So this post is basically me selfishly dumping my chaotic thoughts on cause and effect, in the hope that David or anyone is willing to bump me closer in the right direction. Here goes:David Quinn wrote: ↑Sun Jan 06, 2019 8:32 am
- Forget about trying to stop thoughts and achieve a blank mind. That is a populist delusion. It won’t lead to enlightenment. It will only lead to hell. Allow the mind to form concepts naturally. Your only focus should be to rationally examine them as they arise and discard them when they prove to be mistaken. As time goes by and your understanding deepens, more and more false concepts will fall away of their own accord. The non-conceptual understanding that the sages talk about arises at the very end of this process.
Enlightened understanding is non-conceptual in the sense that it does not rely on any specific concept to prop it up. It is all pervasive. It infuses all of one’s experiences and thoughts. One literally goes beyond all concepts, not into a black mind, but into infinite freedom.
The infinite comprises everything, and it's a unity.
'My' experience is generated by my brain, which involves illusions such as
Inherent existence, or
The inherent existence of finite objects that have boundaries, eg forms
The inherent existence of a self with a will
Time
There is nothing 'else' to be experienced besides this illusory experience. There's only the task of understanding the true nature of the experience, thereby transforming it. Once understanding is reached, experience including its 'illusions' continues as usual, but now with increased awareness as to their true nature in an experiential sense.
The illusion of a self
In enlightened state: you become directly identified with all experience. You realize/know directly that you are the experience of the object, and the object has no existence outside of that.
In enlightened state: The process of self still operates as usual, but it will now be continuously recognized for the biological instinct that it is
Suffering
In enlightened state: The mechanism that produces suffering ceases its output of suffering. since the 'fuel' generating the suffering was misunderstanding that has now been fully corrected, it no longer has any basis to create the state of suffering.
I'm not pleased with the theory since it's too vague
The illusion of time
I also vaguely know that time is another illusion. I tried a search on causality and time on the boards, but could find no threads. How does Time tie into the illusion of existence and cause and effect?
The hidden void
The hidden void is an ultimately unreal 'placeholder concept' for reasoning about the infinite. It represents all of reality that is outside of our immediate experience, but is not a thing that exists and therefore not subject to cause and effect. It only exists in an unreal sense as a concept in your head hence, it's a placeholder stepping stone for next level understanding
More Weird implications
Experience is generated by the brain and of illusory nature, and yet brain only exists within said experience as an illusion. So we are now at the weird situation where a non-real thing, eg the brain, is generating experience, which creates the illusion of the brain generating the experience. Also, all of the previous logic is also an experience generated by my brain. Trying to make sense of this weird situation from a wider perspective I think:
The hidden void and a specific experience created by it, both together, taking for example the experience in which the concept of a brain is reasoned about, is simply a unity that has an inner consistency SUCH that the principle of cause and effect is 'true' inside of the 'experience' generated by the 'brain', where all this reasoning and these concepts are simply a description of the consistency of the inner structure of the infinite. The logic of a 'brain' generating an 'experience' is simply an arbitrary description that can be created and seen as true as a result of its inner consistency.
Experience, therefore, implies the existence of absolute logic, implies existence, implies possibility. One causes the other and vice versa. It simply cannot be any other way or the chain of consistency would collapse.
Would the infinite be able to generate something 'else' with a different type of inner consistency? the answer has to be no, because the question already implies the consistency of the type that exists in our reality, 'reality' implies the particular structure/logic of our reality