Saturday, February 28, 2009

As the World Collapses Around You, Just Remember, It Doesn't Exist.





As the world begins to crumble around you, it might be a good time to consider that it’s not there.





However, your experience of the world is 'there' and if the world is nothing but pure direct experience, then you should have no difficulties altering that state of 'thereness.' However, if you continue to dissociate from your experience of 'world,' as the advocates of egolessness or ego-self abnegation would have you do, then you may find it difficult to reconstruct your experience of “world.” Therefore, unfortunately, you will force your 'self' to experience the suffering inherent in a collapse.

Once you apply external coordinates (time/space) to an experience, you essentially experience it as 'outside' consciousness. Yet, there is only conscious experience and you refer to this as your “world” and you continue to slice and dice your experience through concepts such as “body” "self" and “mind.”

There really is no such thing as “mind,” nor is there any such thing as “thought.” In fact, there is no “self” only an experience of self, mind and thought. We seem quite adept at dissociating from our experience, even though experience is all we have to go on. Martin Heidegger labeled experience as “Dasein” or Being-in-the-world. He hyphenated this phrase to denote a unity to experience and this is because without experience, or “world,” there is no Being at all. Being will devise all manner of experiences to know its Being and 'self' is merely one experience out of many.

Essentially there is NO 'world' only an experience you linguistically symbolize as 'world' and you further assign your experience to a 'mind' which divides up the wholeness or oneness. However, Being is always experiencing something, since not to experience is not to Be. But ‘what’ that experience is, or could be, is open to conjecture (or construction). In addition, there are no coordinates to experience, or 'place' that experience seems to happen, like mind, body, self or world, there is only experience as a whole.

The law of attraction folks got it wrong. You don’t attract physicality or cause objects to materialize through "intention." The only thing you intend is “experience.” Actually, the more operable phrase is “construct.” You seek to augment and embellish your experience of 'self' through experiences of 'world.'

Experiences are constructs and you do construct your experience, simply because YOU constructed your 'self' and you continue to do so everyday. Problem is, that you construct your ‘self’ from past experience, which is the building block of your experience of ego-self. Therefore, to reconstruct experience, you must first dissociate from the past, or deconstruct it.

But you could never fully dissociate from the past simply because to do so would deconstruct YOU and this is because “you” are entirely constructed from the past. But the past was constructed by you as well and this circularity is the paradox that never ends.

Each preceding day provides coordinates, or reference points, from which to experience another “day” and the self refers to this as “time.” Time is nothing more than experiencing the process of self-construction. You are nothing but an infinite process of conceptual addition and subtraction.

However, the paradoxical conundrum is that the more you subtract from your self-concept, the more you add and the more you add the more you subtract.

The game is infinite. So get comfortable with it, since there is NO END.

Yet, the self seeks for some strange finite conclusion, denying that any conclusion must end the 'self.' Fortunately your being knows that there is no end, so "no worry, be happy."

However, the degree of reconstruction you perform on your experience will be directly correlated with the degree of deconstruction you facilitate upon your ego-self-construct. You cannot just “intend” reality to materialize, because your self-construct will delay such reconstruction based on the numerous rigid concepts that make up your self-construct. Self essentially resists the actions or intentions of itself, due to past intentions. This resistance is referred to, by many ancient texts, as "fear." Overcoming fear is your only objective as a 'self' because self was constructed in response to fear.

Deconstruct the ‘self’ and you reconstruct the world, but you will never transcend or leave the 'self' that is YOU. But you will transform the experience of YOU, which deconstructs your experience of “world,” simply because your experience of “you” and the “world” is a unified experience and there can be no division and there is no "you" separate from 'world.'

To save the world requires you deconstruct your experience of 'self' in order to change your experience of world, simply because there is nothing but experience.

So...

Good Luck With That!

2 comments:

  1. Hi Mike,

    This post, and your site in general, is highly valuable because it jostles assumptions. Essentially, you deftly tackle ego-traps.

    If I have understood, what you have said in this post is:
    There is only direct experience
    The mind slices/dices experience through beliefs, fears, self, etc
    We can construct experience
    But to do so, we must deconstruct self, and this is not possible

    If I understand correctly, the concluding point is that if we facilitate deconstruction, that is release fear and allow, our intentions can have effect.

    My experience agrees with most of this, though my symbols are different. Releasing fear and its constructs--I understand and agree with this. Expanding Awareness (direct experience), and that time-space are applied by the mind--agreed and understood.

    Deconstruction is tricky. Who deconstructs whom? For example, your posts with the conversations with your ego are funny and illuminating. Are the conversations between Mike and his ego, or they between Mike's ego story x and Mike's ego story y? Isn't it just one corner of the mind trying to deconstruct another corner?

    Also, the thing about one consciousness and everything arising in it--I'm not denying this, but I'm not following it either; it is not in my direct experience, not yet. There is Awareness (direct experience of Now) and there is experience of mind activity. Everything else is conjecture. Isn't it?

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  2. Hey Kaushik!

    Now you've gone and done it!

    Exactly,"who deconstructs whom"?

    There's the crux of it all, because if 'I' am nothing but 'experience,' and that experience is unsatisfying to "me," I can essentially break it down and rebuild it, but then if I am nothing but experience, then I'm experience creating experience creating experience. There is no end because there was never a beginning.
    Problem is, 'I' have attached a concept to my experience and I label that concept "real" and that seems to be 'my' sticking point (and maybe alot of other folks to).

    Is there really "experience of mind activity" or is it just experience that we conceptualize as "mind activity" in order to apply coordinates and lock it into the self-construct. It seems that we have experience and then we apply conceptual parameters in order to make experience conform to past parameters. And all conceptualized parameters are based solely on the self-construct.

    Possibly if the 'self' were not constructed to be conceptually self-perpetuating, then maybe we could be less concerned with all our concepts of 'world' that simply conform to the self-construct.

    Whew!

    Actually, Kaushik, I'm not really attempting to engage with any conclusion, just keep the game going, so yes, essentially it's all conjecture.

    This is all theoretical wordplay and your symbols are as good as mine.I just like philosophizing and I really enjoy when others join the game. So don't get stuck on my rules. However, you brought up some interesting rules of your own which really piqued my thinking and probably a future post.

    And thanks, I am "jostling assumptions" in trying to make sense of our ego-dynamics. Unfortunately, for many folks this makes no sense at all. But it's not a serious game and the rules MUST change often, or else it tends to get serious like many "awakening" paradigms out there today.

    Much obliged for your excellent comments!
    mikeS

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