noone

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I don't understand why there is so much plagiarism on WCF. People just copy and paste someone else's work without linking to the original source or indicating who the author is. This OP was written by an Australian pastor called Keith Piper. It's from page 20 of this PDF.

My claim is not that distinctions do not exist, it is that they only exist in human thought, and the thought of some animals. It takes a certain ability for conceptualization to make them. Simpler animals do not necessarily have to conceptualize a predator as a separate entity, a ‘self’ in order to avoid it or defend against it. Human infants also do not make distinctions and do not conceptualize selves for themselves or others. The human infant is thought to identify more with its mother’s breasts than it does with its own feet and only slowly learns about selves and bodies. What the newborn experiences is pure non-dual reality. Slowly, as its mind develops, the non-dual nature of reality is covered up, the way that clouds block out the sun. One can never explain non-duality accurately because human thought, based on distinctions, is finite, and is not capable of explaining it. Human thought and language has its limitations in many respects. For example, the word ‘apple’ is only a mental object, or symbol. It doesn’t contain the flavor or chemicals or color of an apple, and you cannot eat the word apple. You can read a whole book about what an apple tastes like, but the only way to know what an apple tastes like is to eat one. Similarly, you can’t know non-dual reality through words, but you can know it through experience.

You imply in your podcast that non-duality is incompatible with this step, but I don’t see it that way, and that is why I had a problem with step 3, not steps 1 or 2. Non-duality is more about the illusory nature of ‘thingness’, or the objects that we use nouns to describe. These things do not exist independently of the rest of the universe, but they are mentally separated from the rest of universe when we consider them. Here is a scenario: you are standing on a beach looking at a beach ball. The nouns in this situation are you, the sand and the ball. That is how we break it down, because that is the way that is most useful to us, but there are many more ways to describe it. We can zoom in, and describe you not as a whole, but as 37.2 trillion cells. Or we can zoom in even further and describe you as the molecules that make up those cells. Or we can zoom in even further and describe you as the atoms that make up those molecules. And we can also do the same thing with the molecules that make up the ball and the sand. So instead of there being 3 nouns, there are centillions. Or, we can zoom out. Now the noun we are dealing with is “the beach” which includes you and everyone on it. We can zoom out further and talk about the entire region. If we zoom out even more we are talking about a country and you and everyone else in your country are an aspect of it - its ‘population’. If we zoom out further still the noun becomes the earth. More than that and it becomes the solar system…until eventually we zoom out as far as possible and we are talking about the entire universe. The universe is defined as everything that exists. Everything that exists, or ‘being’ or ‘existence’ if you will, is our true self - not the finite, separate entity that we think ourselves to be. As far as Descartes, he was wrong. The ability to think doesn’t prove the existence of a separate self. It just proves awareness of a stream of words and mental images. The reason that we are not aware of each other’s thoughts is because we do not have the same brains, but this doesn’t prove that you are separate from me or anyone else. There is one aspect of reality that has your thoughts, the 'Dylany' aspect, and another that has my thoughts, the 'nooney' aspect. Not two separate entities, but two aspects of the same reality.

From experience. Our sensory experience is seamless and not divided or categorized in any way, only thought makes it so.

Yes, eastern mysticism, that's a fair description. How do I know...I don't know 100% but after evaluating the Bible I'm very certain that "God and devil" and "heaven and hell" are straight out of Zoroastrianism, and that these concepts were assimilated by the Israelites from the Persians during the Babylonian Captivity. Prior to the Babylonian Captivity, the Israelites were polytheists whose gods were in the Canaanite pantheon. El is the head of the Canaanite pantheon (and his name is in the name IsraEL). The rest of Canaanite pantheon consists of El's wife and their children. Collectively, these are known in the Bible as "Elohim", the plural of El. One of the gods in the this pantheon, Yahweh the god of war, usurped El as the primary god of the Israelites and then became a composite of both El and Yaweh. Also, during the Babylonian Captivity, another god in the pantheon and son of Yahweh, Satan, came to be seen as a fallen "angel"...the idea of "angels" coming straight out of Zoroastrianism. In Job, which was written prior to the Babylonian Captivity, Satan is written as a god. The meaning of his name, "adversary" does not refer to him being the adversary of the Christian God, it refers to him being the adversary of Job, in the course of testing his faithfulness to Yahweh.

There are a whole bunch of teachers of nonduality / nondualism. That is what the basic idea is called.

It doesn’t suffer from cognitive dissonance because it isn’t cognizant of anything. To perceive “something”, or be aware “of something”, you have to first mentally separate that thing from a conceptual “you the subject”, as in the phrases “my awareness”, “my mind”, “my sight”, “my respiration”. This separation is not real, merely a product of the imagination. So the single entity includes all the processes going on in the universe, including thought processes, but is not “aware of” any of them because they are indistinguishable from itself.

If you look at it through the lens of subject-object duality, then a subject (you) appears to distinguish between two objects which are not you (red and green lights). To distinguish anything, you have to consider it as something separate from “you the subject”, as in the phrases “your body” or “your mind”. But there is nothing that reality isn’t, it includes every object and thought and process. Your body, the colors red and green, their meaning in your culture, the traffic lights, the cars, the street, the people, the trees, the clouds, the stars, and everything else in the universe are all intimate, inseparable aspects of a single entity, and you crossing the street safely is a process of that entity. There is no way for reality to distinguish a red light, because it is the red light. Likewise for the green light.

If I believed that the Bible is true history, then I would believe that a deity was actually involved in those historical events, in the same way that I believe George Washington was involved in the American Revolution. But I still would not believe in separation, or that “God” is anything other than you, me and everything else, because all distinctions are only artificial overlays on reality.

Humanity's collectively and also we are each changing our own individual self-image daily. To use language, you have to make distinctions, which are how the mind artificially divides and labels reality, which is itself a seamless, indivisible whole. So a more accurate but also more awkward answer would be that they are no one's (or every thing's) inventions. Thoughts happen, inventions are made, but they are made by no one, just like the rest of the world. When a worm digs a tunnel, the tunnel is dug by no one. There is no self-image there. When a cloud forms, it is formed by no one, etc. We can temporarily give a "self" to a worm when talking about it, but the self is not anything that exists in the worm or us, apart from thoughts about it, which are essentially had by no one.

This is where you lose me. Before you say “a theistic God exists”, you already assume that you exist and that your reader or listener exists. I do not accept that you or I exist. There are certain collections of matter which we would describe as “our bodies” but the self or individual identity is merely a story or fictional entity which we slowly come to believe in during toddlerhood and which we may forget again someday due to dementia, while the organisms that are “our” bodies could still be alive. Since you and I are inventions of the mind, so are deities. All that there really is is reality (consciousness) interacting with itself. All distinctions, such as this or that, you or me, man or deity, exist in thought only. That which is prior to any thought being thought is what really exists, and it is already everything.

He said “(t)he processor in an online game can generate a value random to it,..” meaning that there is nothing in the game world that causally determines that value from the perspective of an avatar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_indeterminacy#Logical_Independence_and_Quantum_Randomness

Hi, I couldn't agree you with you more. I am not a metaphysical materialist, I'm a metaphysical idealist. I am into this theory called Quantum Realism by mathematics professor Brian Whitworth: www.thephysicalworldisvirtual.com Here is what he says about Multiverse (this is number 6 on his listverse):