The Primacy Of Consciousness

[Antlerman]

I agree with him about the continuation of consciousness after death, since it was before me and all things in the first place.  That is who I am beyond this sack of skin. 

 

As for his comparing NDE's with meditation he is correct.  They very much are the same.  I had an NDE when I was 18, and now that I meditate it is the same Infinite Source I commune with, immerse within, and become in meditation on a daily basis.  The difference is it is more 'controlled', inasmuch as I put myself within its path.  It is nothing you produce or manufacture, but rather expose.  However, I will say that you can go further in meditation than in an NDE.  The NDE is that Subtle Level experience in the stages of meditation link I provided earlier.  The nondual is beyond the NDE in state experiences. 

 

I highly recommend watching this following video for an indepth look at what is behind NDEs and the meditation experience.  I don't feel bad that its 1:45 minutes in length, since I sat through nearly that in this thread so far.    I seriously believe you will get a lot out of this:

 

 

[Joshpantera]

Ok, checking it out. 

 

Starting out the guy looks vaguely similar to weird Al:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMZGRjFabsg

 

Will respond later...

[Antlerman]

Ok, checking it out. 

 

Starting out the guy looks vaguely similar to weird Al:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMZGRjFabsg

 

Will respond later...

  Yes, you're right.  I thought he looked vaguely familiar. 

[Joshpantera]

Pretty good video over all.

 

I've ran into arguments from the atheist camp against transcendent experiences by way of bringing up this type of brain science. The idea that it's all in your brain. And I agree with this guy about how the brain science neither proves nor disproves God. Depends on what we're calling God too. If it's just the consciousness of existence then there you have it, the brain linked to the experience of consciousness. Not too shocking and obviously not devastating in any way to this type of God analysis. 

 

Further, if the material universe is a manifestation of primary consciousness, well then the entire structure of the human brain is consciousness built upon consciousness in that it's particles of matter (consciousness) collected together in order to form the material structure of a body and brain in the first place.

 

One thing I take from this focus is an entirely different view of materialists and materialism. It's essentially people who are focused on material, which is in reality consciousness, so with respect to materialism we find folks who are solely focused on consciousness, perceived as though it is solid matter, without having the foggiest clue as to what they're really doing. This goes back to the dichotomy between what people call spirit and matter. It sort of falls apart as a short sided view of reality if indeed all is consciousness, every last bit it, all space and all matter and all of what people call spirit too....

 

Now around 1:28:53 where he's talking about the Anterior Commisure and the flow between the right and left Amygdala, I recognize this is as something I've done without knowing the technical mechanics of what I did. I found that part of the video pretty interesting.

[Antlerman]

I've ran into arguments from the atheist camp against transcendent experiences by way of bringing up this type of brain science. The idea that it's all in your brain. And I agree with this guy about how the brain science neither proves nor disproves God. Depends on what we're calling God too. If it's just the consciousness of existence then there you have it, the brain linked to the experience of consciousness. Not too shocking and obviously not devastating in any way to this type of God analysis.

I very much agree with this and it has helped my understanding as well.  Our brains are the organ through which we 'see' into consciousness itself.  It's all about degrees of awareness, or awakeness if you prefer.  It's helped me realize how that the areas of our brain, the left hippocampus in particular is our linguistic center where our normal image of self resides.  It's the waking part of consciousness that we "live" in within our minds.  And that its that verbal world that is nothing but symbols upon symbols, constructed frameworks of what we call reality.  And that in meditation or NDE's it's the right hippocampus that becomes more dominant, the non-verbal side.  This is why the subconscious mind arises to the waking mind in the forms of dreamlike symbols.  The verbal side supplies images to these, I'm not sure what to call them, streams of consciousness itself, waves. 

 

There is something else you should look at that I think is very helpful in our understanding of the relationship of all of these things, and that is the work of Charles Tart, a pioneer in transpersonal psychology.  He's very academic but accessible as well.  Here's a brief article about his work where he talks about what he originally called consensus consciousness, but now calls consensus trance (otherwise known as "reality" to the masses).  http://www.cantrip.org/charles_tart.html

 

If you want to go deeper into his actual work, this is something I think you will get a great deal out of that I had discovered in researching out the differences between meditation and hypnosis.  Well worth your look too:  meditation and hypnosis.pdf

 

If you wish to go deeper still, section number 4 in this link about the nature of ordinary consciousness is quite revealing:  States of Consciousness Link.  Of course you can read all of the sections.  If you make your way through all of them, you'll be well on your way to enlightenment!    (at least in being able to recognize the illusion of reality from a scientific understanding). 

