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Good morning, Anubis! Well, if I may be frank, I would hardly consider myself a saintly person. Since Humility is the foundation rock of saintliness - this comment hardly convinces me that you are not a good person ...

You need to learn to meditate!!!

With my daily schedule, that is a difficult task for me to accomplish. Plus, I'm far too fidgety to sit and meditate. I always have to be on the move, doing something.

Even ten minutes a day of meditatrion would forever change you and your life. As for being fidgety: more happens in ten minutes of meditation than you could experience in a lifetime of outer activity....

Of course, you'll never know if you never try it ...

Hello Avery!!

There is no boundary in experience, or knowledge, or awareness, between inner and outer.

Of course there is. That boundary exists in the "I" of which you speak. Awareness and separation between the experiences of interior and exterior are defined by you personally. For me, the boundary is clear. Me then the world around me. Others may feel that they are "one" with their surroundings, feeling that they are but an extension of the world around them.

Do we ever experience a real outer exterior world independent of our experience?

In my view, no. Simply because of my above mentioned statement. We experience the world around us and define it. Our world is entirely dependent on our experience and perception of it. That is what leads to the vast menagerie of differing view points and beliefs among people.

Unfortunately I have run out of time for now, but I will return later to finish answering those posts I have not yet addressed.

.... As an aside to this post, I feel like I've done this before. I seem to be experiencing a bit of Deja Vu at the moment. Deja Vu is an interesting mental phenomena, isn't it .... And still you insist on trusting the personal mind and its individual ideas? Optical illusions are interesting phenomena as well. "Don't use your eyes, they can deceive you" ...

If we do not use our physical eyes to see - then what are we using to see? When we meditate, we receive a new pair of eyes ...

There is no boundary in experience, or knowledge, or awareness, between inner and outer.

Of course there is. Nice to finally find you online, Anubis! Thanks for the chuckle ... and I do not mean that as an insult - I really laughed. Not because I think you wrong and Avery right ... Just how you plunge in ... A trait I very much admire ...

I can't imagine God is ever pleased with tepidity ...

There is no boundary in experience, or knowledge, or awareness, between inner and outer. Of course there is.
Do we ever experience a real outer exterior world independent of our experience? In my view, no. I'm not Avery, but your two statements contradict eachother dear Anubis. I also have run out of time, and I am sorry that we could not dialogue "live" tonight. It seems that I just missed you ... Thank you for these discussions.

Hello Anubis:

[b]There is no boundary in experience, or knowledge, or awareness, between inner and outer. [/b]

Of course there is. That boundary exists in the "I" of which you speak. Awareness and separation between the experiences of interior and exterior are defined by you personally. For me, the boundary is clear. Me then the world around me. Others may feel that they are "one" with their surroundings, feeling that they are but an extension of the world around them.

[b]Do we ever experience a real outer exterior world independent of our experience?[/b]

In my view, no. Simply because of my above mentioned statement. We experience the world around us and define it. Our world is entirely dependent on our experience and perception of it. That is what leads to the vast menagerie of differing view points and beliefs among people.


Thank you for the reply. You can see even in your two posts, that we all start with a kind of disjunction: we FEEL as if we ar separate, isolated. But on reflection we see that in all experience, world and "I" are together. What I call a "science of experience" simply asks us to look more closely as what we believe about experience. To think it out, and to do simple experiment: you can even call it a meditation, but it can be done any time. As you said yourself: what we take to be outside cannot be outside to our experience. Everything we experience of a world is a known world: i.e. contents of our consciousness. And what we take to be so intimate, almost everything we usually think of as "I" is also part of a changing fabric of "content": and not really a true "self" or subject at all. Like copernicus, we may have to turn our beliefs inside out. What we call inner and outer are all contents: of What? Find that out, sense that which does not change among the changing contents, and we have moved from the appearances to the reality. So the little no boundary meditation simply helps us to break back in to what we know: that awareness, we may call it a background field of aliveness, is unbounded. But there are many contents, "inner" and "outer" which appear in this aware-aliveness.

Quantum mechanics has a very good analogy for the real situation we are in. They describe the state of "superposition" or field of possibilities prior to taking a "measurement". Then: once a measurment is taken, and only when it is taken, can we talk of a "thing" with "properties." But QM has shown us, yes albeit only for the sub-atomic particles, that there is NO THING THERE before the "measurement." Similarly, our whole experience we can point out, every moment, our body/mind apparatus takes a "measurement" or "reading" and in the language of quantum mechanics, the vast field of possibilities is precipitated out as your experience. every moment: sense perceptions, feelings, thoughts, images, memories, sense of I, all arise in this field, or out of it.

but also want to add a comment, more on the lines of figaro perspectives here> As His Holiness Dalai Lama said at one of the recent Mind/Life conferences, bringing together Buddhists and scientists: whether consciousness arises from body, or is prior to body: most important thing is how we respond to and respect each other. So, what we do with that consciousness: the precious gift of sentiency and aliveness: wherever we think it comes from is the important thing. to treat our fellow humans as one big family of brothers and sisters. To recognize that this world is our doing and take responsibility: by becoming good human hearts ourselves.

