Dissolving the self = indistinguishable from selfishness

To anyone else, I mean. Seems like the only difference is self-awareness.

 

Not if you dissolve into everything

 

One guy won't help you because he doesn't care. Another guy won't help you because you need to learn how to help yourself. But either way, no-one helps you.

Concern for how you appear to others is the main motivation for doing good for others. When one truly doesn't care what others think of them, whether one is self-aware or ignorant, what reason does one have to do good?

 

??

I go around not giving a damn, and doing good
as often as I can.

 

Uh-uh. Selfishness is observed by others. No-one thinks they're selfish, after all, and if you were the only person in the cosmos, you couldn't be. But if you dissolve into everything (whatever that means), everything won't have dissolved into you. You'd still be abandoning people to fend for themselves - people who probably helped you along your way, one way or another.

 

That's why you go in and out of selfishness and human drama.
Like a yin yang.
Back and forth.

 

Well yeah, I kinda feel like flux is something people talk about but don't really know how to achieve. Point of fact, it's not something you "achieve" as such. Flux comes from taking something as far as it has to, as far as is worth taking it, as far as you can be bothered, ultimately, and then at some point, on instinct, on due consideration, on LSD, on tomorrow, deciding "Hey, you know what? This kinda sucks, I'm-a try something else." I think often those of a considered, considerate mind can lose the ability to admit that they've been heading down a ideological/philosophical dead end.

And it's not an appealing idea. If a guy running for office says "I'll be good for one term, but after that you should probably vote for someone else", he wouldn't get elected at all; people would rather believe that a solution is perfect and will work forever, no matter how implausible that is, and screw things up! Confidence is sexy, I guess. But we want to imagine. So if our ideals stop working, we think it's because the world changed, not just because they couldn't last forever.

Ramble ramble ramble. I think people can forget how to be human in the pursuit of being good. They try to be greater than human by merely acting that way and hoping they'll somehow "trick" themselves into being so.

 

There's the old standard about the journey being more important than the destination. I think some of us treat the journey as if it were a destination; we start out, but we still see ourselves as having arrived. We become satisfied with ourselves for making the effort, taking that first step on the journey of a thousand - realising we have a problem? - but forgetting that it's only one, that we need to take more.

 

The self does not dissolve away. It's more akin to becoming transparent.

Instead of being cemented into one human identity, you now have the run of the place. The "kingdom" is yours. You can place your awareness wherever you want.

You can still use your current identity to continue that level of existance, but you are also aware of where it all comes from. You are now aware you have more than one CD in your case.

This life is but one grain of sand on an endless beach.



x

 

So you can change your identity as much as you want? Sweet.

 

The idea is to have no identity.

You need to become like a naked person standing in front of the closet looking for something to "put on".

You can dress in what pleases you or you can remain naked.

When you're naked, you're everywhere.


x

 

Sorry, explain: why do I need this?

 

I think what he's trying to express is that ultimately it's not all that important who you think you are, because you are not who you think you are. The outer form is impermanent, so it doesn't matter what shape it takes, if any. You are always prior to 'becoming somebody' so, metaphorically speaking, no matter how many clothes you're wearing, you're still always naked underneath them lol

 

But then he talks about wearing identities. Surely that would imply that you are only who you think you are? It seems as if it's more important to play at having no identity than to actually dissolve it.

I don't really understand what he thinks identity is though.

I accept change as part of my identity. I don't believe that I have to shed my identity to be aware that it is malleable. Moreover, I don't think it's helpful to think that you've shed your identity just because you are different from one moment to the next. All of those points are going to be within a certain range of one another unless you have a major personality disorder, and the process of changing throughout one's life will be a measurable vector amid those points. We are changing, yes, but we seldom change so radically that our old identity would serve no purpose. It is like trying to forget that ice was ever water.

 

There is but one consciousness. Creation is the division of consciousness.

It can twist and fold upon itself as well as make parts of itself blind or forgetful. As our human identities are a creation, they are subject to these laws until we reach a point in our own evolution that allows us other options.

The idea is to undivide creation until the singular consciousness is reached.

You follow the stream to the river and then follow the river to the ocean. You can travel up and down these waterways as you wish.

There is no law that says your little spark of awareness can't enjoy both divine awareness and human awareness at the same time.


x

 

I think you are mixing the metaphoric and the literal fairly arbitrarily here. And again, you have a lot of assumptions you're stating here that I don't agree with. "The idea is to undivide creation until the singular consciousness is reached"? Why so? You start with creation dividing consciousness. Why would you want to go against that? If you believe that flux is the natural state for consciousness, then it should divide and recombine, and will probably do so without our help. If not, why shouldn't creation carry on dividing consciousness? What's wrong with that?

And as to our identities being a creation: whose?

 

The human mind cannot know what "God" is, so for the sake of conversation, we have to speak in some kind of framework.

When I say undivide creation, you have to imagine pulling back a tight camera shot. You may start with the what is in front of you. Pull back until you see the earth floating in space. Pull back further still, you see the galaxy we're in, etc.

Pull back far enough, you will come to the border of creation itself where the manifest and unmanifest God meet. There is no division at this point other than right there. To know God, you must come to this place.

This is where the crack in the windshield starts. It branches out and runs from that point forward. Dividing as it goes.

There is no "going against it" because that would imply duality, but from your human standpoint and the desire to know who and what you are, you must recombine all things until they make a whole (God). You cannot exclude anything.

As to the question of "whose", there is only one God. Some give it the description of a supernatural being. The formless God I see before me has no face, but is capable of manifesting anything you can imagine.



x

 

Hello again
When you can see the impermanence of all things you realise that nothing has a fixed, solid individuality, nothing is ultimately separate. All of these forms that are born and dissolve are doing so within consciousness (or whatever you want to call it) so, there's really only consciousness, the forms that seem to be appearing within it are creating the illusion of separateness,of duality. It's like consciousness playing a game. The creation is not separate from the creator, both are one.

 

A handy, PC, relativist get-out-clause: we daren't speak of any existing religion being "right", so we conceive a God that's unknowable. The other possibility is that, while no existing religion is right, one which does not exist could be; in other words, God is knowable, we just don't know him yet.

OK.

It's a shame you don't feel the need to argue your case, rather than merely stating it as fact. You could be more persuasive.

I don't know of any religion that claims God gives us an identity which we can later change. Some might suggest that we are as God made us, but they rarely suggest that we'd be able to do anything about that.

The simplest explanation for identity is that we are products of our environment and our own free will acting together. I see little need to complicate that. If our experience shapes us, and we have some control over our experiences, we have, within a reasonable tolerance, the capacity to passive-aggressively make ourselves into different people without any need for self-examination. We don't have to strip down to zero identity and build back up again; we can simply shift sideways.

I also believe that the latter method is preferable. Yes, it limits our potential for change, but on balance I'd say that most people need that limitation, especially the spiritually minded.

 

I suspect that wanting to see it that way has a lot more to do with seeing it that way.

I get that the universe can be seen as a mass of vibrations of various intensities. But knowing that only changes our perspective if we want it to. That's what I found, anyway. Seeing it all as one thing just because it's all made of the same thing seems like a blind alley.