 

 

Further, if the material universe is a manifestation of primary consciousness, well then the entire structure of the human brain is consciousness built upon consciousness in that it's particles of matter (consciousness) collected together in order to form the material structure of a body and brain in the first place.

I like to think of the brain like a telescope.  It's the lens through which we try to bring into focus Reality, which is Consciousness itself.    The more we expose, the clearer the light. 

 

One thing I take from this focus is an entirely different view of materialists and materialism. It's essentially people who are focused on material, which is in reality consciousness, so with respect to materialism we find folks who are solely focused on consciousness, perceived as though it is solid matter, without having the foggiest clue as to what they're really doing.

When the materialist likes to say from this, "see, it's all just in your brain", I love pointing out how everything they experience of reality is as well.  They can't know reality rationally except through the medium of the brain in a created symbolic world.  It's not 'real' either.  There's only one way to know reality as it is, and that is unmediated Awareness itself, pure Consciousness.  All of our experiences of that are of course in the brain.  So any experience itself, is not That.  That state of consciousness is pure emptiness.

 

Now around 1:28:53 where he's talking about the Anterior Commisure and the flow between the right and left Amygdala, I recognize this is as something I've done without knowing the technical mechanics of what I did. I found that part of the video pretty interesting.

Yes, me too.  If you read that link I gave to my existential experience when I was 18, that NDE, that is exactly what happened.  It was the right hippocampus filling up, filling up the right amygdala, where there was nothing but pure nonverbal terror, and suddenly and complete release into the left amygdala!  I saw God!  It's truly indescribable.  It changed my entire life.  So what was that?  Pure bliss, emptiness and form.  All the centers of the brain responsible for creating reality were gone.  I was face to face with that Void.  It was pure Light, pure Mind, etc.  Wonderful.

 

Anyway this will all make a good basis for us to delve deeper together in our exploration!   

[Joshpantera]

If you wish to go deeper still, section number 4 in this link about the nature of ordinary consciousness is quite revealing:  States of Consciousness Link.  Of course you can read all of the sections.  If you make your way through all of them, you'll be well on your way to enlightenment!    (at least in being able to recognize the illusion of reality from a scientific understanding). 

I'm going through this starting with section 1. More on that later...

 

If you read that link I gave to my existential experience when I was 18, that NDE, that is exactly what happened.

I read the link. The good ole' light...

 

Long story short, my grandfather died of a heart attack and when they got him back to life again he had a very vivid 'meeting with the light' story to tell. He felt passionate about the light saying "I am"  when he asked the light who or what it was.

 

And he lived for another ten years after the heart attack, long enough to talk to me about what happened and send me down the path of looking into the tetragrammaton before he finally passed away. He believed that he was supposed to pass this info along. And where it led was to investigating the name and names of God after he died and tracing Judeo-Christianity to it's pagan mythological roots and then beyond to what the mythologies actually mean as metaphor, like we've been discussing. So in a lot of ways his experience was pivotal in my truth seeking explorations that have finally arrived at the primary of consciousness argument and the possible paradigm shift ahead in science concerning consciousness as more fundamental than space, time, and matter....

 

I'll have more to comment when I do more reading.

[Joshpantera]

http://www.druglibrary.org/special/tart/soc3.htm

 

An almost universal theory in Western scientific circles, sunk to the level of an implicit belief and thus controlling us effectively, is that awareness is a product of brain functioning. No brain functioning—no awareness, no consciousness. This is the conservative view of the mind. It is dangerous as an implicit belief for two reasons. First, many experiences in various altered states of consciousness are inconsistent with this theory, but implicit faith in the conservative view makes us liable to distort our perception of these phenomena. Second, parapsychological data suggest that awareness is at least partially outside brain functioning, a condition that leads to very different views of human nature. The radical view of the mind sees awareness as this something extra and postulates that physical reality can sometimes be directly affected by our belief systems. We must be open minded about the radical view to guard against maintaining too narrow and too culturally conditioned a view of the mind.