Thanks for the conversation. I am not in continual access to my net, but will respond when I can. Thanks Figaro. good day. Peace. Avery.

Deja Vu is an interesting mental phenomena, isn't it .... And still you insist on trusting the personal mind and its individual ideas?

I still do, yes. But that is only because Deja Vu is a product of the mind, as are optical illusions. If I may briefly digress back to Nietzsche, he theorized that we repeat our lives over and over again in a continuous cycle (his exact term for this escapes me at the moment.). Although I do not believe in the idea of re-incarnation or re-birth, or even in Nietzsche's theory of a repetitive existence, the phenomena of Deja Vu seems to lend a certain credence to Nietzsche's theory. Why else would random events in time seem to be "familiar" to us?? Perhaps the real answer lies in the fact that we do, to some degree, repeat our lives on a daily basis. Such repetitiveness can undoubtedly lead to a feeling of similarity between events, regardless of whether or not we've actually "experienced" these things before.

If we do not use our physical eyes to see - then what are we using to see? When we meditate, we receive a new pair of eyes ...

One may refer to this as the mind's eye. But, what is the mind's eye? Is it not just a visulization of our thoughts? That we have used our eyes to see the world around us already affords us the ability to envision things within our minds. When I use my eyes to see a tree, I need not think about the tree, I can see it. But if I were to close my eyes, I must sudeenly use the image captured by my eyes to see the tree in my mind. I would argue that we use the same eyes in meditation that we use to see the world around us.

your two statements contradict eachother dear Anubis.

I see that now. I would like to amend that statement now by saying that we all do experience a world exterior of us, but each of our perceptions on it lead to the often differing opinions of what is and isn't real.

But QM has shown us, yes albeit only for the sub-atomic particles, that there is NO THING THERE before the "measurement."

Hello, Avery!!

Well, the one probelm I have with quantum mehcanics on that level is, if there is nothing there to measure, why measure? And why is that only after we measure is there something there that can be measured and discussed? It seems to me that the idea of meausring nothing in the hopes of proving something is rather convoluted.

What we call inner and outer are all contents: of What? Find that out, sense that which does not change among the changing contents, and we have moved from the appearances to the reality.

But the contents of the inner and outer are constantly changing. Our thoughts are constantly moving, even as we sleep. Our planet is continually evolving. Everything is in constant motion, ever changing. That is the true reality of the situation.

Deja Vu is an interesting mental phenomena, isn't it .... And still you insist on trusting the personal mind and its individual ideas?

I still do, yes. But that is only because Deja Vu is a product of the mind, as are optical illusions. If I may briefly digress back to Nietzsche, he theorized that we repeat our lives over and over again in a continuous cycle (his exact term for this escapes me at the moment.). Although I do not believe in the idea of re-incarnation or re-birth, or even in Nietzsche's theory of a repetitive existence, the phenomena of Deja Vu seems to lend a certain credence to Nietzsche's theory. Why else would random events in time seem to be "familiar" to us?? Perhaps the real answer lies in the fact that we do, to some degree, repeat our lives on a daily basis. Such repetitiveness can undoubtedly lead to a feeling of similarity between events, regardless of whether or not we've actually "experienced" these things before.

Good morning, Anubis! I am exhausted, but I thought I would respond to at least one of your posts tonight ... My point here was in Deja Vu - we think we have experienced this moment before, but we have not; in optical illusions we are fooled by our physical eyes. Therefore: why would we trust our individual perceptions to be True ones? If we mistake a stick for a snake, the mistake is obvious. But sometimes our mistaken perceptions are not so obvious ... I do not see myself in the mirror as a myraid conglomeration of moving atoms that are mainly space - therefore, I think I am the physical body as I perceive it. And so on. There are many levels of "reality" even within our conventional reality - which might leave open the possibility that there are also other levels of Reality, perhaps even truer levels of a truer Reality ... ? As for Deja Vu: scientists explain it as the unconscious mind being a bit out of sync with the conscious mind. So we perceive the same experience twice, each time with different parts of the mind.

Thank you for this fine discussion, Anubis - and Avery, just a brilliant post. I couldn't resist trying out these new color possibilities ... Impressive!

If we do not use our physical eyes to see - then what are we using to see? When we meditate, we receive a new pair of eyes ...

One may refer to this as the mind's eye. But, what is the mind's eye? Is it not just a visulization of our thoughts? That we have used our eyes to see the world around us already affords us the ability to envision things within our minds. When I use my eyes to see a tree, I need not think about the tree, I can see it. But if I were to close my eyes, I must suddenly use the image captured by my eyes to see the tree in my mind. I would argue that we use the same eyes in meditation that we use to see the world around us.

Hello again Anubis! Actually the new eyes we are given when we meditate - are not the mind's eye. And I think you have described the mind's eye, or imagination, or inner visualisation very beautifully ...

No, this is something else. The eyes of the soul - or what I would call the soul. One truly enters a new world. But to experience this you would need to learn to meditate. Even one meditation would change the rest of your life.

Think on it.