what is REAL?

What does promise have to do with reality? What you perceive is memory, living tissue, not events in time. You see only the past and project that into a seeming future. You frighten yourself.

Not very distilled nor distinctively descriptive. Sometime is indefinite.
More definitely,

Rule number one:
Life is a series of sensations some of which we may call pleasant and some not so.

Rule number two:
You give the world all the meaning it has for you.

 

It is naive of you to insist that the torture will never happen again. You appear to be fooling yourself into believing that your past is not real, much the same as you believe that nothing real can be threatened. Think of yourself as not real if you choose, but why deny yourself your experience by trying to separate yourself from it, putting it into the realm of the unreal. You are easily fooled by time.

You want to quibble over the word "sometimes?" Really? Not a very distilled approach, nor distinctively productive.
And since you are quibbling over manners of speaking and definitions, you will need to explain how you are real, and yet incapable of being threatened. Be sure to look up the definition of threatened before answering this time.

And while we're at it, why don't you explain the benefit of breaking up consciousness into pieces like experience, thought, and awareness. Again with the non-distinctive productivity. You must like juggling. You think you gain something when you create separations where none exist. You don't know what or when you lose. You create confusion, causing others to seek the many where there is only one. Perhaps this is due to the fact that you are offering day-old doughnuts baked by another. Confusion always follows that kind of "truth."

 

Refinement of wisdom means that you no longer regurgitate the opinions of others verbatim. A dead giveaway! When you come to your own truth, you won't need the truth of others.

 

Meagain's assertion: "I would say that they are simultaneous, awareness, or thought, and experience. As you cannot have one without the other" is more refined than yours concerning the issue of oneness. But that's just my opinion, of course.

 

real is that which we cannot alter

that's why we use an altar to try

 

thedope,

I asked you who it was that had told you that nothing real can be threatened, and that nothing unreal exists. The reason I asked was to see if you would tell me where you had read it. I asked you more than once. You would not tell me.

Indeed, rather than pointing me in the direction where I could discover the source of the statement, you remained silent. I could ask you the reason for your silence, but do I really need to?

Here is a koan:

A nun who was searching for enlightenment made a stature of Buddha and covered it with gold leaf. Wherever she went, she carried this golden Buddha with her.

Years passed, and, still carrying her Buddha, the nun came to live in a small temple in a country where there were many Buddhas, each one with its own particular shrine.

The nun wished to burn incense before her golden Buddha. Not liking the idea of the perfume straying to the others, she divised a funnel through which the smoke would ascend only to her statue. This blackened the nose of the Buddha, making it especially ugly.

 

I have not.

I am real. I cannot produce in this moment any event "from the past". The past exists in this moment only as memory. There is only and ever current emergence. Now is the only time you can effect change. You cannot do things, "in the future", nor can you do things "in the past".

The past as well as the future are mental constructs, artifacts of current emergence.

No, I quibble with the words "boiled down to", in respect to your observation.

Yes, since it speaks to a transient aspect. Things ultimately boil down to the lowest common denominator. If your philosophy stops where it does, it stops short.

When I say nothing real can be threatened, I mean nothing real ceases to exist.

Helpful is a matter of timing. I cannot in fact separate out pieces of reality, but I can discuss things in a nuanced and symbolic way relative to my current state. It may be to advantage to distinguish between subjective thoughts and objective consciousness and awareness that is unbound by any conceptualization at all.

Confusion is mental disorder. I do not create your mental disorder. Confusion is a conflict between what you believe to be true and what you perceive.

I am not the author of confusion about reality.
There are some who sincerely doubt that they are real or that anything is real. There are some who believe in things that in fact do not exist.

Anxiety is caused by the misapprehension of what is so.

 

it's a spiritual teaching common as dirt - to neither defend nor
impose a reality . i think it makes good music .

 

Actually you asked me, who told me. Most specifically I can trace the statement to the desire to know. No one sat me down and said such and such to me.
.

I'm confused. Do you want to know the source, or do you want to determine accuracy?
.

Could it be you are not listening?

 

Are you actually drawing a distinction between me asking you, "Who told you" and asking you "Who it was that told you"? It is hard to decide whether you are being dodgey, stalling, or pretending to not understand the question.

Your second statement confirms the above. ^

And you have the cheek to ask me if it could be that I'm not listening??

 

But just to be clear, if that is possible, no one sat you down and said such and such to you. So, are you saying that you arrived at this truth through your own calculations based on your understanding of reality?

 

This would be the time to say yes or no.