Pretty good so far.

 

 ...The second change incorporated in the radical view is shown by the two-way arrow from the physical world to the hardware structure of the brain. The idea, held in many spiritual systems of thought that have dealt with altered states of consciousness, is that physical reality is not a completely fixed entity, but something that may actually be shaped in some fundamental manner by the individual's beliefs about it. I am not speaking here simply of perceptions of reality, but of the actual structure of reality. Pearce {49}, for example, describes an experience as a youth where he accidentally entered an altered state of consciousness in which he knew he was impervious to pain or injury. In front of witnesses he ground out the tips of glowing cigarettes on his cheeks, palms, and eyelids. He felt no pain, and there was no sign of physical injury. The consventional view can easily account for the lack of pain: by control of the structures involved in sensing pain (nerve tracts and certain brain areas), pain would not be perceived. But a glowing cigarette tip has a temperature of about 1400F, and his skin should have been severely burned, despite his state of consciousness. From the radical point of view, his beliefs about reality in the altered state actually altered the nature of physical reality. 

    To argue for or against the radical view of the mind would take a book in itself, and this is not the one. (I recommend Pearce's book and my Studies of Psi {131} for data on paranormal phenomena) I want to emphasize that the radical view of the mind, in various forms, is often reported as an experience from altered state of consciousness. If we are going to study states of consciousness adequately, we hall have to confront the radical view, not automatically dismiss it as an illusion or a product of inferior brain functioning  but take it as data. I would personally prefer not to: I do not like the radical view that our belief systems may actually alter the nature of reality even though I can comfortably accept parapsychological data that show that reality is more complex than our current physical world-view believes. But we should stay open to that view and make a decision for or against its probability on scientific grounds, not simply because we have been trained to believe that there is an ultimate, immutable physical reality. Don Juan put it pithily: "To believe that the world is only as you think it is is stupid" {10}. 
    I sympathize with the reader who finds himself rejecting the radical view of the mind. I suggest, however, that he honestly ask himself, "Have I rejected this view as a result of careful and extensive study of the evidence for and against it, or because I have been trained to do so and rewarded by social approval for doing so?"

No worries here. lol

 

After what we've just plunged through with Russell's argument for consciousness as more fundamental than space, time, and matter by way of logical deduction and finding the one thing we can not doubt, I would assume the back ground knowledge and ground work has been laid for what we may encounter in chapter 4. 

[Antlerman]

Awesome.  I'm glad you like it.  I haven't made it through all of that myself yet, but will revisit it now.  It's very good and really gels with so much of what we've been talking about. 

[Joshpantera]

http://www.druglibrary.org/special/tart/soc4.htm

 

The prejudice discussed in this chapter is the belief that our ordinary state of consciousness is somehow natural. It is a very deep-seated and implicit prejudice. I hope in this chapter to convince you intellectually that it is not true. Intellectual conviction is a limited thing, however, and to know the relativity and arbitrariness of your ordinary state of consciousness on a deeper level is a much more difficult task. 

    Consciousness, not our sense organs, is really our "organ" of perception, and one way to begin to see the arbitrariness of our consciousness is to apply the assumption that ordinary consciousness is somehow natural or given to a perceptual situation. This is done in Figure 4-1. A man is looking at a cat and believing that the image of the real cat enters his eye and is, in effect, faithfully reproduced on a screen in his mind, so that he sees the cat as it is. This naive view of perception was rejected long ago by psychologists, who have collected immense amounts of evidence to show that it is a ridiculously oversimplified, misleading, and just plain wrong view of perception. Interestingly, these same psychologists seldom apply their understanding of the complexity of perception to their own lives, and the person in the street does so even less.

 

This seems to be heading in the direction of not perceiving physical reality as it

is, not perceiving directly the thing in itself but an interpretation of what's actually

there. 

 I stress the view that we are prisoners of our ordinary state of consciousness, victims of our consensus reality, because it is necessary to become aware of this if we are to have any hope of transcending it, of developing a science of the mind that is not culturally limited. Enormous benefits result from sharing in our consensus reality, but these benefits must not blind us to the limits of this reality.

 

Ok, so this chapter is more or less geared towards identifying consensus reality and coming to terms with it. 

