Makes sense to me. Any other part of this reply you wanna tackle?
Gib, I will read the rest when I can:
The controller has two jobs.
It can remote control the species to protect or send you to hell.
My favorite job is the accuser.
That’s the most powerful job.
The accuser is there to accuse god if god misbehaves and to accuse the controller if they misbehave
Well it is about time you explained what you meant by controller. You should stop assuming that people are going to connect the dots between the earlier stuff you said about remote controlling people and this new stuff that doesn’t even have the word remote in it.
I am not remotely interested in why it took you so long.
It seems to me that you have already agreed when you entertain the notion of relativity. Does that which is relative exist or not? You can’t say that absolutely exist, or that it does not.
Where empirical perception is concerned what we perceive is demonstrably the excitation of bodily organs interpreted by the mind. There’s no way to get outside of perception to verify some absolute substance behind it as Berkeley showed. I’m not claiming that experience is absolutely unreal—only relatively so. The fact that the modes of experience change everyday proves that.
Individual experience superimposes the qualities such as egoism on pure consciousness. The result is that it sees itself as separate from other selves. Limitations and changes that don’t belong to consciousness are mistakenly superimposed on it. Consequently, we suffer.
We agree, do we not, that different modes of experience seem to negate each other. When dreaming you are not aware of your dreaming self. When in deep sleep you’re not aware of your mind or your body, In flow states you are not aware of yourself only the immediate activity in the present moment, waking states. They are all relatively real—but none absolutely so. Yet the consciousness that you are is the constant across all these modes of experience. That is absolutely real.
You’re confusing ego consciousness with absolute consciousness. The Self is to the self as the waking self is to the dream self. You have argued that consciousness is the substratum of everything, right? If so, I agree. Everything in your dream is really you. Everything in the big dream is the Self. That Self is universal consciousness. Solipsism mistakes the individual ego for consciousness itself in which that ego appears as an object. It is based on narcissism which is the experience mistaking the ego for consciousness. That’s a normal experience in human development, not to be mistaken with narcissistic disorder.
I was being facetious if I sounded harsh. It was fueled by the fact that there is this compulsion inside of me that wants to make a complete glossary of all of the things you say, but I am resisting it out of another compulsion I am encouraging harder.
That sounds familiar, just a passing remark (compulsion, where it is that inordinate force of nature repeated over again, not have yet given name or category to?
Relative and absolute are two modes of being, not degrees of being. I like to compare them to relative motion. We didn’t stop believing in motion when Einstein introduced his relativism. We just understood that it has a relativistic nature. Motion exists just as much as we thought it did when we considered motion to be absolute, but now there’s a question of what it is motion relative to. We can no longer say “X is moving at such-and-such speed,” we now have to say “X is moving at such-and-such speed relative to…” but it remains just as true. In other words, I see a qualitative difference between absolute being and relative being, not a quantitative one.
In any case, the point is that while you may be able to say something like “Dragons don’t exist relative to my perception of the world,” even though someone else hallucinates dragons all the time, the dragons are real–fully real–for the person having the hallucinations (or just believes in dragons).
But we don’t need to get outside our experience to verify their reality. The reality of the experience comes with the experience. You can say of an experience you are having that it is not real (a mirage, a hallucination, a dream), but this is a thought about the experience, an interpretation, not the experience itself. The excitation of bodily organs are the material representation of the experience, but this is a shadow (like on Plato’s cave walls). The experiences are the real thing, and only get translated into the perception of the excitation of bodily organs after a complex process of metamorphosis.
You’ll have to unpack this a bit for me, but it sounds like my theory of epistemic awareness in the sense that epistemic awareness of our experiences is like a flash light illuminating objects in a dark room. Keep the flash light focused on one set of objects and it creates the illusion that those objects stand alone in a void, surrounded by nothingness, by emptiness. The fact that they are part of a larger collection of objects (or part of the room) is not picked up, so we assume there are no other objects or room.
I’m not sure what the link to suffering is, but perhaps you’ll enlighten me.
