding out my garden that's for sure.

It looks like you don't need to wait long for those holes, and fillers to be imitated by man...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 101400.htm

Eventually those holes, or fillers kill you. Cancer is either holes, like lung Cancer, or fillers like moles etc.

The piano falling hits you, and displaces your holes, and fillers.

[Kunga]

Pincho La,

Would you say your theory of holes & fillers is the same as the Buddhist concept of form & emptiness ?
(That's how I invision it)
Without the deeper emphasis on the meaning of dependant origination,
but just simplified as form & space (fillers & holes)

All form fit's into space (holes/fillers)


Also today I thought (again) of how we are smaller than a speck of dust
on the grand scale....how can we be so sure we know anything about the Universe(s) ?
What we can observe is like seeing our back yard and making theories about the inconcieveable.

When asked about the Universe (Cosmology), Buddha was silent.

Sure we now have deep space telescopes, etc.
but we are still playing like little children.
Can't even grow out of our lust for violence.
Not intelligent enough to care for this planet.

The degree we can "weed out our delusions on reality",
depends on how honest we can be about the vast amount of information we don't really have,
and how well we can use what information we do have, for the benefit of mankind and Earth as a whole.

Logic and reason are just as important as compassion .
The heart has its own consciousness, to ignore heart consciousness
and only use brain consciousness will keep us unbalanced & delusional .

To ignore intution, which helps to lead to higher insights of reality,
and to ignore nature and try to lord over it,
creates delusional men, and thus , our knowledge of reality ,
will be distorted.

The degree our delusions can be weeded out will depend on our
higher insights in communication with nature.
Man is not alone , nor is he the Lord of the Universe.
We must think of ourselves as compainions of all Nature,
and Nature will be our companion, and our delusions of reality
will vanish .

We think of ourselves as superior to others and Nature.
That is delusional.
We are all equal.

Without Nature we would not exist.
Our breath is oxygen from life giving flora, sun, and rain.....our reality was created by Nature.
To ignore our life-giving Nature creates a man worshiping man.
No wonder we are delusional.

The degree we can weed out our delusions depends
on how much we understand our nature.

_/\_

[Pincho Paxton]

It would be the same as Buddha's example, because holes, and fillers are the example of everything. You cannot have any example without it being made from holes, and fillers. That's why holes, and fillers are the weeding of all delusions.

You could say that this information is going into a memory hole, and you are reading the memory hole. You could say that weeding involves pulling something out of a hole. So the title of the topic actually reads...

To what degree (degree meaning amount, and amount meaning a fill, as in the amount of water in a bucket.)

can we (we are vessels, and vessels are holes that hold something, and we hold fluids, and memories, and information, and electricity)

weed out (pull out something we don't want from a hole)

our delusions on reality? (delusions are electrons stored in holes that direct to false information.)

So if you break down the title, and remove the delusions, you have the answer in the title.

[Russell Parr]

But that would mean we have to apply a term like "delusion" only to a consistent, repetitive but erroneous understanding. In the example of the piano the delusion would be the case where a person would tell this Buddha that a piano will fall on him anywhere, anytime when he would least expect it. And if Buddha would believe that he would be ducking and running all day long! Now that would classify as delusional belief, also because it manifests as a sustained pattern of behavior or thinking.

This seems to be more of a description of paranoia, or schizophrenia. Like a Christian believing that God could usher in Armageddon at any moment, ha!

Here's one I've been thinking about: Is it more accurate to say that, in the mind of a Buddha, any delusional thoughts that arise are quickly deciphered and easily eliminated, or that delusional thoughts more or less never arise? Or both?

[Kunga]

Hope this helps :

http://books.google.com/books?id=HRoN3A ... on&f=false



I got brain freeze now.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Here's one I've been thinking about: Is it more accurate to say that, in the mind of a Buddha, any delusional thoughts that arise are quickly deciphered and easily eliminated, or that delusional thoughts more or less never arise? Or both?

Just a first stab at this but we need to start somewhere. My current understanding of how thoughts arise would lead to say "both" to your question. I think the mind always throws up a lot of things at a deeper level. It might be the way how it processes information, by juggling things around, recombining it and testing this on consistency and viability. This would mean that at some level, the immediate level of something like shouting "duck! a piano falling!", the mind correctly processes it as too urgent to decipher and will react with alertness and movement first. We're now at the level of "random impressions" which I think always will contain true and false, or potentials for those at least. So one could say that "delusional thoughts" as potentials keep arising. But the mind of the Buddha would have not much for those to hold on to and it's "half-life" time would be severely short. In that way they "more or less" never arise or do not stick around much anymore and certainly will not clog up the view to any serious extent.

This all assumes a healthy working mind. If for example at the "immediate" level the equivalent of the piano warning keeps happening we have the more pathological case like as you mentioned paranoia or whatever label would be used. This might be induced by trauma, wrong habit, brain damage and so on. If we follow this reasoning it would mean a clear mind requires at least a brain without trauma's and working reasonably on a subconscious level. It's like when you want to read a book or study as a student: the requirement is a quiet space, some food and so on. Here we enter a tricky subject: how to indicate the difference between talking about a core falsehood keeping our mind in a delusional state or a core disability of a mind to ever deal with falsehoods and distinctions just because of the overall noise level and condition it is in. The latter case seems very circumstantial and beyond complete control even for a Buddha type. Watch out! Behind you!

[Elizabeth Isabelle]

A person can only at best know their own experience of reality

When the experience of reality is perfect, i.e, delusion-free, or to the degree it is perfect, the person automatically knows every other experience of reality as well.