[RintrahRoars]

Great talk. But the audience sounds like they are tripping on acid.

[Joshpantera]

Now around 1:28:53 where he's talking about the Anterior Commisure and the flow between the right and left Amygdala, I recognize this is as something I've done without knowing the technical mechanics of what I did. I found that part of the video pretty interesting.

Back to this again. This is where the person can kick the negativity flow to a greater degree to where the norm is a flow of positive feeling and awareness. I used to suffer large peaks and troughs - highs and lows - before getting into the eastern philosophy way of thinking, the monism of unity underlying all substance - and the mystery underlying the existence of the monistic one. I wasn't into meditation straight away either, just thinking about the concepts of unity, interconnectivity, and universal interdependence which grain into modern pantheist philosophy. And I would reason things out by this standard. Somehow in the process I began to see quick results and my world view began to change. Later I decided to go all out and try meditation too.

[Joshpantera]

This was just posted today on a pantheist forum:

 

http://www.social-consciousness.com/2013/01/physicists-find-evidence-that-universe-is-conscious.html

[DrGuitar]

 

You cannot replace mysticism with physics. Nor can you prove mystical realization with physics. It's an old argument tried many times in different ways, and quantum mechanics is the latest attempt of the same old failed argument. Physics is not the measuring stick of reality. And that's the problem in a nutshell right there.

I agree.

 

After rejecting Christianity and everything that went with it, I eventually had to face the fact that spirituality is the primordial reality, whether I like it or not.

 

But how do you get a materialist to recognize this? This is what these guys are trying to do. Since an "intelligent" person will only listen to you if what you say can be scientifically proven, then I see why physics keeps being used to prove the existence of the non-physical. Yeah, it gets tiresome after a while, you just want to slap the materialist in the face and say "Why can't you see it, damn it!"

 

I like it when he says that consciousness is the only thing we cannot deny (the fact that we are experiencing something), everything else can be doubted. As we look for something solid to build our lives on, it's ironic to realize that the only thing "solid" is the fluid (I like your "getting wet" analogy). I think this is what was meant by "build your house on rock, not on sand." As consciousness is the only solid truth, then real life won't start until we are able to admit this truth.

 

Becoming aware of consciousness is really what being spiritual is all about. To realize that the nature of reality is spirit is a mind-boggling experience, which I don't mind calling being born again. It's just the beginning. The first step into freedom. How do you go back and tell your friends and hopefully get them to see what you see is... frustrating to say the least.

 

I agree that reality seems to be nonmaterialist at its core and my frustration is now that I am no longer a Christian I am surrounded by atheists (materialists) who disavow all spirit reality. For its not Jesus or atheism it is spirituality. The fact that this spiritual essence is a mystery is just the reality of our situation as humans. Further, this spiritual base of reality gives me hope that when I die, it will not be over in the sense of non-existence. Quantum physics may corroborate consciousnes and /or spirituality but it cannot capture it measure it it seems. The idea that something isnt real if it cannot be physically measured is circular reasoning. They presume it does not exist before they start.  They say they will use a tool that only measures stuff to measure anything and if it doesnt measure then the object doesnt exist. Like measuring color with a thermometer and then saying colors dont exist when the thermometer fails. The more direct thing to say is that the brain and its materialistic processes simply are not consciousness. They may correleate with it but they are not it and they do not produce "it". Chemical and electrical processes are not the same as the reality we perceive. They are surrogates in the manner that their equations are surrogates for physical reality. At this point we are left to deduce things about reality based on our own metaphysical awareness. The question remains, where do we go from here and what is it going to be like experientially? I dont want to wander about haunting houses for the next five hundred or so years like Wilde's Canterville Ghost.

[Voice]

He seems to be saying that there is a physical reality, but its not made of matter. It isn't what we think it is. What is matter? Mostly empty space and a few particles - the nature of which few if any understand.

 

He is right that our perception of the world is the most important thing.

 

A physicist once explained to me that matter is the manifestation of quantum fields.

[Voice]

I haven't had any marathon sessions. I'd say about 2 hours max in one sitting, 20 - 60 minutes is the norm. - but would that include mindfulness meditation as well? That's something I try to stay in (and fail miserable sometimes! lol) pretty much daily.

