The Watercooler Chat Thread

Well said @FrankN, this article struck a chord with me and it seems to mesh with af which is not about adding to our life but taking away all the unecessary things that are keeping us out of the actual world.

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Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion - How Evolution Hid the Truth | Lex Fridman Podcast #293

I haven’t finished listening to this but my take so far is that even what we are calling actual is an illusion. Space and time itself is an illusion.

He finally got around to talking about a ground of being toward the end. He did make a distinction between ‘a being’ and ‘being’. These are spiritual concepts and not actual in my opinion.

My experience and knowledge of af is that there is no ground of being whether it is ‘a being’ or just ‘being’. K talked about a ‘ground of being’ but I don’t recall Richard acknowledging such a thing. My take is that there is just the universe itself. I guess that the universe itself could be considered the ‘ground of being’. I don’t know.

He talked about consciousness but I didn’t get it. My thinking is that the universe is conscious.

I got it. There is just this universe here now period.

Richard was the ‘ground of being’ when he was enlightened:

RESPONDENT: It’s important for you to believe that you are in THAT condition right now, but nothing you’ve said to me has given me any confidence that you are. (…) I doubt very much whether you’re in THAT condition right now.

RICHARD: That would be because I am not and never will be – I lived that/was that, night and day, for eleven years and experientially found it wanting – and if you had actually read what is on offer on The Actual Freedom Trust web site you would cognisant of the fact that an actual freedom from the human condition is beyond spiritual enlightenment … and thus not be needlessly repeating yourself e-mail after e-mail [… snip footnote …].

Put simply: it was only when what I then called ‘The Absolute’ (aka ‘Ground of Being’, Truth, Being, Presence, THAT, and so on) became extinct – via altruistic ‘self’-immolation in toto – that this actual world became apparent.

There is only this actual world.
Selected Correspondence: 180 degrees in the Opposite Direction

It is a mass delusion ! In actuality there is no ‘ground of being’.

@claudiu Yes thanks, this does clear up what exactly is meant by the term ‘ground of being’. Definitely a spiritual term. What I got from this is something that I recall Vineeto saying: There is only
‘this’ (actual universe).

Couldn’t that same criticism be made of pure intent? In the sense that I can’t demonstrate it factually.

This is a bit of theory of knowledge stuff, but essentially what makes something a fact is consistency. I put my coffee cup on my table, look away, look back, and it’s still there. I could do that 1000 times and it would work the exact same. If it did go away, there’s a physical explanation for why

So pure intent operates on this level in that it’s a factually occurring event with consistency, it acts the same in different contexts, has certain attributes, and can be experienced by anyone.

What makes this different than emotions - beyond the hormonal factual events and the fact that they are experienced by everyone (except for a select few :wink:), is that emotions & the self operate by a sort of dream language. The dream language has consistencies & commonalities between individuals & even different cultures, but it has no solidity and any one belief can be upside down or organized completely different in another individual. It’s a world of phantasms, no facts to be found anywhere because it is all happening as a dream.

This is most obviously observable when we go through one of those tangents wherein we get very wound up about something we think is happening, and then upon facts arriving at the scene the whole thing was revealed to be a fear-driven imaginative caper - but taken completely seriously by ‘myself.’

With pure intent this does not happen - when the thread is followed, it’s verification after verification, even in extremely sensitive & subtle territory.

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