I assume you don't mean that to include the specifics of empirical experience. A perfect Buddha may not know what a Walrus fart smells like, for example. If you mean they understand the essential, basic nature of every possible experience, then sure, that's true.

Agreed.

Here's one I've been thinking about: Is it more accurate to say that, in the mind of a Buddha, any delusional thoughts that arise are quickly deciphered and easily eliminated, or that delusional thoughts more or less never arise? Or both?

I don't believe any delusional thoughts would arise in the first place, given the parameters above. Once facts are known, they are known. Should a Buddha start having delusional thoughts, they would no longer be a Buddha.

[Kunga]

Should a Buddha start having delusional thoughts, they would no longer be a Buddha.

I thought there was only one Universal Consciousness.
There is no duality in Ultimate Reality.
Buddha/Non-Buddha is a duality.

There is only THE ONE.

Only the deluded think there are delusions..........(oy)
Duality is an illusion.
If duality is an illusion,
there can't really be delusions....only our perseving them as delusional.

This is hard to grasp, I know....
But if there is Ultimate Truth
And Ultimately all is One,
Then All must be Buddha .

Ordinary beings and Buddhas are One.
It's a delusion to think otherwise.

Yes there are delusions, but they are illusions.

The piano is a delusion/illusion.
But we are so ingrained in this delusion-illusion it seems real.

Conceptualizing is duality.

[SeekerOfWisdom]

Kunga is on the spot, she is clearly been moving towards "I don't know shit" which is what I call true non-egotistical wisdom. Any info exists as a conceptualization, all equally as illusory, the thing we are certain of is that all our experiences have been appearances of consciousness. Choosing particular feelings/ideas that are more agreeable is based on perspective only, there is nothing lasting in the contents of consciousness, the only lasting characteristic is the transience of what we experience.

This is the reason the Buddha said something along the lines of "idiots make guesses about the world".

There is nothing to know except the path that leads to truth which is a way of being that is non-attached to illusions and without self-clinging.

Final summary, there is being and non-being, birth and death and aging and sleeping. All are only experiences of consciousness. All experiences are transient and are like a vision/dream of which we do not control. The conclusion of all wisdom is to remove attachment to self and illusions.

Anything I am missing? Is this resonating Kunga?

[Kunga]

...of which we do not control

I tend to think we have control of what goes on in our individual head.
We, (although ONE entity), are responsible for our actions, or at least we should take responsibility
for our actions. We must navigate this Samsara/Nirvana very carefully & skillfully.


Conventional reality is also Ultimate reality.

We must play by the rules.
The sun and moon have their own course to follow....as the Earth and all else in this Heavenly body
has a function....

We also have this material body , that needs to be controlled. Although it pretty much functions on it's own as far as blood circulation, heart beat, bone growth.....etc.
We are responsible for what actions we take with our body & mind, as individuals.

[SeekerOfWisdom]

We have full control and make decisions every day.... John/Kunga has full control and makes decisions every day... but no one has zero control and makes no decisions.

[Kunga]

We have full control and make decisions every day.... John/Kunga has full control and makes decisions every day... but no one has zero control and makes no decisions.

Yeah....i get you now ....as we are "no one".

[Dan Rowden]

Kunga is on the spot,

I'm sorry, but she's nothing of the kind. She simply repeats shit she's read and/or been told. Tomorrow, when a different mood takes her she'll say something completely different. By the way, if one was to take the content of her last post as sound, then there's exactly no reason to actually say any of it. Why say it? This is one of the remarkably silly things about this particular take on "Buddhist" philosophy. Those that hold to it have no reason whatever to say jack about it and yet they never shut the hell up.

she is clearly been moving towards "I don't know shit" which is what I call true non-egotistical wisdom.

Oh, I don't think so. Most people I've known who adopt the "I don't know shit" paradigm have been lazy morons.

Any info exists as a conceptualization, all equally as illusory,

For the last time - nothing is illusory. Things are not illusions. It is a delusion, mired in duality, to think this way. It's just as serious a mistake to think this as it is to think things are objectively real. Each represents the same degree of folly.

the thing we are certain of is that all our experiences have been appearances of consciousness.

Ok, that's fair enough.

Choosing particular feelings/ideas that are more agreeable is based on perspective only, there is nothing lasting in the contents of consciousness, the only lasting characteristic is the transience of what we experience.

Yes, values and goals etc are merely whims of nature. They only have the meaning we grant them. Nevertheless, they are what they are. They're a natural part of how discriminative consciousness functions. The problem starts when we develop egotistical attachments to them and think they are more than they are.

This is the reason the Buddha said something along the lines of "idiots make guesses about the world".

Well, that could simply mean only idiots guess about things. But the Buddha certainly knew that there's no real knowledge available to us in the empirical realm.

There is nothing to know except the path that leads to truth which is a way of being that is non-attached to illusions and without self-clinging.

Well, yes, transcendence of ego. But attachment to things as illusions is a big one too.

Final summary, there is being and non-being, birth and death and aging and sleeping. All are only experiences of consciousness. All experiences are transient and are like a vision/dream of which we do not control. The conclusion of all wisdom is to remove attachment to self and illusions.

Well, sort of. Wisdom is the removal of attachment, per se, not merely attachments to particular things, though the ones you mention are obviously significant. Attachment is, itself, an expression of delusion, that being the product of ignorance. The very source of attachment has to be eradicated otherwise there's no point at all.