 

I'm not a spring chicken anymore and remaining still for too long can hurt when I come out

- hips and knees don't care much for the absolute!

 

asanerman - great quotes! and I love the ts eliot poem.

 

I'm not well-informed on all the terms... but I think if there is one thing (as opposed to no thing) it would have to be consciousness itself... pure awareness, beingness, call it what you will. For there to be true nothing then even experience of that would be impossible. It could be the reality, but we would never be able to know or experience it.

 

Ravenstar, this is the second post you've made to this thread now where you've expressed resolve the same as mine.  We went to our first experimental meditation with the same goals (to find the source), discovering the nothingness, being the nothingness.  I also found everything in the nothingness.  

In reflection and preparing an appropriate response to this thread, mindfulness meditation came to the front; I was going to talk about it.  That's where I do most of my meditation, days in a row, years even fixed on certain big questions.  I do it without thinking about it, it's a way of life.

The things you say are so cool.

 

Presently I'm looking at the nature of the moment, the facts that we all share the same one, that it's like a vortex, a singularity with an in (future), something like a center (present moment) and an out (past); the fact that the moment itself never seems to change, only the things passing through it change, they get burned up.  This is one I've dwelt on for years.  It's huge in this thread, the intangibility of it, untouchability, the undefinability.  It's persistently in our face, yet it's one of the great mysteries that inspires religions and in my case music and art with a scientific slant.  It's been argued here (antlerman) that science shouldn't try to define it because it can't.  We can't help but to try though, it's in our nature.  When I apply science to music and art it inspires people to search deeper, it cultivates curiosity and appreciation for the unknown.  The secret is to not define it in the works, only to suggest it.

 

I like that the table here is cleared of "proof."  As a quasi-scientist, I'm seeing agreement among you on something undefinable, agreement which resonates with me as I've come to similar places; agreement which I see as a specific kind of evidence, something I express in creative works that can reach people at depth.

 

I'm still not finished reading what everyone has posted here.  It's excellent.

[Voice]

This was just posted today on a pantheist forum:

 

http://www.social-consciousness.com/2013/01/physicists-find-evidence-that-universe-is-conscious.html

 

Good.  This finding is only one report, and the biggest they could do.  I wager some interesting things will be revealed when we start looking at people and our constructs as neurons growing with the same patterns as in a single human brain.  What would be the form of an entity made up of living humans?

Do corporations have souls?  Just kidding.  But it's true, corporations could be seen as Titans, an example of this idea.  Touchy subject, corporations, and not very spiritual.  Their personification threatens our peace and seems to cultivate corruption among us.

[Voice]

Ok, checking it out. 

 

Starting out the guy looks vaguely similar to weird Al:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMZGRjFabsg

 

Will respond later...

 

This lecture is brilliant.  I'm about 1/3 through, enjoying it a lot.

[Voice]

Back to meditations, thoughtful meditation, the reason I'm fixed on time is that previous meditations took me to a place where the moment common to us all is integral with the nothingness and everythingness.  I can't experience one without the other.  It's part of the "singularity" of consciousness.

[Voice]

Antlerman, what is your perception of time, or more fundamentally, the moment and its relationship with your NDE and exposure in your meditations?

 

 

[Antlerman]

Antlerman, what is your perception of time, or more fundamentally, the moment and its relationship with your NDE and exposure in your meditations?

Sorry I didn't see this question from you. Just speaking to this without rereading the context of this thread I will say that what opens to me in meditation, which is what I was first exposed to in my NDE experience, that of the timelessness, is really what I would say is reality beyond this reality we see as the truth. This world of time is really movement in the timeless. In nonduality, the marriage of the formless in form, you sense and see the timeless, the eternal radiant in the finite, in the impermanent. In this sense, every moment is eternal.

 

What's further is that past, present, and future are slices of time, cross-section of what never changes, that Ground of Being. In another forum where I participate nowadays, someone who was a more mystically-minded Christian was speaking of the Biblical reference to God as the "Beginning and the End". I responded with something that may help communicate this. I said that when it comes to the Eternal, to the Absolute, to Consciousness, to God, choose whatever term you wish, in relation to our reality in time, you cannot think in terms of a linear line. You cannot think in terms of a static state. You cannot think in terms of definitive beginning and ending point.