I’m not sure this makes things less or more real, just relative. If I’m dreaming that I’m climbing a mountain, then to say “I’m climbing a mountain” is true of the dream world but false of the waking world. Relativism just makes things more complicated by requiring us to qualify our statements with what they are true relative to, but that doesn’t make them less true than absolute statements. Yes, we agree that consciousness is the constant across all experiences, but that’s still only true relative to what you and I believe.
Ok, so you’re saying that everything is a product of Consciousness (with a capital ‘C’) but not necessarily of the egoic mind. So there is still something beyond the egoic mind. But this doesn’t answer my question of what to think of other people. Are they only images in my consciousness? Or are they real people connected to universal consciousness just like me, and somehow universal consciousness projects an image of them on my consciousness so that they can be represented to me?
Well let’s flip the question. If universal consciousness projects an image of you onto other people’s consciousnesses so that you can be present to them…does/would that make you any less real?
No it doesn’t mean that we are the same self. It just means we are the same kind of thing, as in, a self.
P.s. Above you attributed a quote to me that was actually written by Bob. That bit about running naked and swimming with indigenous folk. Def not me.
All I’ve got, is that we all operate differently, in that… no two brains minds or consciousnesses are the same.
…there’s not much I can disagree with here, if at all… energy, waves, frequency, the concrete elements that help make up the Universe and make things happen. 
Not necessarily. A person who hallucinates dragons all the time, may be able to learn that what he sees is a hallucination and not real. He could then go on seeing them but understand that they only exist relative to his perception but not really. We continue to have mistaken perceptions when we have optical illusions even though we know they are not real. This tells us something important about our perceptual equipment—that it doesn’t convey the world to us the way it really is in itself—that everything we perceive is relative to our sense organs the vibrations of which are are transmitted through nerves to the nerve center called the brain. Now we’re back to the hard problem—what does that have to do with consciousness which is what we’re involved in this very moment? Nobody knows. But, that whole phenomenal process is relative and doubtful in terms of its ultimate verdicality.
They are as real as you are as the ego you imagine yourself to be. Which is to say ultimately they are not real as you are not and neither am I as separate individuals. In so far as we are contingent beings, we only exist relatively.
“Dependent arising, also known as paticca-samuppada in Pali or pratītyasamutpāda in Sanskrit, is a key doctrine in Buddhism that states that all things are interconnected and dependent on other things to exist. This applies to everything, including mental and physical phenomena, thoughts, objects, individuals, and the universe. The doctrine can be expressed as "if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist.”
What does exist is the consciousness that we all ultimately are that is having the big dream we call the universe. The mind blower for me was to discover that being is not matter that is opaque to consciousness but rather is consciousness itself which is what I ultimately am.
There are 5 ways you can destroy existence and three ways you can destroy your soul.
I’ve used all of them and I’m still here.
That was plan A.
The easiest way to destroy existence is to make everyone exactly the same. Another easy way is to be omniscient…. That makes everyone exactly the same.
If you’re still here, you are wrong about the ways, or didn’t use them
Or. You’re not still here 
…& def not omniscient, either way. And that isn’t me being self–deprecating.
Which is why you haven’t replied here:
I highly doubt it. For one thing, I’m here after all, verifying my own existence. For another thing, even an image inserted onto other people’s consciousness would still project (according to my theory) and be real for those who see the image. Third, if Consciousness (with a capital ‘C’) is ensuring I can be represented to other people (even if only by images), then what is it that’s being represented? Surely a representation implies a represented, a something the representation stands in for? Would that something not be real?
Oh, damn, so I did. You mean this:
My sincere apologies… in fact, I remember screwing up a lot with that post, misquoting almost everyone. I combed through it once and thought I got all the misquotes but I guess I missed one. Sorry.