 

I think the source of your confusion has come out in the following statement,
" The reason I asked was to see if you would tell me where you had read it.

You expected an answer to a question that you did not ask.

To answer your question, I have seen it in print many times, in many different forms.

Well it occurs to me in that you have not accepted as an answer the answer I gave. Seems you were expecting an answer to a private conversation you were having with yourself. You may have sensed that I said something, but that was quickly replaced by the associations you were making in your mind.

 

We always choose with a guide.

It is said that Newton when asked how he came to his insights, he replied, I intended my mind.

We grow in stature as well as understanding and I would have no understanding as far as word symbols go, if it were not for my teachers.

The answer to your question is both yes and no. Yes, I intended my mind to work out equations using symbols that were passed to me. No word symbol means anything without experiential conjugation.

 

Very well, then, thedope. Your answer is yes and no. Intriquing. But trying to pass off your reluctance to answer a question onto my failure to ask it correctly is going a step beyond dodgey. But I'm not here to judge.
_____________________________________________________________________________

Meagain,

Many people have a tendency to think of the reality they perceive as the primary, or center, around which all other realms within existence revolve. The people of old believed this to the extent that they wrote of creation as beginning with the Earth. They wrote, in Genesis, that God created the Earth and vegetation before he created the Sun and the stars. Despite the implausibility of this scenario, humans did not question it. Part of the reason for this is that the ego was so in charge of the thought processes of people that the idea of everything in existence revolving around them and theirs was simply too sweet for them to resist--candy to the ego.

Is it so different today? People hear of the astral plane, or the dream realm, and they believe that these realms are subsets of the realm they are presently aware of. In truth, however, astral planes are as much a reality as where you find youreslf at this moment. In fact, most people are quite surprised to learn that this moment--this life--that we are experientially sharing, otherwise known as "here," is, itself, an astral plane. Of course, this begs the question of whether or not it is real. Some call the worlds illusions, some call them dreams, and some call them planes of existence. The fact is that whatever you call it, it's the only game in town.

You present me with the idea that one state of consciousness is as real as another, or that one is as unreal as the other. That is true. But not because one is the other's equal, but because there is no separation between these "realities." They all serve your being. Believing otherwise is like believing that the heart functions independent of the lungs, or that the pancreas functions independent of the liver. None can exist without the other because they are one, not many. And this is how the realms are to be known--of one purpose. The ultimate purpose may be too vast for a three-dimensional being such as myself to tranlate into a three dimensional view, but the purpose is there nonetheless.

People tend to hold the idea that the more solid something is, the more real it is. This is backward, and appeals only to the ego. The belief that denseness equals reality is a block to spiritual attainment. Not that anything needs to be attained; like truth, attainment is neither easy nor hard. It simply is. Truth is not something hidden which needs to be found. Remove the lies, and all that is left is the truth; you can't miss it. The only block to truth is the strength of the grip/need with which one holds the lies. Any search for truth is actually a search for the lies and the way to come out from behind them.

Humans became like kittens kept in a box. Eventually, the kittens lift the lid of the box to peer out, but the outside world is not the inside of the box, and so they determine that the outside world in not true. And they come to this conclusion based on the idea that that which came first is real; kind of like the "first come, first served" mentality. When the box finally becomes intolerable to a growing entity, and they are no longer able to live with the waste--in more ways than one--then they leave the box and explore. And they will come back to offer their discoveries to those remaining in the box. Of course, the report of the one outside the box will be seen as an intrusion and a destabilizing phenomena to be shut down and ridiculed, for, it threatens everyone's grip on their false center.

That's my thinking, anyway.

I'm not right, and I'm not wrong, which is to say that I am right and I am wrong. If I thought otherwise, I would be a fool.

 

Tis' true! Not even god, just a figment of peoples imagination made up to scare people into "living a godly life and choosing the right path".......BULLSHIT!!!

 

Tell me, MayQueen, do you hold any morals and ethics within your mind?

 

Here kitty kitty kitty kitty . . .

 

I think it more your intent was less than concise. This ambivalence toward intent is what leads to unpredictable results. My purpose for writing is to communicate, not to withhold information.

I still have a question as to why you ask one question and expect an answer to another. It appears a test as you put it, to see how I would respond, yet I am at a loss as to what you expect to see or what your point might be along this line of questioning.

If you have described to yourself something less than tasteful, I suggest you spit it out. Keeping with the theme of the thread, what is real,
The measure you give is the measure you receive. As you have described to yourself the fortuitous qualities of my behavior, so they appear to you.