 

The "Beginning and End" is not back there, and up ahead, but is everywhere and nowhere at all times and no time. It's not like a line, but a loop. But not a loop in the sense of a circle. Think of it like a Mobious Strip, I told her. The 'beginning and the end", to use her language, is at every single point along that strip. It is where you are, at that moment. The timeless is not ahead or behind, but now, and now, and now, and now. In the present, in the past, in the future. So at any point, the eternal is fully, always, there. It exists within time, and outside time.

 

So in meditation, in the experience of reaching the end of our perception of reality through such experiences like an NDE, you break open the illusion of time as the boundaries of "reality" to understand that, this life, is but a face, an expression of the timeless. And that at any moment, we can be within that, seeing life moving and passing, rising and falling, in a dance, in a beautiful, impermanent state of expression of That within which all exists and is given form. And we are both that form, and the Formless in ourselves.

 

I hope this helps a little to address your question.

[pawn]

I like your description antlerman.

 

Time is such an amazing illusion. I agree with your observation that all moments are eternal and timeless. I have studied nonduality quite a bit, and I have had a few "mystical" experiences where "I" absolutely transcended time and space. Eternity is now, beginning and end are one and the same, etc. but then you have to go back to normal life and live in the time-space illusion, because... This is it. (Great book by ALan Watts by the way " This Is It. ")

[Joshpantera]

This also reminds me of Joseph Campbell's take on it. He said somewhere that eternity isn't something that happened a long time ago, eternity is right now here in the present. And also that eternity isn't a long time, eternity is transcendent of time. And the goal of the mystic is to see the eternal in all of the forms and images of time. 

 

I can relate to the above post in that I went through a very mystical period of time as a bachelor with lots of leisure for mind exploration. Then got married, took on a certain burden of responsibility, and had to fall back in to the world of illusion and play the game accordingly. However, I have not forgotten the fruits of mystical realization so I do feel that I play the game of every day life with a certain advantage, or vantage point if you will. I understand that it's  illusory, a game, as I willingly participate.  I'm not calling myself a Bodhisattva but to some degree I do joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world... 

[Joshpantera]

 

This was just posted today on a pantheist forum:

 

http://www.social-consciousness.com/2013/01/physicists-find-evidence-that-universe-is-conscious.html

 

Good.  This finding is only one report, and the biggest they could do.  I wager some interesting things will be revealed when we start looking at people and our constructs as neurons growing with the same patterns as in a single human brain.  What would be the form of an entity made up of living humans?

Do corporations have souls?  Just kidding.  But it's true, corporations could be seen as Titans, an example of this idea.  Touchy subject, corporations, and not very spiritual.  Their personification threatens our peace and seems to cultivate corruption among us.

 

Funny that you mention that. I had to sit back and think on that because I am incorporated. lol That was part of the whole having to return to the world of illusion from a personal years long 'heroes journey.' I wonder now if a corporation can be spiritual? Funny stuff, but worthy of thought...

[bornagainathiest]

 

Antlerman, what is your perception of time, or more fundamentally, the moment and its relationship with your NDE and exposure in your meditations?

Sorry I didn't see this question from you. Just speaking to this without rereading the context of this thread I will say that what opens to me in meditation, which is what I was first exposed to in my NDE experience, that of the timelessness, is really what I would say is reality beyond this reality we see as the truth. This world of time is really movement in the timeless. In nonduality, the marriage of the formless in form, you sense and see the timeless, the eternal radiant in the finite, in the impermanent. In this sense, every moment is eternal.

 

What's further is that past, present, and future are slices of time, cross-section of what never changes, that Ground of Being. In another forum where I participate nowadays, someone who was a more mystically-minded Christian was speaking of the Biblical reference to God as the "Beginning and the End". I responded with something that may help communicate this. I said that when it comes to the Eternal, to the Absolute, to Consciousness, to God, choose whatever term you wish, in relation to our reality in time, you cannot think in terms of a linear line. You cannot think in terms of a static state. You cannot think in terms of definitive beginning and ending point.

 

The "Beginning and End" is not back there, and up ahead, but is everywhere and nowhere at all times and no time. It's not like a line, but a loop. But not a loop in the sense of a circle. Think of it like a Mobious Strip, I told her. The 'beginning and the end", to use her language, is at every single point along that strip. It is where you are, at that moment. The timeless is not ahead or behind, but now, and now, and now, and now. In the present, in the past, in the future. So at any point, the eternal is fully, always, there. It exists within time, and outside time.