About the man who hallucinates dragon’s but doesn’t believe them… if he doesn’t believe in them, then for him they aren’t real, pure and simple. In my theory, what it takes to be part of one’s reality is that one must believe it is reality, not just see it. This comes back to my relativism and the way that ties into statements and what I coined “reality designs”. Statements (expressions of thoughts, beliefs) are what’s relative in my theory because they are referential; they always refer back to the individual’s concept of reality (or what I call his “reality design”). The statement is true relative to the reality he believes in. If the individual doesn’t believe dragons are real despite experiencing them, then they are not written to his reality design (or erased). The fact that he sees dragons is accommodated but interpreting them as just “hallucinations”. Hallucinations can easily fit in a reality design in which there are no dragons (but dragon hallucinations may sometimes occur).
Now admittedly, there is a snag in this reason which I haven’t satisfactorily figured out, and it is this. What I consider a “reality design” is not just the way someone regards reality cognitively or abstractly–it includes everything that is given to the mind, everything concrete, everything incoming, like the sensory perceptions of dragons themselves. And my theory pivots on the experience itself, no interpretation thereof, manifesting it’s own reality. This is a problem because it means I have to say that in the schizophrenic’s reality, dragons are real and they are not real at the same time. But I think the solution has something to do with the fact that even though the perception of dragons carries with it its own reality, this doesn’t impact the way we interpret our experiences. So we are free to interpret out experiences as hallucinations, as not real, and this is good enough for the reality design, the reality of the dragon not changing but becoming the reality of the hallucination instead.
Needless to say, my theory needs to make room not only for relativism, but what I call “reality transitions”. If the schizophrenic once did believe in the dragons he hallucinates, and then one day decided not to believe in them, he made a reality transition (according to my book)–from a reality in which dragon’s exist and to one in which they don’t (not that this is how he would describe it but…). ← But I caution the reader not to take this too seriously. I’m not suggesting there there are these abstract bubbles floating around in metaphysical space called “realities” that we hop in and out of without realizing it. Rather, it is the manner in which we must talk if we are to hold to the tenet of my theory that everything experienced must be real, and that reality itself, its essence, projects from us just as much as any other experience. It’s just that it can’t accommodate contradictory affairs within itself–ex. dragons existing and not existing at the same time–and so the mind relegates the existence of dragons (if that’s what we’re saying doesn’t exist) to a separate reality, a world of fantasy, a world the schizophrenic once believed in but now sees that it was just a belief. This is why I prefer the term “reality design”–it’s hard to argue that a world of dragons that no one believes in counts as a “reality” but a design for a reality? Like Star Wars is a design for a reality. Or the world of Harry Potter and Hogwarts? Sure, they’re designs. And through life, we go through a series of designs and believe in them while we have them, thereby allowing them to project as reality for the time.
The problem I have with explanations that fall back on biology and brain operations is that I thought we agreed that these are no more real that any of the other images that appear in consciousness, and as you insightfully pointed out, everything’s in consciousness, consciousness is not in anything, certainly not in the stirrings of a few neurons. So I’m very wary of explanations for the workings of our psychology, mind, consciousness, etc. that fall back on the brain sciences… sure, the brain sciences are great for shedding light on the correlations between brain and mind, and they can make us look at mind and consciousness in whole new ways and discover things we didn’t even know were there, but I cringe when brain is used to explain what causes or controls mind. The brain, to me, is a material representation of someone’s mind, like a shadow is a representation in Plato’s cave of things and activity outside the cave.
At the end of the day, my theory rests of mind being a substance that creates things out of being, for that’s what it is itself–being–(the 2nd aspect of all experience, along with quality and meaning). So even if you chock up someone seeing dragons as “hallucinations”, they’re made of being, of realness–they must be if that is what mind and perception universally are–and so there is no way the dragon is not real. We just have to find clever ways to articulate these things, like bringing relativity into it or “reality transitions” or the concept of reality designs, etc.
felix dakat:
They are as real as you are as the ego you imagine yourself to be. Which is to say ultimately they are not real as you are not and neither am I as separate individuals. In so far as we are contingent beings, we only exist relatively.
Relative to what?