 

So in meditation, in the experience of reaching the end of our perception of reality through such experiences like an NDE, you break open the illusion of time as the boundaries of "reality" to understand that, this life, is but a face, an expression of the timeless. And that at any moment, we can be within that, seeing life moving and passing, rising and falling, in a dance, in a beautiful, impermanent state of expression of That within which all exists and is given form. And we are both that form, and the Formless in ourselves.

 

I hope this helps a little to address your question.

 

 

Hi A-Man!

 

I like your take on time, timelessness and eternity. 

As far as I can see we (humans) are, by and large, ill-equipped to grasp the subtleties of these ideas.  

Our linear model of... past --> present  -->  future ...needs to yield to a new understanding.

 

Interestingly enough theorists are edging towards a new approach to matters temporal.  What if time isn't foundational to reality?  What if time 'emerges' from some other state/condition and we simply experience it as foundational because we're 'stuck' within it, like bugs in amber?  This would be somewhat similar to the frustratingly slow progress astronomers are making as they struggle to draw up 3-D maps of the Milky Way galaxy.  Because we're inside this galaxy we can't step outside of it and look back from afar to get a complete view of it - and our understanding of the whole shebang therefore suffers.

 

Anyway, here's a few links for your interest. 

 

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/167/

http://pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/blog/2012/03/are-space-and-time-fundamental/

http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/wuthrich/talks/2010eUCSDOsherSpacetime1.pdf (1 of 2 pdf files)

 

Thanks,

 

BAA

[Antlerman]

This also reminds me of Joseph Campbell's take on it. He said somewhere that eternity isn't something that happened a long time ago, eternity is right now here in the present. And also that eternity isn't a long time, eternity is transcendent of time. And the goal of the mystic is to see the eternal in all of the forms and images of time.

This reminds me as well that whenever people speculate about an afterlife, it always strikes me as being stuck in this mode of the perception of time as linear. It seems to have the self at the center of their reality in the same was we collectively see our species as the center of the universe. We are in the "afterlife" now because eternity doesn't have a beginning. If they wish to imagine the afterlife, open their eyes now as see themselves as they are.

 

I can relate to the above post in that I went through a very mystical period of time as a bachelor with lots of leisure for mind exploration. Then got married, took on a certain burden of responsibility, and had to fall back in to the world of illusion and play the game accordingly. However, I have not forgotten the fruits of mystical realization so I do feel that I play the game of every day life with a certain advantage, or vantage point if you will. I understand that it's  illusory, a game, as I willingly participate.  I'm not calling myself a Bodhisattva but to some degree I do joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world...

One thing I've been coming to learn in my practice of meditation, that the goal is really to train the mind, to train our awareness to be able to skilfully engage in that stream, that 'world of illusion' (which it really isn't so much that once you are aware of it), and be able to be present in the timeless while engaged in time. The challenge really is habits. We fall back into being so engaged within the ego (in the good sense of the word), that we begin to loose ourselves, that center of gravity of the self, in the 'things of the world' and loose sight of that timeless within us.

 

With continual practice we learn to live in that transegoic mind as the now center of gravity of the self, and engage the ego as a tool of our minds. In other words, you are "in the world but not of the world", meaning stuck struggling in that stream of egoic consciousness, just trying to keep your ego afloat and being constantly engaged in building and defending that ego sense of self. The key is practice to the point where you are increasingly removed from the old mind habits, looking exclusively through that ego set of eyes as the dominant perceptive filter, and instead through eyes beyond the ego-eyes. Your ego is still your ego and is still useful in engaging in the tasks of a social world, but it is not longer the center of gravity that dominates your perception and experience of the world, of reality that is not tied to a linear sense of time. It rides it, and gets off at will. It engages at will without its domination of the self.

 

There's a quote from one of the Upanishads that I feel expresses this to me. To paraphrase, "But the illumined soul moves freely up and down all these worlds, taking whatever form it wants, eating whatever food it desires, chanting, 'Oh Wonderful! Oh Wonderful! Oh Wonderful!'".