“Dependent arising, also known as paticca-samuppada in Pali or pratītyasamutpāda in Sanskrit, is a key doctrine in Buddhism that states that all things are interconnected and dependent on other things to exist. This applies to everything, including mental and physical phenomena, thoughts, objects, individuals, and the universe. The doctrine can be expressed as "if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist.”
What does exist is the consciousness that we all ultimately are that is having the big dream we call the universe.
Right, so all the more reason that that which comes from consciousness must also be real. The reason why our experiences seem real to us is precisely because of this–consciousness is being and visa-versa–for if we are conscious that it is a sunny day, then the experience of the sunny day is being, it is realness, which is why it cannot help but to manifest as an actual sunny day, not the perception of such which may or may not be real.
Ecmandu:
There are 5 ways you can destroy existence and three ways you can destroy your soul.
I’ve used all of them and I’m still here.
That was plan A.
The easiest way to destroy existence is to make everyone exactly the same.
Like if we all became omniscient at once? Or can one somehow make everyone omniscient simply by achieving omniscience him/herself first?
Are you the real thing or the projected thing? If you are in the image of Consciousness, does that mean you are a projected thing and Consciousness is the real thing? If the projected thing is a real thing, and the image is the projected and real thing, then you are contingent consciousness subsumed in Consciousness (everything projected/imaged is subsumed).
Does formless & void mean absent of capacity — or undeveloped capacity?
Observe the two posts’concurrance; in synch(Cronkite)?
.
Surely you can see that your sunny day is relative to the position of your body, the weather, the position of the earth relative to the sun, etcetera? It is temporary. It is a mere appearance to you. Moreover, it is an abstraction.
Reality is consciousness which is nondual—one without a second. This is the absolute. It is unconditioned, unconditional, constant and unchanging. Everything that appears in it is fundamentally it, like waves in the ocean. There is no discontinuity. That is what you are!
So, yes your sunny day is real, but its reality is conscious itself. The phenomena that is a sunny day is relative to its temporary conditions.
Your body itself lasts longer in time than your sunny day but is likewise a temporary phenomenon dependent on the sensory organs for its perception.
You and your world are more fundamentally mind stuff projected by the intellect. What you really are is consciousness itself playing hide and seek with yourself. The Vedantists call this play Lila. Enjoy!
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I think you’re using relativism too broadly. I don’t think everything is relative. I reserve relativism specifically for statements. Statements are true or false relative to one or another person’s “reality design” (or more simply put, according to someone). And of course, if I am looking at the sky and reporting that it’s a sunny day, that statement is true relative to me and how I experience reality in that moment. Somewhere else in the world, it may not be a sunny day and my statement would be false relative to those living in that part of the world. Instead, they would say “it’s not a sunny day” and that would be true relative to them and how they experience the world. And that’s ok. Relativism (of statements) allows both statements to be true at the same time–in fact, that’s the point (which is what I need in my theory if I am to say all experiences project and become real).
This comes straight out of the fact that statements represent truths or beliefs that project from thought. This relativism, in other words, is an inherent characteristic of cognition specifically, for it is only cognition that is characterized as being about something–and about something other than itself. When I say “it’s a sunny day” that expresses a thought (coming from the front of the brain) which is about what I see visually (a different experience coming from the back of the brain). All thought has this referential aspect about it (I believe they call it “intentionality”) because of what it comes from. And you can develop further thoughts, thoughts about thoughts, and they can become abstract and metaphysical, but so long as they are always about something (something other than themselves), they will always refer back to simpler thoughts and eventually the non-cognitive experiences from which they came. To say that the statement “it’s a sunny day today” refers back to my visual beholding of the kind of day it is outside is just a very specific and narrowed-down way of saying that it refers back to reality (my experience, or my idea, of reality–my “reality design”) which is the most generalized way of putting this referential nature of thought, and is the reason why this type of relativism is about statements being true or false relative to a reality design.
Any other experience can also be said to be relative, of course, but in a extremely trivial sense–an experience is always real relative to itself–it’s the one experiencing itself as real, after all–but that’s just what an experience is–the reality of something by virtue of being felt (that’s simply Berkeley’s esse es percepi); but this isn’t all that much different than saying a rock is real relative to itself. Well, of course it’s real relative to itself–if it weren’t for itself, it wouldn’t be real, but because of itself (there it is, after all) it is real! True but incredibly trivial! I suppose saying “real relative to itself” makes sense to some people because, as consciousness, we think of experience as sort of a “being”–not being, but a being–like a self. So just as I can say “it’s a sunny day relative to John” it seems like I should be able to say, the sky is blue relative to my visual perception of blue when I look up at the sky–like my perception of blue has its own point of view (its own “reality design”) according to which the sky is blue. And in a manner of speaking, I suppose one could say this, but it’s important to understand that this is very different than saying “the sky is blue” relative to John, a living breathing human being who can think about the fact that the sky is blue, make it part of his reality design, and express it by making statements about it.
As to the idea that the sunny day is temporary, this is a very different argument. No one ever said the sunny day had to be permanent in order to be real (or true). There may come a time when the statement “it’s a sunny day” ceases to be true (because it’s not anymore), but I don’t need it to be permanently true. I can simply express the thought in the past tense–I can say “It was a sunny day”. But in any case, the “temporary” argument is one of two arguments I hear most often from proponents of Eastern philosophy and religion–the first being “since reality is perception, it’s not real” and that’s the one that’s usually argued first, and when it fails, out comes the “temporary” argument which goes something like “since everything changes, you can never make a true statement about anything; once you’ve made it, the thing has changed and it’s no longer true” ← But that’s a different argument. And I’m not sure the constant changing of things really affects the truth of a reality design, as it is the reality design which determines what’s true of the things it refers to. There can be a lot of leeway and change in the things we experience without the statements we typically make about them becoming false. For example, at 5 years old, I would say of my son “that’s my son.” My son is now 13 and guess what! I’m still saying “that’s my son” and it is no less true than it was when he was 5.
I’ll leave “abstract” for a later post as this response is already way too long winded.
Absolutely! But here it sounds like your making a distinction between substance and form. We’re talking about the ultimate substance of existence, right? We’re saying it’s consciousness. Traditionally, in the philosophy of substance, we say that there is substance and there are the forms substance takes. For the materialists, matter is the primary substance of existence and a banana (say) is one of its forms. The form is said to be temporary and conditional while the substance is permanent and unconditional. But they are not mutually exclusive. You seem to be saying that because substance is the true permanent and unconditional basis for things, it is the real thing and its forms are not. Why are the forms that consciousness takes not real if the consciousness they are made of is real?
Again, how are you using “relative” here? A child is a child relative to his age. Sure! But is it wrong to call a 5 year old boy a “child” just because one day he’ll be an adult? A “sunny day” is the form consciousness takes right here right now, so falling back on my previous argument, the form is just as real as the substance. That it is temporary is neither here nor there.
There you go again, saying our sense perceptions are dependent on neural processes, when it should be the other way around. How do we even know of “neural processes” except from sense perceptions (empiricism 101)? Our sense perceptions of these neural processes are what make these neural processes real (at least if you follow my theory) and are therefore dependent on the latter. I would think you of all people would agree with this. The outer world is giving us representations of itself–sensory representations, which, when projected, are material/physical representations. These neural processes are no less material/physical representations than anything else. But of what? Of whatever the owner of these neural processes is experiencing from them. It’s that person’s experiences which are being represented (and communicated) to us via our senses, and apparently that requires translation into the form of physical neural processes.
Thanks! (I think?) I have no idea what you mean by this. But it’s still only true relative to your way of looking at things. I have my own way of looking at things. You seem to want to say more than just that consciousness is absolute but that your whole Vedantic theory is absolutely true as well. I’d argue this point further, but it might be more appropriate now to remind you that we can still just agree to disagree.